Recover, repair, adapt

LIFESTYLE

Our daily lifestyle directly impacts our body’s ability to recover, repair and adapt to training as well as maintain healthy function in life.

Our body repairs and remodels itself every single day. It does this at all times through various biological processes without us even knowing it is happening. I believe because we don’t need to read the manual before operating our biological machinery, we can sometimes take it for granted, forgetting the importance and necessity of our daily recovery practices. The lifestyle we live every day directly impacts both our fitness as well as our health because of its effects on our ability to recover, repair, re-build and remodel our body to counter the demands of our life.

The lifestyle we live everyday impacts our physical resilience because it improves our ability to recover from daily challenges. Fitness training is a purposeful stress, designed to break down our body a little bit with the intention of re-building it back up a little better than it was before. Our fitness training improves our bodies ability to withstand physical challenge. Without the necessary recovery from a healthy lifestyle, we won’t recover from, or adapt to, our training stress and therefore won’t improve from it either.

Recovery is our ability to return to a normal state following a stress/challenge

I like to simplify the quality of our repair and re-modelling down to five key lifestyle processes we all do every single day and will do forever. These lifestyle factors will be ever present in our life so it is worthwhile learning how we can manipulate them for our needs. Our body can only work with what we give it and the better these daily processes, the better our bodies ability to recover, repair, re-build and go again, in training as well as in life.

A fitness lifestyle is a healthy lifestyle.

It is important to remember that the benefits of a healthy lifestyle are only temporary. Because we have a constant turnover within our body, we only reap lifestyle rewards whilst we follow the process and is the reason why short term change only leads to short term improvements.

This is why consistency is everything and why any changes made must be sustainable, otherwise we are only borrowing the benefits, not buying them.