The science behind strength and conditioning may be boring, but understanding why your training is or isn’t effective only serves to improve your fitness and make your training more rewarding and enjoyable.
The SAID principle is a extremely fundamental concept in strength and conditioning and appreciating its importance is paramount to long term success in any training plan.
S.A.I.D. = Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand
What does this mean?
Simply, the body adapts in a very specific way as a result of the training we perform.
Ex. Bicep curls result in increased bicep muscle size, strength, or endurance.
Ex. A long duration, low intensity jog will result in improved aerobic endurance
Just as importantly, we need to understand the ways that the body will not adapt to our training.
Ex. Bicep curls will not result in improved leg strength
Ex. A long duration, low intensity jog will not result in improved sprinting performance
A training session can be thought of as a bout of stress that sends a specific signal to the body. Accordingly, the body will receive that signal and hopefully respond by adapting in a way that will better prepare it to handle similar stress in the future.
Effective training sends the right signals to the body and results in the desired adaptation. Sending the wrong signals, or even worse, no meaningful signals to the body, result in no positive adaptation and can mean that your training session only served to stress and fatigue the body.
While there may be some overlap in the way you train for certain goals, every outcome has its own best path to reaching it. Strength, muscle size, power, speed, endurance, etc etc. all need to be trained for intentionally and training for one will not readily result in improvement in another.
I do understand that there is more to training than growing big biceps, but its an easy example.
You could perform bicep curls to failure everyday of the week and not get bigger arms if you aren’t asking the body to adapt in that specific way. If you’re using relatively light weights and performing a lot of reps, you are far more likely to respond by improving the muscular endurance of the biceps and not with muscle growth. You’re doing the right exercise, and the body is adapting beautifully to the signal you are sending, its just not the signal and adaptation you want. You’re so close, but still so far. Ultimately, you’re not getting what you want because you are training for an entirely different attribute.
That’s why this idea is so important, not all exercise is created equal when it comes to specific goals. You have to train for exactly the characteristic that you want by deliberately exercising in a certain way.
Why does this matter to you?
If you are going to spend precious time training, you want it to be effective. No one works out consistently with the hope of remaining the same, we are seeking positive outcomes, positive adaptations.
If you want bigger muscles, you need to train in a way that best produces that specific adaptation.
If you want increased muscular endurance, you need to train in a way that best produces that specific adaptation
If you want improved aerobic capacity.. yeah you got it.
Whatever attribute you are hoping to improve, it is critical that you train in a way that will best lead to that outcome. This seems so obvious, yet so often people train in a way that does not most effectively chase the adaptation they are seeking or truthfully, any adaptation at all.
Don’t waste your efforts doing something that will NEVER result in the outcome you want, put your energy in the right place and make progress.
Best: specific training leads to specific desired outcomes
Worse: general, ambiguous training leads to unproductive stress on the body
Common examples of misunderstanding the SAID principle
Hunting for the legendary six pack – individuals seeking well defined, visible abdominal muscle often train by performing many reps at a relatively low intensity. Ex. Doing 100 crunches at the end of every workout.
And while this training may result in a small improvement in muscle size and definition, the primary attribute that is being trained is abdominal muscular endurance ( the ability to perform a lot of work).
Instead, they would be far better served by training for size and improved definition via hypertrophy training – moderate intensity and moderate volume. Ex. 3-5 sets of 8-12 reps instead of 1 set of 100 reps.
In either case, its easy to think “that person is working their core hard and will probably get results,” not knowing that the individual who is best funneling their efforts towards the desired adaptation is being far more productive.
Running – running is synonymous with getting and being in good shape. It is often one of the first things someone does as they decide its time to get off the couch and get into ‘shape.’ Yet, adaptation from running is very often misunderstood.
There is a long held belief that in order to get the most from our workouts we have to push ourselves and work hard. The harder we work, the fitter we will get.. but it doesn’t really work that way.
Again, we are seeking adaptation. That is always the goal. When it comes to aerobic training, the body adapts best to low intensity efforts, and extremely high intensity efforts, and not so much in between.
Slow aerobic efforts can be very boring and very intense efforts are, well, very hard. Consequently, people often train in between, an intensity of aerobic training that is often referred to as the ‘grey zone,’ or ‘no mans land.’ Without knowing, you can train with rather high intensity in this grey zone and while you’re accumulating a lot of fatigue and stress on the body, the training isn’t leading to very much adaptation, – you’re working hard, but not making progress. You’re logging hard miles and you’re just not getting any faster. Its not because your body using capable, you’re just not sending the signals it needs in order to adapt.
You just have to ask nicely
The body will adapt if we ask it to. If you’ve been training hard and aren’t making progress, I’m willing to bet that its simply because you aren’t asking it in the best way. If you don’t know the best way, educate yourself or find a coach. Wasting time, throwing enormous volumes of misguided exercise and stress at your body is not the answer. Set clear goals, take the best path, and get results.
