The Breakdown

As hard as we try, we do not know what’s happening inside the human body at all times. We perform an exercise, we see an increase in  performance over time, and then make large assumptions as to what is occurring.

The little black mystery box (seen in picture above) is our body. Changes at the cellular level will always occur first and eventually lead to morphological changes. Based on the training stimulus, we attempt to modify the internal state of the body.

Example:

Training stimuli may evoke a different adaptation for one person versus another: let’s take a look at pull-ups.

Two athletes perform pulls up for a month. Athlete A develops large arms while Athlete B develops a large back. At the end of the training cycle, both athletes equally increased their abilities to perform pull-ups.

What’s happening?

The body received a training stimulus and then figured out how to overcome it; the structures used to overcome it adapted. At the end of the day, different molecular/morphological changes led to the same functional outcome.

However, this is not always beneficial. In this situation, the sport both athletes were training for involved the back more than arms. Now Athlete B has a larger motor potential for the given sport compared to Athlete A. Athlete B’s adaptations were more functionally specific than A’s despite the fact performance outcomes were equal.

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