Priming and Adapting
Words and language frame how you view the world. Unfortunately for endurance athletes, the terms training and recovery have obscured the purpose of each activity, and guided athletes to make poor choices.
Training, by definition, is the act of making one’s self fit. Recovery is defined as the process of overcoming a shortcoming of deficiency. Sadly, that’s not what is happening during the two step process of making yourself fit. Training makes you slow and tired. Recovery makes you strong. Training does not make you fit. Training makes you tired and weak.
Training makes you weak. Recovery makes you strong.
They why train?
If you are not fit, then shouldn’t more training make you fit? This train of thought leads to a destination where you are overtrained, tired, and weak. And this subtle trap has led far too many endurance athletes down the wrong path in a search for fitness.
The first step in making yourself fit - the workout - merely prepares the body for the second step where improvement is actually made. The workout doesn’t make you fit, the workout simply sets up the conditions where you can become fit. So, it’s time to stop using the word training and adopt a word that better matches what is happening. Priming is the act of taking steps to encourage the growth or functioning of an object. That is precisely what is occurring during a workout. As you push yourself during a workout - as your heart rate increases, blood oxygen levels might dip slightly, fatty acid and carbohydrate usage increase, and you mitochondria are forced to make more energy - each change in your body sends out chemical signals instructing the body that it needs to make improvements.
Sufficient priming encourages growth.
But, the fitness improvements don’t happen during training. The improvements happen after training. Fitness improvements happen as you adapt - as your body makes you fit through modification - while you sit on your couch or lie in you bed following a workout. Adapting - not training - is what improves fitness.
Reframing the two step process of getting fit as priming and adapting leads to a vastly different perspective on where you should focus your time and effort. Do you want to spend more time doing a workout priming your body, or should you spend more time adapting your body? You need the workout to be long enough and sufficiently hard enough to prime the body to change, but once that minimum level has been reached, it’s clear that you want to maximize the time you spend adapting.
Maximize the time you spend adapting.