“What do we want?”
“Change!”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
Biohacking, detoxing, muscle confusion, cheat-codes… the fitness and wellness marketplace is replete with buzzwords to get our attention and sell us some sort of snake oil that will supposedly change us for the better. And guess what? These marketing tactics work. Even though the methods and products they tout usually don’t.
Why do we fall for them? Well, because we all want to be able to improve our ourselves – is that so bad!? Of course not. But if the pursuit of this noble goal is valued less than the means by which we achieve it, then the results are almost always at least compromised or disastrous, at worst. But at some point, eventually, most of us will grudgingly concede that “exercise” in some way, shape or form has to be a part of our healthy lifestyle or self-improvement journey.
So why do we exercise? Feeling better, performing better, looking better; these are the benefits we hope to achieve from physical training. Everyone who undertakes an exercise regimen is hoping to force (keyword) their bodies to adapt to the stimulus of training and thereby improve. So why is it that we expect our bodies’ tissues to change because of exercise? I already gave it away; force.
Mechanical forces are what cause changes in the size, shape, number, position, and genetic expression of our cells. Force is therefore integral to any morphogenetic processes. There’s no supplement, medicine or device that can cause the sort of cellular changes that mechanical force can. In order to develop our tissues and make our bodies feel better, perform better or look better, we have to apply mechanical forces to them; there’s no way around it.
As such, we have to use movement. Movement is why we have a brain. It is our only way of affecting changes to our internal or external environment. If we move, we will improve. It sounds simple doesn’t it? Here’s where it gets complicated. What movements? How much force through movement is actually needed to cause the change we want? How much force is too much? How do we apply this force? How frequently? In the training world, these questions create the variables used in fitness programming; exercise selection, volume, density, but most importantly intensity.
Scientific study continues to give us better and smarter ways of improving our physical selves, but these methods could never be rightfully labeled as “short cuts” or “hacks.” “Opportunity looks a lot like work,” our coach, Alwyn Cosgrove, likes to say, and the intensity of the work matters… a lot.
Research has indeed given us a clear strategy to realistically make the most productive use of our limited training time and actually implement long-lasting, meaningful changes to our bodies. Force development at the proper intensity and volume can change whatever it is we want to change. Do you want more mobility? Force development is the answer. A more athletic body composition? Force development again. More resilience to injury? Take it by force.
To understand this better, it helps to contextualize some of the fundamental elements that make human physiology tick. Thanks to our big brains and incredibly adaptable bodies, human beings have become accustomed to sitting at the peak of the food chain here on earth for a little while now. This success can be largely attributed to the theory that at our most quintessential, the human form prioritizes two objectives above all else;
- Survival
- The Conservation of Energy
Even #2 above is actually just in service of doing a better job at number 1, but in the context of training, it’s important to understand that the priority to conserve energy holds our adaptive resources in a relentless and inescapable grasp. The living tissues that make up a human being will only adapt if the forces applied to them are such that the body perceives survival to be at stake. This is what triggers an energy-intensive central nervous system response to produce costly resources like growth hormone to rebuild damaged tissues to a higher standard of robustness, and cannibalize underperforming cells for genetic material to create better performing ones.
Even though this sounds like we must be talking about the wonderful muscle-building effects of resistance training, we’re actually talking about how mechanical force is used to trigger a morphogenetic process in any of our living tissues, including ligaments, tendons, bones… you name it. This stimulus can take the form of basic joint mobilizations, but also concentric, isometric and eccentric muscle contractions, with or without external loading.
If the force applied to a tissue is equal to, or somewhat less than the tissue’s load absorption capacity, the body perceives that the survivability of the tissue is dependent upon this capacity, so it adapts by working to increase it. This is a fundamental principle of physical training, of course. Similarly, but with more unpleasant consequences, If the force applied exceeds the load absorption capacity of the tissue, it gets injured. Obviously, this is something we’d like to avoid. If the force applied is well below the tissue’s capacity, then it just preserves it’s current state and we experience no change at all. Even worse, if the force is too insignificant, the tissue will adapt by actually degrading it’s load absorption capacity (those valuable adaptive resources could be used elsewhere; remember priority #2 above). All this is to say, “we have to use it or we lose it,” basically.
This demonstrates how vital the intensity variable is when it comes to training. Too intense, and we get hurt, not intense enough and nothing happens or we begin to atrophy. Also in the context of training, we must accept that because our #1 one parasympathetic priority is always survival, our central nervous system will not allow us to functionally achieve a range of motion or muscle contraction that it determines we don’t have the strength to control. Yes, once again we see that strength is the mother of all physical attributes, even if our immediate goal is more mobility. If we want our joints to move more freely, we have to make them strong enough to control the range of motion that we’re trying to achieve so that our brains then give them the green light.
“Intensity is directly correlated to the capacity of the tissue being trained, whereas effort is the mental fortitude to try harder.” – Dr. Andreo Spina
This distinction can be a difficult one for many fitness enthusiasts to understand, but it is essential to achieving a successful result from our physical practice. Intensity has much less to do with the rate of perceived exertion than most athletes think. What many describe as the euphoria created by a “good workout” is simply the feeling of having put in a considerable effort. Any coach (so-called) can make a participant feel utterly destroyed by a training session by simply demanding an extremely high volume of output, even at a relatively minimal level of actual intensity. The feeling of accomplishment after having survived such a session is, unfortunately, in no way indicative of a physiologically beneficial result, although it may trigger some sort of mental satisfaction. This is not unlike the satiated feeling we get after eating a large meal with little to no nutritious value. We sometimes refer to this training experience as performing “junk repetitions” just like we use the term “junk food.”
Well then, if we can’t trust how exercise feels, how can we achieve the most beneficial balance between effort and intensity and force our bodies to adapt in the most efficient and expedient manner?
Once again, exhaustive scientific study has come to the rescue and given us lots of analysis as to how many reps we need each month at a particular level of intensity to achieve the results we’re looking for.
This graph gives us a visual representation of how to approach intensity and volume in a productive month of training. Notice that reps below a 50% level of intensity are of little value in terms of provoking change, but it should be noted that reps at low levels of intensity are still valuable for skill practice, learning, warming up, etc. Also noteworthy is an estimate of the maximum number of reps we can likely perform at a given level of intensity. Working with near maximal loads that can only be performed for 1 or 2 reps, for example, should only make up about 5% of our training volume for the month, and working at intensities that would allow for sets of 20 repetitions also represents a low volume (albeit slightly higher than max singles or doubles). We can see that most of the productive volume actually lies within the 65%-90% intensity range; these would be sets that might allow for no more than 5-15 reps before failure would occur.
Now we have an answer to the question of how to stimulate the changes we want our bodies to make, while mitigating the risk of tissue damage or wasted effort! All we have to do is conscientiously distribute the volume of work we perform each month within the productive intensity curve at the bottom of the graph.
These principles of force development programming are the real game-changer when it comes to physical improvement. They are what’s actually “under the hood” of any effective training system. Some systems will get lucky and hit this curve by happy accident, others will ignore these principles at their peril and either fail to make progress or hurt the people who use them, but adhering to the laws of human tissue adaptation will beat any one doctrine, methodology or product because it governs all of them, whether they admit it or not.