Training Balance & Balanced Training

What is needed in training is appropriate physical preparation to support and where possible enhance the quality of the sport specific technical and tactical training. They all go hand in glove. All aspects of training are highly interdependent and must be trained in varied proportions at all times of the training year. You can artificially try to separate them but to be most effective you need to recognize and take advantage of the interaction. Early in my career when I was just beginning coaching and also competing in the decathlon served as a powerful lesson for me about balancing training. I learned quickly that if I let my training get out of balance and emphasized one event or one physical component that it would quickly show up negatively somewhere else. It was clear that to make effective progress I had to balance all aspects of the physical preparation with the technical work on all the events. Obviously I could not give equal attention to everything, I had to balance it all out. I learned to eliminate blind spots in training. Good sound training is always a continual compromise, a give and take, a yin and yang to maintain the desired training focus.