How Ensure Physical Progression Through Physical Adaptation

You know that to get better physically, you have to progress.  Do you know how you should be doing it?

We know that to keep the body progressing physically, we have to keep it adapting.
Say you took up jogging to improve your cardiovascular conditioning.  And say you started out jogging a mile a few times/week.  And after a few weeks, you got in better shape.  Compared to when you first started, you're not breathing as hard, your legs don't get sore like they used to, and your heart rate returns to normal much quicker.
The body adapted to this cardio workout because you made it by constantly putting it under stress (i.e. - the workout).  But what if you took the opposite approach?
What if going for a jog a few times per week, let's say that you only went for a jog once every few weeks or so?  Do you think you'd adapt then?  Of course not.  There wouldn't be enough stress put on the body to make it adapt.
But what if you took a completely different approach?  Let's say you kept putting stress on the body, but you constantly did it in a different way.  Instead of doing the same cardio workouts each time, you did something different with every workout.  
So, maybe one day you'd go for a jog.  The next workout, you'd do some sprints.  The day after that would be circuits of bodyweight calisthenics.  That sort of thing.  
After a while of this, you go back to your jog, and find you'd likely improved - even though you hadn't done much actual jogging.  But you wouldn't be better at jogging than if you had just done the jogging and that's it.
You see, there is a line between too much adaptation and not enough. If you have too much adaptation, you quit progressing. If you don't have enough, you never actually get better at anything.
Now, with varied cardio workouts like this, there are two ways to look at it.  First, is your cardio improving?  In this sort of "randomized" scenario, the answer would likely still be "yes".  However, your performance on the jogging itself would likely suffer.  
So this is where you have to strictly define what your goals are - to simply improve your cardio (say for health reasons) or to actually improve your jogging (say for the sake of running a race).
Either way, if you want to progress, you have to adapt.  And if your body is going to adapt, you're going to have to make it.
Nobody ever got any better by doing the same thing - especially when that same thing was easy.
Train Hard, Rest Hard, Play Hard.

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