Your body is intelligent. It is intelligent because it was made with intelligence by God. He made your body with the ability to change and improve to deal with the environment that it is in. For example, if you move to a higher altitude where oxygen levels are lower than your previous environment, your body will improve its ability to take in and utilize oxygen. If a section of your skin keeps rubbing against another surface, your skin will get thicker and form a callous to resist damage from the rubbing. If you exercise, your body will change in order to make it easier to do the same exercise.
The Path of Least Resistance
Your body responds to your physical environment by taking the path of least resistance. This simply means that if you force your body to perform a difficult task, it will look for a way to improve itself in order to make the same task easier. In doing so, the task will create less resistance or less difficulty. In other words, a difficult task is the same thing as taking a difficult path, and your body wants to improve to make the same task easier, which is the same as taking the path of least resistance.
Your Body’s Goal: Make the Same Exercise Easier
When you begin an exercise program, your body will start to remake itself. The newer version of your body will be equipped to provide you with a higher level of ability to deal with the challenges of the specific exercise you have been doing. If your body feels stressed from walking or running for ten to fifteen minutes, it will redesign itself with more endurance in order to make it easier for you to walk or run for ten or fifteen minutes. If you begin a stretching program, your body will gain flexibility in order to make it easier and more comfortable to stretch into those same positions. If you practice sprinting, your body will gain speed in order to make it easier for you to run fast. If you lift a heavy weight, your body will get stronger to help you lift the same weight with greater ease. Your body will do whatever it thinks will help you to do the same exercise with greater ease.
The Adaptive Reserve
You may find that your body is able to improve at a fairly rapid rate when you start an exercise program; especially when starting either endurance, or strength training programs. This is because your body is made with a built in reserve of adaptive power to help it survive in case it faces physically taxing circumstances that require an uncomfortable amount of exertion. As long as the reserve of adaptive power is available, you can keep demanding more and more of your body, and it will keep on responding with improvements. Unfortunately, your reserve of adaptive power is not unlimited. When the reserve dwindles to a low amount, adaptations become much more difficult.
When The Adaptive Reserve Dwindles
Without a substantial reserve of adaptive power, it makes no sense to an intelligent body to make improvements when you keep pushing harder. It is at this point that the strategy of simply pushing yourself to do more will start to backfire. Let’s take a look at what happens when you reach the point of a low reserve of adaptive power to keep gaining strength.
Imagine that you have started a strength training program five months ago. During this time, your body has made every effort to gain strength in order to make it easier for you to lift heavy weights. While you may have gained a lot of strength, your body has reached the point where it sees no point in gaining more strength. Why would it think this? Because every little strength gain has resulted in heavier workouts that are no easier than the last workout. As long as strength gains always lead to an immediate increase in the difficulty of your workouts, your body sees no point in continuously gaining strength. Your body gains strength in order to make it easier for you to lift the same weight. Unfortunately, the workouts never get any easier when you immediately add weight and make them harder.
Training Strategy: Allow The Same Workouts To Grow Easier
The continuous push to lift harder, or heavier may work for a time, but it doesn’t work forever. When striving to lift more weight or more reps stops working, you must change your training strategy by allowing the same workout to grow easier. This means that lifting the same amount of weight with the same number of sets and reps must become easier for a time before adding more weight or reps. Don’t try to add to your workouts at the first sign of a strength gain. Just keep doing the same workouts until they become easier. The best way to do this is to use training thresholds in which you push your sets to the point where you reach a rep that suddenly becomes more difficult than previous reps This is the point where the set becomes hard enough to stimulate strength. Most lifters reach this point in a set two to four reps short of failure. We’ll imagine that a lifter reaches this point on his eighth rep when benching with 225 pounds. His goal should be to keep repeating bench press workouts with 225 pounds for eight reps until the workout becomes easier. He will know when the workout is easier when he can perform eight reps without feeling as though the set doesn’t suddenly become more difficult when he reaches the eighth rep.
By repeating workouts with the same amount of sets, reps, and weight until they become easier, the lifter’s body succeeds at accomplishing its goal of gaining strength in order to lift the same weight with greater ease. If you prefer to vary your sets and reps from workout to workout, you can create a cycle of different workouts. The cycle can last either one, two, or three weeks. You then repeat the same cycle until it becomes easier.
The bottom line is that an intelligent training strategy is a strategy that agrees with the intelligence of your body. Your body will only see strength gains as an intelligent decision if it believes that growing stronger will make the training conditions you have created easier to deal with. Please understand, your body doesn’t care about poundages or effort unless those poundages and effort align with the path of least resistance. If your body sees that gaining strength will create a path of lesser resistance, then it will gain strength. In contrast, if your body doesn’t think that gaining strength will make life easier, it won’t gain strength.
Are your current workouts producing strength gains? If so, then stay with your current training strategy until it stops working. If you get stuck at the same strength level for four to six weeks, think about changing your training strategy as you may benefit from applying the concept of allowing the same workouts, or the same cycle of workouts, to grow easier. May God bless you with the best of training.
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