There are 3 fundamental principles of exercise that needs to be applied in order to achieve success with an exercise program. These three principles are as follows:

Specificity
Overload
Progression

There are various ways to apply these principles depending on the activity you want to improve and your unique exercise goals.

Specificity
There are a few ways to break down and apply this principle. Specificity may apply to muscle groups,energy systems or specific movements and activities. Basically this principle states that in order to get better at any type of activity you need to you need to perform that activity. This means that if you want to get better at running you need to run, throwing darts you need to throw darts, writing articles on Xomba you need to write articles on Xomba and so on.

This principle may however be subdivided further to include only parts of a specific skill, for example if a baseball pitcher wants to work specifically on his accuracy he needs to target this skill by trying to hit a specific target. If he wants to work on his speed he needs to target the throwing phase of the pitch and somehow measure the speed of his pitch. The possibilities and variations are endless but these principles make up a framework to work around when trying to achieve a specific goal.

Overload
This principle states that in order to achieve adaptation (improvement) a greater than normal load needs to be applied. The body will adapt increased stimulus over time wether this increase comes in the form of added weight such as in strength training or added difficulty in any other form depends on the specific activity we want to improve on as well as our goals. When the body has adapted once again we need to apply further overload in order to improve further which leads us to the third principle of progression.

Progression
The principle of progression refers to the rate of which the overload is applied. In theory an optimal rate at which to apply overload exists for all skills or activities. However, this rate might be very different between different people. If overload is applied to rapidly it will result in poor improvement (progression) and demotivation and in sports this may lead to injury. As a general example an athlete that only exercises sporadically and adds overload too fast violates both the principle of overload as well as the principle of progression and as a result will not achieve good progression.

These principles are highly interconnected and are reciprocally dependent on eachother.
They also have a strong relation to additional principles like the ones of adaptation and individual differences.
The good thing about using these principles as a framework to reach your goals is that they can be applied to virtually any skill or activity you can think of, not only within sports and fitness.

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