Your Body is a Survival Mechanism

Know how it works and you know how to train it!

How does your body really work?

To properly understand how to change your body you must first understand how the body works. Not how it functions from a mechanical or kinesiological point of view, but rather the true nature of it, based on your ancestry and chemistry. This is one of the first concepts I teach in seminars, personal training courses and all other forums relating to physical training because it bears on all elements of physiological response to resistance training and conditioning. Your body will execute its prime objective regardless of anything else. If you are aware of how your body really functions and how it interprets physical and mental inputs, you are well on your way to understanding how to effectively generate the responses you want and achieve efficient results. You will also own one of the biggest ‘secrets’ in the fitness/athletic/body shaping world:

First and foremost, your body is a survival mechanism for your brain and everything that’s in it. Essentially, your body will, without conscious effort or input, do whatever it takes (within the limits of its physical structure) to preserve your physical existence. When you become conscious of this very fundamental reality, all our physiological responses and reactions suddenly make a lot more sense. You gain an instantaneous edge in knowing the cause and effect relationship between the actions you take and your body’s automatic responses.

Your body and its subconscious functions have no awareness of what it is you consciously want to achieve. You can ‘fool’ it a bit sometimes, but for the most part, ‘you’ control your actions and ‘it’ controls your physiological re-actions. When you subject your body to various workloads designed to achieve a certain goal, it does not necessarily interpret those inputs the way you want it to or think it logically should. Rather, your body regards these stimuli only from a survival point of view and responds accordingly.

As an example, regarding nutrition, let’s assume that you have decided to reduce your body fat level by a few percent. Regardless of the reasons and motivations you have for this, that is your goal and you want to achieve it quickly. The typical approach to that scenario is to dramatically reduce your calorie intake, in this example let’s say you cut it in half. On the surface, this should have the result of placing you in an energy-deficit state and your body should logically turn to burning stored fat for energy, thus quickly reducing your body fat levels as this takes place. Theoretically at least, this is what you would like to happen. Nothing much else in your body should change and you would look transformed and feel great in a matter of weeks.

What really happens is quite a different story. Very shortly after you make this relatively drastic adjustment to your diet, your body recognizes the lack of available energy and nutrients and immediately assumes that you are in a situation where you do not have sufficient food available to consume. It interprets the situation as an emergency and a threat to your existence and responds accordingly. It does not recognize that in fact you have plenty of good food available and just want to drop some extra fat.

Adaptive survival response

The first response is that it will immediately begin to conserve energy by slowing your metabolism and slowing or shutting down any unnecessary metabolic functions that it can. It then also begins to very quickly eliminate any excess muscle mass (unless it thinks you really need it to survive), since muscle tissue, even at rest, uses more energy per pound than fat. If the calorie reduction is large enough and your activity levels remain constant, it will also start to burn some fat for energy out of necessity, but only as a last resort, with the ‘rationale’ that this situation may get even worse. Remember that stored body fat is simply a reserve energy tank for your body, designed to temporarily bridge gaps in available food intake. (Fat also has functions related to insulation and shock absorption, but those are not relevant here). For the sake of a natural scenario, you might have accidentally wandered into a dessert and your body does not know how bad things are going to get.

The result of all this is that you will initially (and probably quite quickly) lose some weight, but almost certainly much more of the loss will be muscle rather than fat. Within a short period of time your body will find a new balance of intake and expenditure and you will feel reasonable, although likely lethargic and less alert due to the energy-conservation measures now in place. The weight loss levels off and you will continue on. Typically, while you are happy that you have indeed lost weight and even some fat, your body is on high alert, still interpreting the situation as a threat. This is called an adaptive survival response.

Since results are now slow or non-existent, you decide that you need a further reduction in intake to keep things going. Let’s assume you again take the drastic route and cut your calories in half again. Once again, the entire processes repeats, but to a lesser degree, since there are only so many resources your body can cut and still keep you on your feet. Now your body, thinking that you are really in a dire situation and fearing for your survival, enters an emergency mode as it struggles to keep you functioning at the severely lowered caloric and nutrient intake levels. One key emergency measure is that it will now endeavour to store any extra calories you may take in at any time, since the fear is that this could still get worse. This means that if at an any time you eat something even a bit calorie dense (and usually this state comes with cravings that become increasingly hard to ignore), your body will immediately try to store any excess at all in the form of…you guessed it, fat. Your body does not store extra muscle for reserve energy. In fact, it views it as a liability unless absolutely required, since it consumes a lot of extra energy.

