Supercompensation. Could someone explain the the principles and how to implement it properly into my training?

It's a difficult topic to discuss because of the variation from person to person.

I have not used a special block for a marathon but my coach had me do them for 10k usually about 6 weeks out from my goal race. I would do a one week block with a 25% rise in mileage and intensity (not recommended to increase both this severely if you have a small aerobic base). His focus was on working my anaerobic system and Vo2 max. A marathon would require an approach to stressing the aerobic system in a special block. After the one week block we would decrease my usual mileage pre special block by 25%.

Recovery is the most important part of super compensation because your body needs time to recover and adapt to the unusally high stress you placed on it during the special block. If your mileage is under 80mpw. I would not recommend increasing both intensity and mileage at the same time during this block. Either raise the intensity or the mileage.

A special block could last 10 days if you want but overtraining may sneak in if you are not careful at that length. If your block lasts 7 days. You then recover for 7 days for super compensation to kick in.

This is the best I can give you considering I have not used it in marathon training. Another poster may be more informative on it for that.

If you're not supercompensating, you're not training. Supercompensation is simply your body adapting to a training stimulus to not only recover but also improve.

There are a lot of different ways to achieve this, but it's a matter of fitting all of the variables together. Training pace, weekly mileage, number of doubles, number of workouts, type of workout, and many other factors all go into making your training hard enough but not too hard.

When it comes to exercise physiology there are a few basic principles. One of those is SAID...specific adaptations to imposed demands. The body will adapt specifically to the demand placed on it. The body likes homeostasis and does not like the stress associated with hard training so will adapt to make training less of a stress. This adaptation is accomplished via supercompensation....improvements in infrastructure (reduced body fat, reduced size of muscle fibers, inc in capillaries and mitochondria, ect)...so the next time you want to take the body away from homeostasis it is ready. Initial improvements are large. More improvements are much harder. Think back when you were a freshman then senioe the college. Your improvement from your 'ugly duckling" mile to end of freshman year is probably much greater than any improvement you had in college.

Bonus points to anyone who gets the ugly duckling reference.

Alan

Mr E wrote:

If you're not supercompensating, you're not training. Supercompensation is simply your body adapting to a training stimulus to not only recover but also improve.

There are a lot of different ways to achieve this, but it's a matter of fitting all of the variables together. Training pace, weekly mileage, number of doubles, number of workouts, type of workout, and many other factors all go into making your training hard enough but not too hard.

True but Special block training is a little more of a radical approach to super compensation. The OP appears to be talking about a maximal overload block and super composition recovery after. A short microcycle of overload to overcome training plateaus. You are breaking it down into a simplified daily method where the OP referenced a special block every mesocycle which suggests a bigger period of overload than one workout.

I think it is possible by the way the OP phrased the thread topic and question, that when he did so, he did not understand what supercompensation is, and thought it was some type of training method to achieve.

Understanding supercompensation, and the supercompensation curve, is an important and fundamental concept to training for 'improvement' of the physical body. The curve can be used to help describe the process of overtraining. And drawing smaller super compensation cycles on top of a the line of a large super compensation curve can help to describe the concept of micro and macro super compensation cycles.