Fitness goals and the various roads towards achieving them
are frequently misunderstood, in my opinion. Often in conversation about
fitness goals someone will state what they are trying to accomplish, but their
idea of how to actually go about accomplishing it may be a little off. While
there are many ways to reach a destination, knowing the physiology behind what
you are doing is crucial to getting yourself on a more direct route. If you can
understand these principles and physiological processes that contribute to eliciting
the result you desire, you might be pleasantly surprised with the easy progress
you see, instead of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. Let’s
take a look at a few examples:
1. A common one: losing/gaining
weight. When considering the physiology of weight loss or gain, there is
one process that rules above all: the law of thermogenesis. Thermogenesis is
simply the balance between energy in and energy out, also counted in calories.
If your calories in exceed calories out, your weight goes up, and if calories out
exceed calories in, you lose weight. That equation is pretty simple. Another
physiological gold nugget is the fact that muscle is the most metabolically
demanding part of our bodies, so the more you have, the larger calorie-burning
metabolic furnace you will have.
2. Getting “huge,” or
relatively huge. Taking thermodynamics into consideration again, you need
to be in a calorie surplus to make those muscles bigger. If you don’t have extra
supplies to make more muscle, you can’t expect to get bigger. On top of that,
you need to perform strength activities where you are working at 70-75+% of
your 1 rep max (RM) and increase the amount of volume you are performing, or
perform ultra-sets with ~50% of 1RM and go till failure to get large quantities
of volume. “Volume” refers to the number of sets x number of reps x weight
being used. Increased volume stimulates the physiological process of muscle
hypertrophy when you are in a calorie surplus.
3. Running/sprinting
or jumping higher. This is a more interesting example, consisting of a
combination of muscle and neurologic adaptions that you are trying to improve.
Muscularly, you need to improve the performance of your type 2 muscle fibers,
which are you power/high force producing fibers. Conversely, type 1 fibers are
closer towards the endurance side of the spectrum and are meant for prolonged
activity. To stimulate type 2 fiber development, you have to perform activities
such as maximal effort lifts, like squats and deadlifts, working at 90+% of your
1RM to improve maximal strength. Secondly, on the neurological side of things, performing
dynamic effort lifts (like squats and deadlifts) at 50-70% of your 1RM while intending
to move the weight as quickly as possible improves your ability to recruit type
2 fibers quickly and all at once. Performing plyometric jumps will also improve
your ability to use your passive elastic structures to absorb and transfer
force, making you more “springy.”
As you can see from the above examples, each training goal requires
a slightly different stimulus to get the desired physiological result. Each
training modality has a different effect on your physiology and will dictate
how well you are moving towards what your end goal is. A better understanding
of the physiology of what is going on will make your training more efficient
and less frustrating.
If you have any questions about additional examples of how
to manipulate training to affect physiology, you can leave them in the comments
below! Train smart, my friends :)
Thanks for reading,
Ryan Goodell, CSCS
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