part0015

The third strategy to unlocking your fitness potential is to push until you feel tired, and then push a little more. In the field of exercise science, this is the principle of overload. It states that a greater than normal stress on the body is required for training adaptation to take place. 26 In plain language, this means you must challenge your body to go beyond what is familiar and comfortable for improvements to take place.

While exercising, you naturally want to stop and rest or catch your breath when you start feeling tired. Your body doesn’t like to do more work than it has to, and it will let you know by making you feel sore, exhausted, and consumed with the desire to quit. But if you give in to your body’s demands too early and stop exercising, you won’t make much progress because you’re not giving your body the increased stress it needs to change.

When you continue to exercise beyond the point where you would normally quit, you signal to your body that the demands you’re placing on it are the new normal. As a result, your body will very quickly change to meet these demands; this change translates directly into rapid increases in strength and endurance. Now you may be thinking that six minutes is too short of a time to push yourself past the point where you would normally quit. I assure you, it’s not. Remember, our goal here is to work harder, not longer. In other words, we improve our body by increasing the intensity of exercise, not the time. For example, a person can walk a mile in 30 minutes, or they can attempt to run the same distance in 6 minutes. Although the distance is the same, the 6-minute mile pace is more intense and will yield significantly more improvements in the body than the 30-minute mile pace. At the 6-minute mile pace, most people, not just older adults, would tire and quit in less than 3 minutes. Even so, those 3 minutes of intense activity will create more improvements in endurance than walking the entire mile in 30 minutes. Let me be clear. Nowhere in this book am I going to ask you to go out and run a mile, but I hope this example clarifies that by increasing the intensity of exercise, 6 minutes is plenty of time to create massive improvements in strength and function.

To push yourself, then push a little more, your goal of the first 80 percent of the workout is just to get you to the point of fatigue. Exercise during this part of the workout doesn’t change your body much because you’re not yet pushing your limits. Your body can handle this level of exercise quite comfortably and so does not need to change to accommodate it.

The goal of the remaining 20 percent of the workout—when you’ve reached your perceived limit of fatigue—is to make dramatic improvements. In this critical period near the end of your workout, when you’re feeling sore, exhausted, and wanting to quit, don’t. Instead, push for a few more seconds or a few more repetitions (a repetition is the number of times you perform a particular movement in your workout). In other words, you push until you feel tired—and then push a little more.

This is how you provide the greater than normal stress your body requires for training adaptations to take place. This is how you challenge your body to go beyond what is familiar and comfortable and make improvements.

You may have noticed I used the phrase “perceived limit of fatigue.” Your mind will tell you to stop well before your body has reached its actual limit of fatigue because the mind doesn’t like unfamiliar or uncomfortable situations. Not only is it normal to feel sore, exhausted, and consumed with the desire to quit during exercise, it’s actually desirable. See it as a sign that you’re doing something right.