SAID Principle, Good Stress and Overload

There are two terms I want to discuss today, and they’re important for you to know about your training.

First is the SAID principle.
SAID = Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands.

Basically, whatever you ask your body to do, it’ll get better at.

We all think of stress as bad, but this is crucial to remember: exercise is intentionally causing stress on your body—so it will adapt to the imposed demands. The adaptations to the demand include strength, bone density, muscular endurance, tissue tolerance, and/or the nervous system.

You don’t want to cause too much, or too little stress.

Progressive overload will help you do that.

Progressive overload is a way to gradually increase the demands placed on the body over time so it adapts. See why these two things go together?

We can progress by adding more weight, of course. As I like to remind clients, I would have a 5000 pound deadlift (5x the world record), if I had been able to add 5 pounds to my deadlift every week for the past 20 years.

More weight isn’t the only way to progress though. There are many strategies to increase the demand. You can do more reps, 4 sets of 6 instead of 4×5. You can add another set or round, if you typically do 3, complete the 4th when you’re feeling good. You can complete the same amount of work in less time.

There are countless ways to increase the training demand—just a little bit— each and every training session.

You won’t be able to do this all the time. There will be workouts that you need to back off, and do a little less. That’s normal too.

Remember: exercise is stress, it’s good for your body. If you want something to improve you need to feed it the right stress, and a little bit more over time. It won’t feel like much, and shouldn’t, but before you know it, you’ll be much stronger.

—Justin Miner