Eventually all weight loss and certainly all fat loss comes to a halt (at the latest when you have no more fat to burn) and you get no more results. You also become either so uncomfortable or truly dysfunctional and are forced to resume a higher caloric intake to feel better and/or resume your normal activities. Your body, ‘thinking’ that you have found your way out of the desert and that the current emergency is at least temporarily averted slowly returns your functions to normal. As added insurance, though, should this ever happen again, it will also strive to add a bountiful amount of new stored fat, yet another survival adaptation. This means that you will now have an easier time gaining fat, which was not exactly the result you were looking for.

All this should be a very familiar pattern to anyone exposed to individuals dieting or dieting drastically themselves but viewed from a very different perspective.

The important point is that your body did not understand your desire to lose fat. It merely responded to specific inputs designed to keep you alive. Happily, these responses are highly predictable when understood from a survival point of view.

Desirable adaptive responses — overcompensation

Fortunately, the other side of the coin is that your body also responds favourably and with equal efficiency to more positive inputs.

Case in point, when you subject it to a physical load or exertion beyond what it is used to in daily activities, it elicits just as strong of a response, but with a much more favourable outcome.

Let’s assume that you just decided to get in shape fast and thought that a good way to do that was to sprint as far and hard as you possibly can in one go. Again, you only have the intention of getting in better shape, but your body sees it a bit differently. You have just run 1500 metres flat out and are collapsed in a heap of exhaustion on a bench. Your body again goes into an emergency response. It interprets your run as an emergency. For example, that you have just been chased down by a tiger or lion and have just barely managed to get away by sprinting and exerting yourself way beyond your normal limits.

The huge effort you have just made incurs several unusual stresses and damage to the systems involved. Without getting too technical, you have expended all of the energy stored in your muscles as glycogen, you have depleted your ATP energy system, pushed your cardiovascular system way beyond normal limits, caused a huge build-up of lactic acid in the muscles of your legs and caused considerable cellular damage to all of the muscle fibres involved, not to mention considerable stress to your joints and ligaments.

Your body, convinced that you have just survived a life-and-death encounter by running away, immediately begins to repair the damage and replenish the affected systems. In fact, it will do so to the exclusion of nearly every other function you have. Your body will try to respond as fast as possible; since you could be subjected to another such episode again immediately (the natural logic being that you could still be in imminent danger). Moreover, since it thinks that the tiger, or whatever caused you to run so hard, might come back another time in the future and that this time you may have to run farther and faster to get away. Therefore, the body overcompensates by strengthening all of the systems and stressed parts involved. If all the ingredients are available, namely rest and enough nutrients, it will very quickly and efficiently restore you to a better condition than you were in before.

The result of this adaptive response is that you gain muscular mass in your legs, your energy systems improve in efficiency, and your cardiovascular efficiency improves. As a little added perk, this recovery process consumes considerable amounts of residual energy and temporarily elevates your metabolic rate. Assuming you have not taken in tremendous amounts of extra calories, this will result in a slight fat loss. That fat loss is further supported by your body’s desire to shed any extra unnecessary weight that might slow you down in the next similar situation and get you killed. The added muscle mass is retained, since you need it to generate more speed.

It should be clear at this point how all this relates to the endeavour of changing your body shape and composition. The trick is simply in finding the right balance of inputs to ‘fool’ your body into making the responses that will most efficiently achieve the changes you want.

The golden rules of generating desirable adaptive survival responses are these:

1. Training inputs need to be quite severe to force adaptations, provided they don’t induce injury and adequate recuperation is allowed.

2. Training inputs that trigger a strong survival response, including strong adrenal and hormonal responses, will cause the greatest overcompensating adaptive reaction, almost at the expense of all else. Such training usually must involve large muscle groups, compound movements and high intensity levels to be effective.

