Protected: Our Training Philosophy: Training For Athletic Performance

Whether you’re striving for a specific athletic goal or aiming to become a versatile all-rounder, capable of engaging in a diverse array of physical activities, our mission at Common Purpose is to unlock your full potential and help you achieve your performance goals through our One to One PT and Semi Private PT offerings.

We design our training programmes using evidence-based methods, ensuring they meet our members’ needs and goals. With our experienced and motivating personal trainers, our members benefit from the latest training techniques to become the fittest, strongest, and most athletic version of themselves.

What is Athletic Performance?

Before we dive into the Common Purpose approach to enhancing performance, let’s first define what performance really means and what it entails. Performance is about being able to perform a task or activity to the best of our ability. Whether it’s in the gym, on the sports field/court or competing in a specific event (triathlon, hyrox, marathon, powerlifting etc). 

Peak performance requires a mix of technical skill, physical and psychological attributes. At Common Purpose, our job is to optimise movement and exercise technique in order to train effectively to develop the specific physical attributes required to reach peak performance. We also support and help develop mindset skills that help maintain motivation and consistency along the way. 

The 5 Pillars of Performance

In order to train to enhance physical performance, we focus on 5 key areas in particular: Movement, Strength, Conditioning, Athleticism, and Body Composition. 

We believe that everyone should incorporate all of these pillars into their training programme. The right mix of these pillars will vary depending on the task and the individual. For example, a marathon runner needs enough muscular strength to prevent injury but doesn’t require as much strength as a powerlifter. In fact, overemphasising strength training could interfere with their training and performance in long-distance running.

Movement

Proper movement is the foundation of all physical activity. We believe moving well before moving often. Movement is complex, but there are fundamental movements and joint ranges of motion that we should all be able to perform. These fundamentals ensure we are able to train efficiently and safely. At Common Purpose, we screen for these movements and provide training programmes that aim to enhance your movement capacity by addressing restrictions or limitations, promoting optimal movement.

Strength

Building strength is a vital foundation for overall physical performance. The ability to generate and resist force during physical activity is crucial for both optimal performance and injury prevention. Through personalised resistance training programmes, we help you increase strength, muscle mass, improve and enhance your ability to perform various activities. Whether lifting weights or using bodyweight exercises, our strength training programme is tailored to meet your specific needs and goals.

Conditioning 

Conditioning is the body’s ability to efficiently generate and restore energy during physical activity. There are multiple different energy systems that contribute to energy production, which we can bias depending on the type of conditioning we do. 

We tend to split conditioning into two sub-categories; aerobic and anaerobic development. Aerobic training programmes focus on lower intensity, longer duration exercise that improves muscular endurance and cardiovascular efficiency. This training method can be done with exercises like running, cycling, and swimming and helps boost your stamina, developing conditioning foundation.

Anaerobic training consists of short bursts of high-intensity activity interspersed with periods of rest and recovery. This type of conditioning is required for a large number of sports, such as football, rugby, tennis etc. We design high-intensity interval training (HIIT) programs to enhance your ability to perform high power and speed outputs during repeated efforts, as well as recover quickly between intervals. 

Our conditioning training is designed to establish a solid foundation of fitness, then progressively tailor the training to your specific sport or event, maximising your performance potential.

Athleticism

To excel in sports and other physical activities, a combination of agility, speed, power, and coordination is necessary. Our athletic training focuses on developing these attributes, making you more dynamic and versatile in your movements. We incorporate hopping, jumping, throwing, sprinting, change of direction and agility drills that ensure you’re prepared for peak performance.

Body Composition

Achieving and maintaining an optimal body composition is key to overall health and performance. Leaner athletes tend to have better power to weight ratios and put less stress on joints and ligaments, helping to prevent injury. We provide comprehensive nutrition and exercise guidance to help you build lean muscle, reduce excess fat, and improve your overall physique. By focusing on healthy eating habits and effective workout routines, we help you reach your ideal body composition.

Achieving Your Peak Performance

At Common Purpose, our commitment is to guide you toward achieving your peak performance, whether you’re targeting a specific athletic goal or seeking to become a versatile all-rounder. By focusing on key areas such as movement, strength, conditioning, athleticism, and body composition, we create comprehensive, evidence-based training programs that are tailored to your individual needs. 

With the support of our skilled trainers and the latest training techniques, we aim to optimise your physical and mental attributes, ensuring that you can perform at your best in any activity. At Common Purpose, we’re dedicated to unlocking your full potential and helping you become the fittest, strongest, and most athletic version of yourself.

The 7 Essential Training Principles for Maximising Performance Programs

At Common Purpose, our mission is to ensure our training programs are effective at enhancing physical performance. Below, we outline the fundamental principles that drive our training programmes and offer insights into how they help our members achieve their health and fitness goals. 

Principle 1. Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands

Despite the fancy name, this is a pretty straight-forward principle that means our bodies will adapt specifically to the type of training we do.

For example, the body will adapt to resistance training by increasing muscle strength and size. Cardiovascular exercise will provide the stimulus to improve energy efficiency, endurance, and recovery.

This principle underscores the importance of ensuring that training programs must provide the right type of stimulus according to the goals that have been set. Whether the goal is to improve body composition, build strength, boost endurance, enhance athleticism, or all of the above, the training plan needs to reflect these objectives through the correct training methods and techniques.

