Adaptation, what is it?
Getting chased by a Tiger.
Eating a poison berry.
Trying to Deadlift 200kg.
Breaking up your Girlfriend.
While very different events in their nature, will provoke the exact same general response from the body: a primal alarm system produced by the Central Nervous System that is there to tell you that something significant and potentially dangerous is happening and you’re going to need to deal with it.
This is what we call General Adaptation Syndrome and it forms the body’s general response to any significant stimuli received from the external or internal environment to help you resist the danger until it disappears or you’re able to adapt to it.
Understanding this process and how the body responds to different magnitudes and frequencies of stimuli will allow you to gain insight into how the body adapts or succumbs to the world around it. It will help you understand that while, as a culture, we try to compartmentalise our lives into work, rest, play and training, our bodies and minds know no such thing and therefore stress accumulates to the point of significantly hampering our physical and mental well being.
In this lecture, I’ll guide you through the original research that lead to the formulation of the General Adaptation syndrome and its evolution over the last few decades. From that we’ll use the clues and insights gained from the discussion to determine how we can create more effective training programmes for ourselves and our clients, as well how to better recover from our training and life style stressors so we can give ourselves the chance to flourish mentally and physical and lastly, how we can effectively monitor our clients through this process for long term training success.
