Stop Training For Soreness: Understanding General Adaptation Syndrome | Beginner Gym Tips
When it comes to our bodies, we all adapt to stressors in the same way.
One of the most basic concepts you learn about as a newbie personal trainer is GAS (General Adaptation Syndrome) and I’m going to share some of this knowledge so you can better understand what’s going on when you train.
THE PRE-STRESS STAGE
This is just the stage before you begin working out. There is nothing to adapt to with your workouts here because you’re not currently putting stress on your body.
If you want to apply this to current situations, imagine you stopped working out during quarantine and are looking to get back on track. You would then move into phase 2.
ALARM STAGE
This is the stage that inexperienced lifters or new lifters get confused about because this is their initial impression of what “fitness” is supposed to feel like.
This is the stage where your body is screaming, “WTF???” You feel more intense soreness here and usually DOMS (AKA soreness 2-3 days after a workout).
Many people associate this phase with “getting a good workout,” but actually, if you’re sore all of the time, there’s likely a problem.
In fact, many of you may be doing bodyweight workouts from home instead of the heavy weight from the gym and you’re still feeling sore. This does not necessarily correlate with progress. It just means that your body isn’t used to this style of training and/or you took a break.
Another perspective: if you run a marathon and your goal is to get stronger, you will be sore because your body isn’t used to long distance running, but that doesn’t mean its helping you get stronger. Make sense?
RESISTANCE STAGE
This is the stage where we begin making our progress. This is where our bodies leave the alarm stage and our training provides beneficial stress on our bodies; we’re better recovered and capable of adding more volume to our training.
Other signs of entering this stage are:
Increased performance
Increased energy
Improved confidence (mental benefits too, eh??)
Decreased soreness
If you continue throughout your training program with the right progressions for your body, you won’t experience the next phase, which is one we want to avoid.
EXHAUSTION PHASE
You may have heard me talk about overtraining before. This is the stage you enter if you push too hard and your body can no longer recover.
Let’s say you’re ready to go back to the gym right now with everything re-opening and you go “ALL OUT” and pick up some heavy weight, but you find that you crash and burn after two weeks of doing this (or just completely fail lifts).
This happens because your body requires gradual progressions. If you do too much too quickly, you will enter this stage (check out my posts on maximal recoverable volume).
This can lead to injury, illness, and extreme fatigue that feels like it is no longer corrected with sleep/nutrition.
You can also enter this stage by not having a proper recovery plan (nutrition, water intake, sleep, etc).
This is how we know our bodies to adapt to the stress we provide it via training. Its important to understand if you’re looking to make some serious progress in the gym. Once you know this, it may help you re-evaluate how you go about your training and mindset in the gym.
If you’re interested in coaching or personal training, you can talk with me about coaching here!