Principle 2. Supercompensation

The supercompensation effect is the phenomenon that explains how our bodies actually adapt and improve in response to physical training. When we train, our body becomes fatigued and performance begins to drop. However, if adequate rest and recovery follows a bout of physical exercise, our bodies have an incredible ability to bounce back better and stronger than before, elevating performance above the previous baseline (hence the term “supercompensation”).

This principle is a game-changer. It explains why it’s crucial to train effectively in order to create an adequate training stimulus, but also to provide enough rest and recovery to fully reap the benefits of the hard work. Striking the perfect balance between stress and recovery is the secret to ongoing progress and peak performance.

Principle 3. Progression

The supercompensation effect naturally brings us to the need for progressively increasing the training stimulus over time. Over time, training should improve performance and fitness. Therefore, it is required to gradually increase the training stimulus, to ensure the training stimulus is adequate for continued progress. 

Note: The rate at which training stimulus increases occur will depend on your age, response to training, ability to recover and training experience.

There are various ways to increase training stimulus. Adding more weights or reps to lifts, increasing the duration or intensity of cardio sessions, reducing rest times and increasing session density, or simply trying more challenging exercises. The key is that training programs must continually progress over time to avoid plateaus. Consistently and steadily upping the ante in training is key to achieving ongoing success.

*The Legend of Milo of Croton is a nice analogy for progression: Legend has it that every day, Milo lifted a young calf. As the calf grew, so did Milo’s strength. Eventually, he was able to carry a full-grown cow on his back. 

Principle 4. Tolerance vs Exposure

A progressive training stimulus aims to ensure that your training continues to provide the right amount and intensity of training in order to promote continued fitness gains. The aim is to find the optimal amount and intensity of exercise needed to achieve a desired fitness outcome, without over or under doing it. Searching for this effective dose is all about finding balance between two things: 1) Tolerance & 2 ) Exposure.

Tolerance refers to the body’s ability to handle and adapt to physical stress. Exposure refers to the amount and the intensity of training stimulus you expose yourself to during training. This includes things like duration, frequency, volume, load, density and intensity of workouts. 

Physical tolerance generally increases over time with consistent, progressive training. Tolerance is however influenced by many factors, some of which are relatively stable (age, genetics, training experience etc), others are quite transient and change day to day (sleep / recovery, hydration, nutrition, stress levels etc). This variability makes it difficult to get right all the time. Therefore, training exposure needs to be carefully managed to match an individual’s tolerance for optimal performance enhancement.

We manage this dynamic balance by monitoring the following:

• Assessments and feedback: We regularly assess our member’s tolerance with subjective feedback (soreness and energy levels), as well as measurable recovery indicators (sleep metrics, HRV and resting heart rate).
• Graded Exposure: Our programmes are designed to gradually increase training exposure to continuously challenge the body without exceeding tolerance limits.
• Recovery: We ensure our member’s incorporate adequate rest and recovery to ensure the body can adapt to the training stimuli.
• Variation: We use periodisation principles by varying training intensities and volumes to prevent overtraining and promote continuous improvement.

Principle 5. Recovery

As we now know, recovery is crucial to gaining training adaptations while safeguarding against overtraining or injury. That’s why implementing acclimation, sometimes, deload phases in training programmes and enhancing recovery strategies are crucial elements of any training regimen.

Active rest days, quality sleep, proper nutrition, hydration, and effective stress management techniques become paramount in optimising training progress. 

By balancing the stress of training with sufficient recovery time, your body can repair, rebuild, and adapt optimally. This not only minimises the risk of injury but also enhances overall health and performance, ensuring you can keep pushing your limits in a sustainable and effective way.

Principle 6. Individualisation

It’s important to recognise that everyone responds to and recovers from training programmes a bit differently, depending on a myriad of lifestyle factors (stress, sleep, nutrition, etc.). This variability means it’s crucial to monitor key performance indicators throughout the training programme. Since progress isn’t always linear, building flexibility into the regimen is key.

For instance, if you notice you’re not recovering well from a certain workout, you might need to dial back the intensity or allow more rest days. Conversely, if you’re progressing quickly, you might increase the difficulty sooner than planned. This adaptability ensures the programme stays tailored to your requirements and goals.

Principle 7. Consistency

When it comes to training, consistency is key. The body needs repeated, frequent training stimuli in order to adapt. A lack of consistency creates a detraining effect which is the biggest reason most people struggle to make progress with their performance. Detraining refers to the loss of fitness gains when regular exercise is reduced or stopped. The cardiovascular and energy systems efficiency drops, muscles atrophy, metabolism slows, flexibility decreases, and neuromuscular adaptations reverse, reducing coordination and movement efficiency. 

Interestingly the longer you’ve been consistently training, the quicker your gains return. Sometimes known as “muscle memory”. Also, different types of fitness detrain quicker than others (known as training residuals). As a general rule of thumb, “if it’s slow to grow, it’s slow to go”, meaning adaptations that take a long time to gain, often take longer to lose and vice versa. 

Driving effective physical performance enhancement

In conclusion, at Common Purpose, our training programmes are designed to align with the core principles that drive effective physical performance enhancement. By adhering to principles like Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands, Supercompensation, and Progression, we ensure that our members receive tailored, progressive training that continuously challenges and improves their fitness levels. We prioritise a balanced approach, carefully managing training tolerance and exposure while emphasising the importance of recovery and individualisation. Above all, consistency remains the cornerstone of success, enabling sustainable progress and long-term achievement of health and fitness goals. With these principles at the heart of our programmes, we are committed to helping our members unlock their full potential and achieve lasting results. 

Looking to start your training journey? Talk to us today.