SAID is an acronym for what the human body does in response to anything.
When it’s explained it will hopefully make total sense and you’ll be left wondering why there needs to be an acronym for something that is hopefully so obvious that it barely needs explaining!
SAID stands for Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands – which for the non-science types out there translates as:
Your body gets used to the things that you ask it to do time and time again and then gets better at coping with them.
So, let’s illustrate it with some examples:
- If you never got out of bed and walked around then the muscles in your legs would shrink and become weaker as they would have no stimulation and your body would think that it didn’t need them any more.
- If you ran 5km every day, then for the first few weeks your body would probably react strongly to it and you might be sore every time you woke up, but over time your body would get used to it, burn less energy when running and, whilst you might not get faster or fitter, you’d just get used to it.
- If you ate all your normal food in a day and then developed a habit of eating a cake in the evening every day then your body would start to store the excess energy that you were putting into it as bodyfat because it’d be thinking that at some point that bodyfat is going to become a useful and valuable store of fuel for exercise.
- If you routinely eat way fewer calories than you are burning each day then your body will protect itself in a number of ways – it’ll downregulate some of its essential processes and lower your overall energy levels so you move around less as it tries to hang onto as much energy as it can
- If you always go to the gym and do exactly the same thing without ever seeking to do more reps, add more load, do the same amount of work in less time or change the stimulus in some other way then your body will just get good at doing those exact things and never make any progress
So, what does that mean in terms of what we do at SC FIT?
We vary the things that we ask our bodies to do so that they can never become super comfortable with doing the same thing day and day out. We don’t just do random things, but work with tried and tested principles to present slightly new stimuli to your body on a regular basis.
Why do we do this though?
Hopefully from the examples above, it becomes obvious as to why we embrace variety. By constantly changing things up we can:
- Stop your body getting stuck in a rut
- Burn huge numbers of calories both during and after a workout
- Keep your brain engaged with new challenges
- Provide a reason for your body to build and hang onto the muscle it has
- Make workouts fun and challenging
- Show you how much progress you’ve made