Yesterday I got to see a real live humpback whale out in the wild.
Me and the family were out on the water for much of the day on a cruise around the Bay of Islands on as fine and clear a summer day as you could ask for.
While anchored up near a rock formation called, cleverly, the Hole in the Rock, about a good half hour from the mainland, the skipper pointed out the nearby whale’s blow-off as it came up to the surface.
A couple minutes after sighting it, the joker slapped its tail, did a deep-dive, and hauled rubber out of the area. Next time we saw it, it was way up the road. I had no idea that humpbacks could hoof it like that. Not that I could blame the poor whale. I’m always ready to get far away from tourists.
While this was going on I picked up a healthy Alabama t-shirt of a sunburn on my arms and neck. Serves me right for getting out into the glaring sun on the open water with my glow-in-the-dark skin.
Adaptation is a funny thing. The parts of my head and neck which get regular sun were hardly affected. It’s the bits that only see light from 50 Watt bulbs that took the beating.
If you understand the wisdom coded in that idea, you understand one of the most important principles of training and nutrition.
Your body will adapt to specific threats with specific responses.
If I’d been getting regular sun on my bare skin for the last few weeks, yesterday wouldn’t have fazed me.
What you can handle depends greatly on what you’ve already handled.
This being the major reason that I counsel frequent repetition for anything that you wish to improve.
Any change you want to make in yourself is really a project of conditioning your mind and body to handle that change.
I’ve experimented with “crazy” ideas like squatting to a max every day because, when harnessed properly, that kind of pressure creates a powerful set of changes in you.
When you’re conditioned to take a challenging lift as part of your daily practice, not much else can intimidate you. (Twenty rep squats can. Those never get easier. But even the mighty breathing squat can be mentally mastered with regular practice.)
What scares people about “insane” training strategies is that they fear the work load will crush them. It can, if you’re an idiot. And there are lots of idiots in the fitness universe. But if you aren’t an idiot, it isn’t crushing yourself that is the problem.
The bigger issue is stagnation.
Anything you repeat enough eventually goes stale.
Even daily max squats stop being a novel growth-promoting stimulus and level off into a plateau.
At that point, the best thing you can do to kickstart progress is to rest and go low-volume and low-frequency.
The transition creates the shocks that stimulate the energies of growth and development.
Think of your body as like a hungry stomach. Hunger makes you look for food. Feeding makes the hunger go away. A satisfied stomach isn’t motivating you to get food.
That’s what happens when you’re causing change. You’ve got to keep your muscles and fat cells and hormones hungry. If they get satisfied, there’s no movement for change.
We wandered all over the place with this one didn’t we?
For more wanderings full of life-altering wisdom, make sure you join us.
Matt Perryman