An interesting sidebar; relatively short-distance sprinting, say 100 to 300 metres at all-out effort, causes the largest release of growth hormone in people compared to any other single action that can be taken. The reason is simple; running is the single most common and natural survival action you would normally take in a situation when faced with overwhelming danger. The body invariably makes every possible effort to recover from such exertions quickly.

3. Dietary changes must be made gradually. Sudden major changes in dietary inputs are almost never beneficial. Gradual adjustments to caloric intake and content are the best approach.

4. Energy deficits designed to reduce fat are best achieved with elevations in overall activity volumes as opposed to just restrictions in caloric intake. Increases in your workout volume will contribute, as will any other increases in your overall energy expenditure.

Look to nature

In our drive to research, discover, invent and analyse, we sometimes tend to overlook things that are obvious and right in front of us. We conduct endless studies and compile mountains of research, only to conclude what could have readily been observed in the natural world around us, had we only looked.

Case in point, a number of years ago I had a brilliant personal trainer in his mid-thirties working for me who was just finishing his doctorate in Kinesiology. He was anxious to discuss with me the findings of a research study he had just concluded, which formed the basis for a thesis on the effects of stretching pre-exercise and/or post-exercise and the effects of this on performance and injury prevention. He was clearly disappointed with, and more than a bit baffled by, his findings that stretching either immediately before various types of performances, or immediately afterwards, had little or no measurable effect on performance, nor did it significantly affect the rate of injury one way or the other. In short, his study concluded that stretching at the described instances held no measurable benefits for the athlete at all. I thought about these findings a considerable amount. It occurred to me to compare the conditions of the study to how stretching occurs in the natural world.

Those creatures that can be observed stretching the most are those which tend to engage in short, violent bursts of activity during their normal routine. Good examples are predators, particularly cats, which are readily observed to stretch frequently and relatively thoroughly. Their typical routine involves resting most of the day, then scouting, stalking and hunting for a period late in the day, the successful conclusion of which is a remarkably violent burst of sprinting and maximum effort to bring down their prey. They then eat huge amounts before retiring to sleep. At no point during their activity do they stop to stretch, especially not just prior to or after the actual hunt.

What stands out is when they do stretch. It is never immediately prior to hunting, or immediately afterward. The pattern is a very consistent one; an extended period of low-level activity prowling, then short, maximum bursts of effort, followed by a huge meal, then an extended period of rest and recovery. Then and only then do they stretch, just before beginning the scouting and hunting cycle again, to restore full mobility.

Stretch…but when?

My conclusion was that the stretching process, obviously well-evolved in these animals, is timed and executed not before the hunt to enhance performance or to reduce injury during those bouts, but rather the next day before activity to restore full mobility and flexibility after recuperation has taken place. I further concluded that stretching after rest and recovery and just prior to warm-up and exercise yields the greatest benefits in performance, increased flexibility and injury prevention. This simple example opened my eyes to a new way of looking at cause and effect with many types of physical conditioning; that nature has already done the research for us.

What shapes us?

We need often only look to nature for not-so-subtle clues as to what patterns of training, rest and even diet yield what results in terms of physical development. By extension, we can also look to nature for not-so-subtle clues as to why we find certain physical characteristics attractive.

The perception of what is or is not attractive or impressive physical development is completely subjective. It has been demonstrated many times, though, that most animals are instinctively drawn to and admire certain physical attributes and characteristics regardless of species and humans are no exception. It is of no small importance that all creatures on the planet are drawn to mates, siblings and peers with strong and healthy physical characteristics. This instinct derives from the assumption that potential offspring will have the greatest genetic survival advantage possible. Like most of the living things on the planet, people are likewise drawn to a specific set of physical characteristics. These characteristics are the product of a combination of genetic inheritance and the exertion, intake and rest patterns followed during a lifetime.

Humans, by and large, can no longer be found on this planet in a ‘natural’ state of existence, unaffected by technology and modern supply chain. We simply are no longer readily observable in a hunter-gatherer state. It is important to keep in mind that our bodies, physiology and response mechanisms have not changed. Even our psychological responses are still remarkably unchanged by our dramatically altered societies, behaviour patterns and lifestyles. Basically, we have not really evolved much over the last number of centuries other than in a technological sense. The secret lies in understanding that the body still functions largely as a pure survival mechanism. Bear this in mind in all of your training endeavors and you will reap exponentially better results.