La individualidad, el principio «clave»

Individuality, the “key” principle

When you train, there are several strength and conditioning principles you should consider, but individuality, a basic principle, is not always understood.

This principle, that of individuality, tells us that each athlete will respond differently to the same stimulus arising from training, diet, or other physiological or psychological factors.

For example, a group of athletes seeking to gain size might follow the same well-designed program, but after completing it, their individual training responses could differ from one another.

Individual factors

This is because there are individual factors such as age, sex, body size, limb length, the distribution of muscle “type,” or training experience, among others.

Since each of these variables differs between individuals, we obtain a variable response to a training program that includes everything: exercise, diet, rest, stress, etc.

Each human parameter can also change over time at any moment, depending on the demand incurred from birth to death.

People not only have stress organs of different sizes, but each person also has their own tolerance to stressors, and each person has different levels of stress and responses to stress (1).

Likewise, each person responds differently to foods or dietary supplements, from their intake to their processing through digestion or their bioavailability for training, burning fat, or storing it, including the different facets of protein synthesis (2).

Well, everything has to do with what surrounds a human being, and this is due to the principle of individuality, which we analyze according to each factor.

The environment also influences

The environment will also influence the response to training or diet—that is, everything surrounding the athlete that is not part of their body—and this is due to individuality.

Most athletes have competing priorities in their lives, such as work, family, and other commitments that naturally consume energy and time.

The demands of work intertwine with those of home and family and, in turn, affect when, where, and how you train, generating accumulated stress that will affect the way you train, which in turn will affect your response to training.

But this can be different in the life of your training partner, teammate, or even competitor; therefore, even if they are the same age, sex, size, and training experience, their response to training will still differ because of these external environmental influences, which vary from person to person.

Individuality: are you beginning to understand it? ?

Simply because your time is valuable and you want your training program to provide the greatest benefit, the idea is to optimize your performance and have this goal help you get the most out of your sporting activities.

Your training regimen should reflect your needs and goals; therefore, if you ignore this principle of individuality, you risk setting unrealistic goals or expectations, which predisposes you to failure.

Copying someone else’s program or simply improvising one will not help you progress in your training.

Individuality and Training

The principle of individualization dictates that sports training should be adjusted according to each athlete’s characteristics and needs, such as age, sex, rate of progress, and previous experience.

The goal of individuality is to capitalize on each athlete’s strengths, exploit their genetic potential, and strengthen their weaknesses.

Training program reviews can take many forms: adjustments can be made for skill level, size, medical conditions, injuries, motivation level, or other natural attributes.

Although personal attention requires a great deal of time, working with a coach on a personalized program can accelerate an athlete’s progress.

Individuality: what to do?

The principle of individuality can apply to individual or team athletes, depending on the type of training. However, the following factors are common to any program:

  1. Setting clear goalsThe goals you set should relate to “realistic” results, which can be personalized according to the physical and psychological factors surrounding you.
  2. Tests: Obtaining your baseline measurements and evaluating the results is the most accurate way to apply this principle. In addition to fitness and skills tests, analytical tests conducted by coaches and other professionals provide clues about how you can adjust your training.
  3. Optimizing weaknessesYou should consider ways to overcome your weaknesses as much as possible; for example, if you have little motivation, you should set specific goals and reward your progress, or if you are a conservative athlete, vary your activities and even the way you train.
  4. Gender differences: We must be sensitive to physical and cultural differences: women and men can follow the same program, but there are hormonal, physical, and psychological factors that must be taken into account when designing a program based on individuality.
  5. Positive-negative-positive: Reinforce your positive points and also point out negative areas, since positive reinforcement encourages you to persist. This is especially useful when you have difficulties, either on a given day or constantly, due to personal weaknesses.
  6. Taking age into account: If you are over 45–50, you should take into account decreased flexibility, postural deviations, body composition, and other orthopedic factors; in addition, your athletic life should not interrupt your “normal” life in any way. And if you are young, you must learn, learn, and learn… we are talking about diet, training, competitions, recovery…

Individual differences

We are referring here to individual differences in motor abilities, since one of the challenges coaches face is that individual differences among athletes make each of them unique in their ability to succeed or achieve specific goals.

Height, body type, muscle fiber composition, motivation level, and learning styles are among the many factors that affect how long it takes athletes to become proficient.

Because athletes are unique, instructional and training strategies will not be equally effective, and analyzing motor abilities can help optimize each athlete’s genetic potential.

The same applies to each athlete’s metabolic capacity, since training is related to diet. In this context, Santi Cano gives us a master class on the importance of individualizing the diet when bodybuilding.

Abilities vs. skills

Motor abilities are inherited and relatively stable traits of athletes that are prerequisites for performing various sports skills (3).

These skills predict athletic performance in the same way that intelligence predicts academic performance.

Many specific skills have been identified and grouped, including multi-limb coordination, control precision, aiming, explosive strength, dynamic flexibility, limb movement speed, movement rate, and strength control.

Although motor abilities are innate characteristics of athletes, motor skills refer to the ability to perform with maximum certainty, minimal energy, or minimal time, and are developed through practice.

Coaches can analyze sports skills by identifying the motor skills necessary for sports performance.

For example, if we analyzed a bench press, we could divide it into:

  • (a) mental focus
  • (b) grip strength,
  • (c) mind-muscle connection.
  • (d) strength when lifting/lowering
  • (d) motor control
  • (e) flexibility

Coaches often refer to these skills as part of the “demands of a specific sport or activity,” and this skill analysis makes it possible to better determine testing assessments, practice activities, instructional strategies, and even strength and conditioning activities.

One example is knowing your 1RM for a given exercise, which we can see in an explanatory video by our coach Curro Hernández.

What a coach should do

Above all, a coach should individualize sports training programs to account for differences in motor skills, as well as gender, attitudes, motivational level, medical history, previous experience, and other factors that affect performance.

  • Conduct tests of motor skills inherent to specific sports skills and include them in the testing.
  • Avoid making conclusive predictions about future performance based on initial practice, especially for beginners. Some who do well at first may not do well later.
  • Design skill-learning experiences that capitalize on each athlete's best skills and compensate for their weaker ones.
  • Use the grouping of motor skills when designing training activities, in order to better combine conditioning, strength, power, volume, definition, pre-competition, or post-competition recovery activities.
  • Carry out objective monitoring of all the factors, since things change, just as the days, weeks, and months change.

In short, all of this is taken into account to develop a training program that includes a diet and personalized training.

Have you used those magazine programs?

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