Supercompensation: It's a Really Big Deal

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It's been exactly 68 hours since I ran on Sunday. Pulled up great, the quad is feeling awesome since my little setback.

The plan today is to run 12x30 meters, but what I really want to do today is tackle one of the most important sports science concepts there is — supercompensation.

The concept of supercompensation is pretty basic but it underpins every decision we make as a coach.

The graph above shows the basic timeline of performance and readiness to train following a previous training or competition stressor.

After a training stress (or any stress for that matter), we initially have a dip where we are worse off than had we never done the session in the first place. From this dip, if you give the body time to rest and regenerate, it returns up back to baseline (typically anywhere from 24-48 hours). This is your body rebuilding muscles, restoring energy levels and balancing hormones and enzymes in the body.

The super cool thing here is, that if you allow more time after reaching the baseline your body will actually supercompensate and will overshoot where it was before. That over-adaptation is that body basically preparing itself for the next onslaught of training or stress as a way of safeguarding itself against that stimulus (this is why as you get fitter, stronger or better you need to constantly increase the intensity of the challenge to continue stressing the body).

Now, if you apply another stress too early and apply it at the bottom of the dip, you can effectively dig a deeper hole, which every now and again is not the end of the world but if you continually dig deep holes on top (inside?) of each other, the body will burn out and eventually overtrain, injury and illness can occur.

Ideally, you should space and spread your training stressors over the week to allow for the maximum overshoot and recovery but minimal detraining.

This is where things can get a little tricky.

Muscle tissue works on a 48-hour cycle supercompensation cycle, tendons and ligaments are closer to a 72-hour cycle, bone, which is actually a dynamic adaptive tissue, it’s closer to a 96-hour cycle.

Then on top of that the nervous and endocrine (hormones) system are all over the place. It depends entirely on the type of training, the type of recovery you're doing, and also the other stressors you've got going on in your life. To make matters even more different types of training will affect different systems at different rates.

Lifting for strength (1-6 reps) is most taxing on the neural, endocrine, and the muscular systems. Lifting for hypertrophy is primarily about the muscles, tendons and joints. While sprinting in the early days can be quite taxing on the muscles and tendons, once you build up a tolerance to the volume in your training program, it ends up being more stressful on the nervous system and on the bones.

So what does this all mean for you? For the average trainee, just trying to get and stay ready for the zombie apocalypse, keeping 48 to 72 hours between the same type or intensity of training stimulus, is the best way to keep your bones, your tendons and your neuromuscular system as fresh and healthy as possible.

Run on Monday, weights Tuesday, and then some non-weight bearing cardio on a Wednesday (bike or cross trainer for example), is one option. For someone like me, coming off an injury or a surgery, or any time out of sport, I need to be particularly careful when it comes to my tendons and bones. For me, all my ground reaction force work is 72, sometimes 96 hours apart. I'm only running twice a week, on a Wednesday and a Sunday, and then I'm jumping/playing basketball maybe once a week. Then if you're an athlete, it's all about maintaining your volume inside what’s known as the floor and the ceiling. If you're training hard and training consistently, and pulling up fresh, recovering well and have no problems, then don’t try to fix what isn’t broken!

What we ultimately want to do long term is this constant, smooth, upward moving graphs, where eventually if you zoom out on it, it's going to look like this nice long, slow, gradual progression, which is the whole point of training in sports. That's the basic concept of supercompensation.

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