![]() If you have been biking for years without improvement in your speed or endurance, then maybe you are not exposing yourself to sufficient stress to encourage the body to build the adaptations that will allow biking success. If you want to strengthen your arm bones, tapping them with your finger won't help, and a whack with a hammer will just break them. If there isn't sufficient stress, there will be no adaptation, and if there is too much stress, you will cause injury or burnout. ![]() Stress in the right amount simply means not too much and not too little. First is that the training stress must be the right amount and second, the stress must be sufficiently specific to ensure "transfer" or "carryover" to your sport or activity. There are two major limitations to keep in mind. So if you want to get better at dealing with some some form of stress such as hitting a tennis ball or running 26 miles, start exposing yourself to the stress in question and then hope that the body makes some favorable adaptations. And your memories of hand skills will be placed into parts of the brain where they can be accessed and executed automatically, without any degree of conscious effort or thought. The neurons responsible for the coordinated finger actions will develop better and faster lines of communication between themselves. For example, if you spend hours practicing the piano, the part of your brain that controls hand coordination will actually grow larger. As you practice physical skills, there are numerous physical changes to the structure of the brain as a result. The SAID principle also refers to adaptations that are far more sophisticated and complex, such as learning new motor skills. Stress to muscles will cause them to enlarge, and so on. The same thing happens with tendons and ligaments, which thicken and strengthen in response to mechanical stresses such as resistance training. Martial artists can toughen their shins and forearms into steel weapons through repeated shock training of the bone. The dominant arm of a tennis player will have larger bones than the opposite arm. For example, the place where your heel bone strikes the ground will be very hard and dense. If you place mechanical stress on the bones of the body by shock or impact, this will set in motion simple physiological processes that will thicken and harden the bones in the exact area of stress. ![]() ![]() While it is almost impossible to understand and account for all these separate mechanisms in devising a training program, it is easy to remember the general SAID principle - it means that the body is always trying to get better at exactly what you practice. The adaptation process does not occur by any one mechanism - it is a general tendency of the body which is played out in innumerable separate mechanisms. It means that when the body is placed under some form of stress, it starts to make adaptations that will allow the body to get better at withstanding that specific form of stress in the future. It is an acronym which stands for Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand. The SAID principle is one of the most important basic concepts in sport science. His book, A Guide to Better Movement: The Science and Practice of Moving With More Skill And Less Pain, is well worth the read. It’s a reminder of how inescapable this principle is in training for sport. Today’s link of the day comes from Todd Hargrove at on the all important SAID principle.
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