BUILDING RESILIENCE & FEELING THE BENEFITS
FITNESS
Fitness training simply combines purposeful movement and progressive stress to bring about desired adaptation over time
Adaptation is the process of change by which an organism or species becomes better suited to its environment
We are always adapting to our environment, for better or for worse. Our body is always looking to make things easier for itself and it does this using the feedback we give it when living our life.
The physical world we expose our body to whilst living, creates the environment in which our body will become better suited for. If we live in a physically challenging world, our body will make the necessary upgrades to better live in that world. It does this by changing our body, building up its strength, endurance, balance and other bodily systems, all of which can increase our physical resilience to a challenging world. Similarly, if we do not live in a physically challenging world, we have no need to make any upgrades and our body’s physical resilience deteriorates over time potentially having a negative impact on our health.
Fitness training simply takes advantage of this natural mechanism by purposefully challenging our body’s movements in a safe, controlled and meaningful way in order to maintain or increase our body’s physical resilience.
Increasing resilience, improves our capacity to withstand, recover from and adapt to challenges
In order to build physical resilience from training our body needs two things : movement and stress. This is all a fitness training regime is, purposeful movement which stresses/challenges our body in some form causing it to adapt. Typically these involve movements such as running, cycling, jumping, lifting things, yoga, pilates or playing sports, all of which can be challenged leading to physical change and adaptation. Fitness training allows us to control and selectively choose the environment our body will change and adapt to, increasing desired physical resilience. An effective fitness regime should build us up to be strong and healthy, none of which requires blood, sweat and tears.
Ahead, I touch upon the minimalist model of fitness I use. This involves getting clients to move with purpose, utilising weight training as their main form of challenge which can help build any body to be a strong, healthy, resilient body.
