Do you know Moneyball? It’s a 2011 American sports drama about Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager Billy Bean. One of the scenes shows the main character, stating this easy message in a hot conversation with the head scout: What can I say? Adapt or die!
Don’t take it too direct — it’s just a quote from a 6X Oscar-nominated sports movie starring Brad Pitt.
While doing sports, even though it’s just a hobby or social activity, we pursue some of these goals — improving physical fitness and health, reducing weight, increasing speed, strength, or endurance.
Achieving any of these goals involves changing you and your body. It is difficult to run faster or lose weight if nothing has changed. All these changes don’t happen out of the blue. The higher the bar, the more effort you need to put into what you do and how you do it.
In sports scientific language, efforts that provide changes in muscles, ligaments, and joints are called stress. This is not the kind of stress that we deal with on a daily basis in everyday life. In our case, stress is the training itself, or rather the degree of fatigue your body got while training. The higher the fatigue, the higher your training stress.
Training stress tires your muscles, but you are not “stressed”. But rather satisfied with the training work or load done. However, your muscles are “in shock” and if they could talk, you would hear a lot of new things from them 😤😆
This kind of stress causes your body to react, adjust, and become stronger. Of course, if you give it rest without pushing over certain limit. The result of this reaction is the acquired ability of the body to withstand more load. The process of achieving a new state is called physiological adaptation.
However, it is difficult for an amateur to achieve a goal simply by applying more and more stress. The classic approach of many coaches with professional backgrounds looks like an endless VO2Max test and simply doesn’t work for 99% of amateurs.
By dying at every workout in the hope to accelerate physiological adaptation, you will not reach your goals. Your body will respond to excessive stress with injury or illness. On the other hand, by running at a sexy pace or making endless social rides you will also make little progress. It doesn’t work without stress.
The key question is “How to properly dose your training stress?” This is the main task of the high-quality and adaptive training plan. It’s actually not just a plan, but rather a service that “lives” with you and adapts to your abilities and real-life obstacles by flexibly adjusting the load. In general, it adapts to you in the same way that you adapt to training stress.
This hidden inherent adaptation is an important value of the OMY! Sports product. It is something that ultimately determines your goal achievement.
The next post is about how this adaptation actually works.