What is Athlete Training?

The purpose of athlete training is to achieve the highest possible sports result for a given individual. Training is efficient if this result is achieved with a minimal expenditure of time and energy (Kurz 2001). Sports training leads to morphological, physiological, biochemical and psychological changes; the character of these changes depends on the volume and intensity of training, on the frequency and density of workouts, and many other factors. These factors vary depending on the sport, the period of training, and the needs of an individual athlete (Kurz 2001).

In its simplest form, athlete training and programming is centered on managing the organism and adjusting acute variables in an effort to raise trainability and sporting performance, while minimizing the risk of injury. Laputin et al. (1982) discuss the idea of management as it refers to training; the further development of athletes and the necessity of perfecting the system of preparing highly-qualified athletes in our country and abroad are advanced in the first order by the search for new means and methods of training which permits the rise in the already high sporting results. Organization of training is understood to mean the structure of the training scheme which includes the determination of its means and methods. Managing, in the broad sense of the word, is the sum total of coordinated measures designed to achieve a certain goal. In essence the process of management enables one to stabilize the system, preserve its qualitative definitiveness, preserve its dynamic equilibrium with the environment and secure it's perfecting to achieve the desired effect. In other words the process of management is none other than regulation of the system, in this case, managing the training process (Laputin 1982).