Stimulus, Recovery, and Progress

Connie exerting an adaptive stress upon herself.

Lifting weights will not make you stronger, but recovering from lifting weights will. This seemingly simple statement is an important concept to understand if you are to improve your performance. When you exercise, you exert a stress on your body. If that exercise is to be effective in driving progress, it must be sufficiently intense to disrupt homeostasis, but not so intense as to injure you. Provided the appropriate dose of stress is applied, you will first suffer a decrease in performance, followed by a period of recovery where performance begins to improve. Once recovery occurs you will not, however, return to where you started. Instead, you will experience a period of increased capacity termed supercompensation. It is important to note that you will not realize this improved performance without sufficient recovery. In fact, if you continue to apply stress in the form of exercise without allowing for recovery, you will suffer performance decreases that can potentially be long lasting.

In 1936, a gentleman named Hans Selye provided the theoretical framework for the body's reactions to external stressors called the General Adaptation Syndrome. While Selye's work was not done specifically for exercise science, his theory is quite useful for our purposes. General Adaptation Syndrome consists of three sequential phases: 1 - Alarm, 2 - Adaptation, and 3 - Exhaustion. Phase 1 begins almost immediately after exercise, but is not long lasting. Phases 2 and 3 represent longer-term phenomena. We want to elicit alarm and adaptation through training. In fact, they are essential components of a properly designed program. Without the associated favorable adaptations to training - such as increased strength, endurance, and power - no progress will occur. Exhaustion, or overtraining for our purposes, can and should be avoided.

Theory is wonderful, but an example is of greater interest. On Monday, a trainee performs a strength-focused workout of three heavy sets of five squats, the same for presses, and then one heavy set of five deadlifts. The next day, the trainee performs a high intensity conditioning workout for 20 minutes. Wednesday, the trainee performs another strength workout and ups the weights. Thursday is more demanding conditioning work. Friday is strength again, only heavier still. The weekend is left for recovery, or sometimes not. Open gym on Saturday and Sunday provides opportunities to do additional skill work. After three or four weeks of this, progress on strength stalls and the already difficult conditioning work becomes a slog with performance setbacks. Why is this?

In order for progress to be made, supercompensation must be allowed to occur. The body must go through alarm, followed by adaptation. After adaptation, you have a window of increased performance capacity that you can utilize to perform a greater workload than before. If done appropriately, this will spur further progress. You will supercompensate to continually higher levels, at least for a good long time. However, if training stresses are inflicted on the body too frequently, or at too high of an intensity, you will not reap the dividend the recovery processes want to provide to you. You will not get stronger, you will not get faster, and you will feel poorly. You will be knocking on the door of stage 3 in the General Adaptation Syndrome. If you want to increase your levels of fitness, rest and recovery are just as important as the work you put in on the gym floor.