The only way the body changes. Adaptation!
Whether you have a strict fitness plan you follow each day or you move based on whatever the day brings, keep moving. You are healthier for it, and moving puts you in the top 17 percent of the U.S. population if you are over 40. But as I have mentioned before, as we age, most of us gain weight and lose muscle. So if you keep doing the same thing you are doing now for fitness, it will eventually stop working. You’ll need to change the way you are doing your fitness to surpass the rate at which your body is deteriorating. That’s where the adaptation theory, which is the idea of organizing and individualizing our fitness in order to see positive changes, comes in.
Adaptation is when the body adapts to a stimulus, like exercise. How you adapt to a stimulus depends on many factors, including your fitness starting point. For example, if you were sedentary and overweight and you started training for a 5K race by running for the first time in a long time (running being the stimulus), you might see weight loss occur (weight loss being the adaptation). If you already have a movement practice but feel stuck and are not seeing your body adapt anymore, you will need a stronger or different stimulus. You may need to add intensity, load, speed, and variation, or you may need to add more recovery if you are overtraining. Most likely, it’s a combination of all of these. In order to understand how to fix what’s keeping you stuck, you need to understand the adaptation cycle.
Adaptation takes place in four phases—stimulus, fatigue, recovery, and adaptation—and these phases make up the adaptation cycle. The adaptation cycle allows us to apply true science to fitness and find efficacy in any training program. If what you are doing doesn’t follow the four phases of adaptation, then what you do might be good, but it’s not as effective as it could be. Using the four phases of adaptation is the foundation of impactful, meaningful training with an individualized purpose and goal. These four phases of adaptation are at the core of how we shift the way we look at fitness. Once you understand what goes into forcing the body to change, you will see that all training must have a purpose with specific peaks in intensity and dips for recovery. We all adapt to different stimuli in different ways, and along with that, we all need different amounts of recovery.
Keep in mind that each step of adaptation is dependent on the step before it. No phase in the cycle can be isolated; each phase, in order, is necessary to see change. You may need to be open to adding to, subtracting from, or changing what you currently do to see change. Don’t worry, you don’t have to completely throw out what you’re doing now, but my hope is that by understanding how adaptation works, you’ll be able to tweak or reinvent a movement practice so that you can move forward and understand how to get your body to adapt as you age.
I want to reiterate the fact that fitness is emotional. We all bring outside patterns to fitness, and because fitness is stressful not only physically but emotionally, our patterns tend to be exaggerated with fitness. For example, I am very non-committal, ask any of my friends. If you invite me to go on a walk, or hang out, or go to watch a soccer game, it’s difficult for me to commit. I’m afraid if I do, I’ll miss out on something else. I’ve had the same issue with my fitness. I know that just waking up each day and coming up with whatever workout I feel like doing doesn’t work for me, but in the past I had the tendency to do that because I was afraid if I followed a pre-designed program, I’d miss out on something that might help me more with my fitness. But I’ve realized that if I don’t track my training, if I don’t have a plan, if I just do whatever, I usually end up getting injured, overdoing it, and burning out after a few weeks. When I plan my fitness, I might not always get to do what I feel like I should or want to do, but I do what I need to do and the results are so much better. So just be aware of what patterns you are bringing to your fitness; this will help you address any blind spots you have.
See you in the gym,
Aaron Leventhal CSCS, PN1