Adapt -> Get Better -> Repeat!
Adapt -> Get Better -> Repeat!
Using the SAID principle to achieve your fitness goals
Our bodies are amazing at adapting to the environment around us. Humans have spread civilization across the globe, building cities in deserts, the tropics, and tundra. Granted, spreading our species worldwide took a few hundred thousand years. Thankfully, adapting to exercise is a much quicker process. That’s where the SAID principle comes into play: Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. It’s quite simple: your body will adapt to the exercise stress placed upon it. Want to get stronger? Lift heavier weights. Want to improve your balance? Do exercises that challenge your balance. Of course, this is much easier said than done. The catch? Adapting to get better at something, like getting stronger or having better balance, takes hard work and trying new things and often involves failure along the way. If doing these were easy, everyone would be strong and have impeccable balance, which is clearly not the case.
Every day, I get a front-row seat to the exercise habits of hundreds of people. I’ve seen them in the gym so much I know exactly what they will do when they come in to exercise. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Not everyone who exercises is training for a marathon or strongman competition. Exercise just for the sake of exercising is excellent in its own right due to the many positive side effects that come with it. However, if you have a specific goal, your training needs to be tailored to it.
Let’s use a classic bodyweight movement as an example: the push-up. Push-ups are a great demonstration of upper body strength and endurance. Building the strength will require some effort if you can’t do a standard push-up. A kneeling push-up is a great way to start, but ultimately isn’t a great solution to the problem at hand. If you do kneeling push-ups every day for a couple of weeks with the goal of doing a standard push-up, you will be sorely disappointed. Those weeks spent on kneeling push-ups will make you excellent at it, but that’s about it. It’s because you haven’t placed enough stress upon the body to make it adapt and build the necessary strength. A better method is gradually making your push-ups harder by lowering your body’s angle relative to the ground. Watch the video below to see how.
The same principle can be applied to any resistance training movement if your goal is to improve strength. Another helpful way to use SAID is to gauge the difficulty of the exercise using the RPE (Rating of Perceived Exertion) scale. RPE is a subjective effort scale graded from 1 to 10, with 1 being super easy and 10 being maximal effort. Let’s say you complete a set of elevated push-ups, and your effort on the RPE scale is a 2. If your goal is to get stronger, that is way too easy, and you will need to make your elevated push-ups harder by lowering them closer to the ground. On the other hand, if you can’t even complete one repetition without breaking form, you would need to raise your position to make the movement easier. A good range to aim for using RPE is 7 or 8. This indicates a challenging yet achievable effort. Once your RPE drops to a 6 or below, consider adding more resistance to make the exercise more difficult.
All things are difficult before they are easy, this applies to exercise just as much as any other area of your life. Whatever your goal is in the gym, using the SAID principle is a sure fire method to make those goals a reality.