40fit Radio

Last episode we posed the question: why do our workouts have to be so hard? The scientific answer to this question lies in the concept of the stress-recovery-adaptation cycle, or SRA cycle, derived from Hans Selye's work in the first half of the twentieth century. Simply put, in order to generate an adaptation, which we would recognize as an increase in one or more of the ten general physical skills (strength, endurance, mobility, etc), then you must progressively increase the amount of stress applied during the training program. That is the nature of training: it must become "harder" over time to continue driving progress.   In the 1950's Austro-Hungarian endocrinologist Hans Selye developed a theory known as the general adaptation syndrome which describes the effect of acute stress, generated by a stimulus (real or imagined), on an individual. Selye observed that the effect of stress on an organism was to disrupt homeostasis and, if continued unchecked, eventually kill the organism. If the stress was remove