The Dose Matters!

The following is from the training course Andy created and taught in Arizona at the Z-Health Headquarters in April 2014:

 

This very simple illustration  holds the key formula to virtually guaranteeing you get results in every workout, training session, or rehab session you conduct- whether it is your own personal session or you are with a client.  The formula itself is simple.  Its application, to date, has not been so simple.  In fact, in a recent study, it was found that 85% of Americans who begin an exercise program quit within 6 weeks due to excessive pain or injury.  In short, those exercise programs were along the yellow and red continuum on our graph, and only 15% are actually in the green!  Dr. Eric Cobb, creator of Z-Health Performance Solutions, sums it up best with this quote: "Exercise is not so simple that you cannot screw it up."   But, we've been operating under that premise for decades.  

 In the graph above, you see that as the "amount of stressor" (in our case, training regiment) increases, there is also a corresponding increase in the benefit from adapting to that stressor...up to a certain point!  Once the amount of stressor becomes too great, adaptation (or gains) stop and even begins to degrade all the way to the point of possible harm if it's not stopped or corrected- in the fitness industry, this is referred to as "overtraining."  

You can also see that there's a "sweet spot".  That's the zone that, with just the right amount of stressors, we can get the maximum amount of benefit without any "diminishing returns."  This is where you want to be in every workout, training, or rehab session.

The question is, how do we really know if we are in that "sweet spot"?  How do we know, for sure, if we have done enough or too much?  Until recently, that was a really tough question to answer.  We either had to trust how we feel, trust that the coach that is prescribing the exercises knows how to tell if we are in that spot, or the workout that was written for anyone to try did hit the mark and the majority of the people who do it fall in that zone.  Unfortunately, according to the stat above, it only happens about 15% of the time- that's if everyone actually quits within 6 weeks and doesn't stick it out and put up with it longer which is also a very common occurrence- for some reason many of us tend to view diet and exercise as a punishment.  Furthermore, traditionally, that question cannot be answered until 4-6 weeks or longer down the road.   Sometimes that is too late.  There's nothing like going through a 4 week program, and even though you may have progressed some in that program, upon re-assessment you find that you have not made any progress towards your goal, or worse, you have gone backwards.  

The answer to this question is what we've been after for the past 4 years, and creating a system to do just that. You'll notice that in your training sessions or classes we will ask you to continually re-assess yourself.  This is why!  Based on how your body is responding to each exercise, we can know quite accurately what to do and how much of it we should do to get the most benefit from each training session without pushing your body too hard or too far and causing set backs.

What does this mean?  

Fitness Evolved members are in the Top 15% of exercisers in the United States!