Dear Colleagues,

At present, the achievement of success in sports has become a difficult target for both athletes and coaches. The overall purpose of the training process is to induce positive physical adaptations that, in turn, may create optimal conditions to enhance sport-specific performance and health. Improvements in the physical capabilities of athletes (e.g., strength, sprinting, endurance) are paramount, and these outcomes are most likely the result of positive adaptation to specific training and/or exercise. However, in order to maximize training adaptations and physical performance, practitioners should correctly manipulate training and exercise parameters (e.g., volume, intensity, distribution) across the training process. Thus, the training process requires a stricter monitoring and a closer examination of training loads and its effects, and therefore the training load should be carefully planned for the optimization of athletic performance and health. Furthermore, although many practitioners work in a team sport context with groups of athletes, it should be relevant to focus on individual athletes’ responses rather than only on the group’s results, since average results could result in missing important individual responses. Hence, an individualized approach to athlete monitoring is critical to get the best results from a training system. Advancing the knowledge and understanding of training responses in different types and proposals of training and exercise will facilitate training planning for performance enhancement and optimization of the training process. This Special Issue aims to address some of these issues and thus further our understanding about the response and effectiveness to different training and exercise methods, considered together with the importance of considering an individualized approach in training and exercise.

Dr. Pedro Jimenez-Reyes
Guest Editor

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• performance
• training load
• acute adaptations
• enhancement of physical capacities
• strength
• sprinting
• force-velocity profiling
• monitoring
• fatigue