From the title I bet you think this post is about how exercise is the best way that I know of to deal with stress and although that may be true, that’s not at all what I’m writing about.  Having focused my undergraduate work on Interdisciplinary Studies, I love examples where a theory or element from one discipline is applied to another in a meaningful way.  When I got my CSCS®, I was thrilled to find such a wonderful example that touches so close to home for me.

Back in 1950, a scientist by the name of Hans Selye published a paper titled Stress and the General Adaption Syndrome in the British Medical Journal.  Below is a great summary from Health: The Basics where Selye’s stages of stress are described:

What is being shown here is how the body reacts to stress.  When we’re not in a state of high stress, we’re said to be in a state of homeostasis, all systems normal and in balance with one another.  However, when a stressor comes along and triggers a physiological response, we leave homeostasis and go through the stages described in the diagram above in order to to get back to our normal state. So what do I mean by physiological response?  Check our this illustration also from Health: The Basics:

These responses are the adaptations referred to in stage 2 , The Resistance Stage.  At some point, the body can no longer handle the heightened state and drops not only back to homeostasis but even below!  OK, so before I move on to what this has to do with the gym I should mention that I barely scratched the surface on this subject.  Stress in general is a great topic for blogs as its something that affects all of us, has many different causes with many different symptoms and there’s a whole bunch of great ways to manage it (yeah, including lifting heavy stuff and putting it back down).  So look for future posts on stress for sure!

Now, on to the gym. In 1964 a Russian sport scientist named Leonid Matveyev introduced the concept of periodization to the strength and conditioning world. It is basically a model that works to minimize injury and staleness while maximizing performance around a given time period all by systematically designing a program with a focus on variation.  Later, in the paper A Hypothetical Model for Strength Training, John Garhammer and others applied The General Adaption Syndrome that we just talked about to strength and conditioning and just like that, the notion that when you lift heavier your body enters the Alarm Stage and when you allow for proper recovery you are in the Resistance Stage.  In strength and conditioning we sometimes call this super-compensation.  If you don’t allow your body time to recover to homeostasis you enter the Exhaustion Phase which we call overtraining. I’ll have some future posts on overtraining for sure as that’s an important topic not only for athletes but for those of us that train like them even if we don’t compete 🙂 But there you go, a model created to describe the human body’s response to stress taken and applied to strength and conditioning in the form of one the fundamental principals used today – periodization. That’s Interdisciplinary Studies at work!

As with all of these topics, there’s lots more to read about out there and a really great unbiased resource is Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning.