BIORHYTHMS & ADAPTATION

Far too often, I see athletes chasing fitness and performance while giving no-to-at-best-mediocre attention to health. This is a terrible formula if we’re chasing results. Health and fitness are not mutually exclusive enterprises, despite how much weight your local chubby, chronically-inflammed, pain-riddled powerlifter can get up-They would be better if they were healthier. Allow me to explain.

Stimulus. Adaptation. Response.

This is all that matters for what we’re trying to do, and so it follows that we’re always chasing this bioflow - the critical equation for serious evolutions in health, performance, and fitness. If you had to reduce everything we do as practitioners or athletes down to one thing, this is it.

The problem is that no one truly understands the middle piece: adaptation.

In order to get results, adaptation is key. In order to adapt to your training, key systems in the body have to be working properly and be in sync. Otherwise, how do you know whether you’re leaving results on the table? You can’t simply train and expect to get better. You may be bigger, stronger, and faster, but what if you could reach a higher level, more efficiently, with less wasted time?

In order for that to happen, you would have to ensure you’re getting results from your training instead of just going through the motions. In other words, to get results, we come back to adaptation. In order for you to adapt to your training stimulus, your training needs to be build on a quality foundation of health.

You see, the autonomic and central nervous systems govern biological adaptation to training loads. Everything underneath or intertwined-hormones, metabolism, cardiac system, and more-has to be functioning well enough to support this adaptation process to give you results. You need to start thinking about your performance, results, and goals as the total sum of these various systems in your body instead of solely focusing on cookie cutter training programs.

Of course, designing a quality strength & conditioning regimen is a foundational piece, but if you’re not recovering properly, eating the right nutrients, or managing various stresses, how can you expect to have the requisite biological ‘currency’ or be in the right ‘biorhythms’ to enable the under-the-hood recovery process and net results?

For example, if you were trying to build strength and muscle, we know hormonal health is critical to these processes. But if you weren’t sleeping well, we know these supportive, anabolic hormones likely won’t be available in necessary means to drive your results. What happens then? You tread water. You don’t adapt. You don’t get better. We don’t want that. You obviously don’t want that.

We believe in doing everything we can to get that result response. This means doing a fair share of measuring, course correction, and building a foundation of health.

We focus-both in measurement and in programming-on key systems of the body to ensure we’re building that bedrock of health from which you can perform. This is why we use the Omegawave, take a metabolic assessment, observe sleep patterns, manage stress load, look at labs, and more.

This health-first model even extends into our exterior work in the training process-instead of just throwing someone straight into heavy lifts, agility work, or other performance training, we integrate proper prehab, conduct movement screens, look at posture, tissue quality, stability, and more. This allows us to build the proper structure to not only create longevity in the body, but also to provide a platform from which performance expresses itself.

This article is intended to get you to bark up the right trees, identify which areas of health are limiters, and implement minimum effective doses in key areas to drive your results. We can help you with this as a part of our evaluations and intake process so you’re not lost.

This might be a lot to think about, but it can be summed up with one simple phrase: Health drives all results. If you want fitness and performance, start by optimizing your health.