Your client may have the mindset that any exercise is good exercise.

Although specificity training should be a ‘no brainer,’ for your clients, it may not be as simple as it sounds. Your running clients can perform squats and lunges all day, but if they don’t also run, then they won’t see improvements. This means that if your clients want to improve on a specific exercise or skill, they need to perform that exercise or skill. More importantly, specific practice improves performance. Just like anything else in life, practice is the key to improving performance. For example, if a client is working with you to improve their running abilities, you need to prescribe movements that will help to directly improve their form, gate, cadence, and speed. Specificity in training is essentially training in a manner that is applicable, appropriate and course-specific in order to produce the desired outcome. Specificity is one of the most important elements in client training programs and a big part of helping them to reach their goals, whether it be training for a sport, losing weight, or working on improving activities of daily living. See A Bit About Specificity and Transfer Of Training Effect for more on this subject.Without this key element, training just isn’t quite as personal. For example, for muscles to adapt to become maximally strong, training intensities of at least 80% and up to 100% of 1RM must be used. Just how specific training can be is how most misunderstand specificity. However, as above, the adaptations to training are much more specific than these broad categories suggest and the specificity principle goes much deeper. The same specificity is true in strength training, and any other performance pursuit. Anaerobic exercise, which is what strength and power training is, produces specific adaptations to strength and power that are quite different from those of aerobic training (See: Difference Between Aerobic and Anaerobic Exercise) Only a very small benefit can be seen between the two types of training. “Specificity of Swim Training on Maximum Oxygen Uptake.” Journal of Applied Physiology 38.1 (1975): 151-55. Baltimore, MD: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2010. Exercise Physiology: Nutrition, Energy, and Human Performance. This is exemplified by research on swimmers that demonstrated that swim training showed no improvement in VO 2max on treadmill running. There is evidence of specificity in VO 2max between different types of endurance training, as well. In fact, a marathoner, for instance, would not want to spend very much of his time running a distance of 1600 meters, since marathon distances are much greater than this, while a 1600 meter runner, would find little benefit from training sprint distances. The cardiorespiratory responses (the transport and use of oxygen), and the specific neuronal firing pattern of the muscles, in long distance endurance running, are quite specific. So, for a long distance runner to improve his performance, the majority of training should be spent running long distances.

Training specificity tells us that, in order to achieve the greatest gains in our ability to perform a chosen task, the majority of our training must be spent performing that task or tasks that are extremely similar to it.

The specificity principle is also known as SAID or Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands. The patterns of muscle firing, and the cardiorespiratory responses are the two variables that have the most specific change.

The specificity principle states that these metabolic or physiologic changes are specific to the muscular, cardiorespiratory, and neurologic responses that are required by the exercise activity. Specificity Principle of Exercise Training

Specificity principle