Missing in action
13 September 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Sorry I totally missed the on-line chat yesterday but around 11am one of our pet cats was run over and killed. Great confusion and consternation. It occurred to me at around 2pm that – wait a minute this is Tuesday and I totally missed the live chat. Apologies for those who showed up and I was MIA….
The fall season is really here and with the seasonal change perhaps its time to consider recalibrating your approach towards fitness/training/diet-nutrition. Time and experience have shown repeatedly that the human body is marvelous at neutralizing the positive effect of training. The body wants to maintain the physical status quo at all cost and is remarkably adaptive. Given time the body can and will become used to a particular training or eating regimen. That which once shocked the body into gains no longer delivers the mail. What was once intense and different – so much so that the body begrudgingly gave up stored body fat or built new muscle tissue – eventually becomes passé. I put training and nutritional strategies into a fitness Hegelian dialectic, thesis/antithesis/synthesis. To wit, a particular training and/or nutritional approach are used for a protracted period of time and morphs into the thesis. After a period of time all the effectiveness of the thesis-training regimen ceases. No matter how sophisticated or intense a regimen is after a certain period of time results fail. The savvy trainee recognizes gains have dried up and institutes a radically new approach – minute adjustments to the thesis/status quo are insufficient to spur additional progress – a new, radically different approach is required. Thus the antithesis is born. For a period of time results occur in response to the antithesis but alas what were once radical and heretical morphs into the new status quo. The smart trainee recognizes this and a synthesis instituted. The synthesis becomes the new thesis and the cycle begins anew. In order to coax gains from the body the smart trainee should have a series of effective resistance training methods and modes ready to roll out when stagnation takes hold of current efforts. Ditto cardio: too many fitness devotees pick a single cardio mode (stationary biking, by way of example) and run that mode or approach into the ground. Ditto nutrition: the eternal goal of any sound nutritional game plan is to provide enough nutrients to fuel muscle growth. We also use nutrition to set up a metabolic situation where the body mobilizes stored body fat and burns it to power day to day activity. Problems occur when the trainee becomes so attached to a particular exercise mode or nutritional approach that they refuse to change. They develop an unhealthy, unproductive allegiance to a particular system. Optimally we need to have an arsenal of tactics and techniques, modes and methods, ready for roll out when the current approach peters out. Experience has shown that results in resistance training and cardio run dry roughly 4 to 6 weeks. Some folks are able to milk results from a particular approach longer than others. The key is recognizing stagnation and having an alternative ready. Do you have an unhealthy allegiance to a particular mode or fitness system? If so give serious consideration to radically changing that tired thesis into a vibrant antithesis.
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