Muscle is built with progressive overload which means that the body is able to adapt to the stress that you put it under over a certain period. The condition that your body is in today reflects the quality of the conversation that you have been having with your own body.
The health industry boom that started in the 1980’s gave birth to comprehensive studies on how the body reacts to exercise. Sports science has since become a recognized science that continues to make enormous contributions to the general knowledge that we know about our bodies. We have come a long way since the first competitive bodybuilders started training instinctively over 50 years ago.
There are many examples of this, but probably one that has affected most of us and the way that we train now is the discovery that the best way to gain muscle on a long-term basis is with HIIT training. High intensity interval training (HIIT) has been studied extensively and we now know what works best when trying to get results.
From fat loss to muscle gain, the ability to train with a high intensity over a short period of only 45 minutes works best. If this type of training is done correctly the results will increase the speed of metabolism that will burn more calories for up to 72 hours after this high intensity workout.
Effective fat loss is just one of the benefits that training with HIIT has now been proven to do for us by sports scientists. They have also conclusively proven that when training with HIIT you will put on more muscle than when you just lift a weight until you get tired like bodybuilders used to do.
Yoga which was started thousands of years ago was the first opportunity than people had to start a conversation with our body. Learning the limitations of what your body can do is part of that conversation and any bodybuilder who wants to add muscle needs to know the best way to converse with the body.
Any exercise no matter what you do is a conversation with your body. Challenging your pain barrier by simply raising your heart rate when you walk faster or train harder is a conversation with yourself and your body. Our bodies are built to react to this stress and without this our bodies simply waste away.
When a bodybuilder is doing a specific isolated exercise on one body-part he/she is talking specifically to that one muscle group or body part. The person doing the exercise is challenging that body-part which is giving constant feedback on its capability to complete the movement.
It is this conversation that results in the ability of the body to adapt and the millions of joggers that we have across the world know this conversation very well. They know that when they go for a job, whether it be for 5 minutes or five hours, it will start this conversation.
This conversation that we have with our bodies could be compared to self-knowledge and that any top athlete will have developed the ability to converse with his/her body so effectively that they know exactly what they can and can’t do. It all starts with the ability to ‘stress’ the body to a point it has never been before which is what progressive overload is.
The muscle adapts to this ‘stress’ because our bodies are built to survive and just like the conversation that you have with yourself when you meditate there is a self-learning that only gets results over time. If we think of doing any form of exercise as a simple conversation with our bodies we might be able to push ourselves a bit farther.