ABSTRACT
Although competition is the best-known sports activity, sports practitioners devote the most part of their time to quite a different kind of activity: training. Sports training is a progressive adaptive process of a non-linear nature, aimed to maximally increase the probability of achieving great performances, by means of sequentially assigning workloads and recovery periods (Rowbottom and Green, 2000; Bonete and Suay, 2003). Thus, the training process involves successive and planned acute efforts aimed to disturb homeostasis and create fatigue in order to evoke an adaptive response of the organism at various levels, which would lead to an increased ability to sustain either a maximal or submaximal intensity for a longer time than the rivals. Every one of these efforts (training loads) may be considered as an acute stressor, while the whole training schedule – with its dynamic balance between effort and recovery – constitutes a good example of a chronic stressor to which sports performers would have to adapt. The ability to cope with both kinds of stressors is central to the process of achieving higher performance levels.
