Physical Exercise Hurts Your Body
By: Thais Hvid
Tags: Critical Thinking, Education, Training, Reflections, Movement

Therefore, Keep Doing It!

Theme: A departure from binary thinking.

Physical exercise stresses your body and eventually hurts it, regardless of how perfect your technique is. This is also why you get stronger from it.

Training depletes your energy reserves, breaks down proteins and eventually damages your muscles, tendons, cartilage and bone tissue. Do you not trust me? Jump up and down on the spot, with perfect technique, one million times, right now, without a break — you will feel the damage.

“Well yeah, of course, A MILLION jumps will hurt you!” some people might reply.

OK then, if not a million, where is that threshold of when jumping, or any other exercise, goes from stressor to damaging?

Is it 300?

Is it 800?

9000? 9001? 9002? 9279?

Is it safe to say that no one knows the exact number of repetitions, of when an exercise gets harmful?

Maybe we could even say that the exact number of repetitions of when an exercise gets harmful depends on the person doing the jumping? Might someone doing a full-time office job fatigue and get injured sooner than an athlete who jumps in their discipline?

What about on a day where you were tired? Or after just having had knee surgery?

Regardless of your physical state, I believe it is safe to say two things:

1. All actions stress your organism.

2. The threshold of when something moves from general stress to fatigue, and then to injury is hard to pin down. It is individual and it is contextual.

If what I wrote so far got your head spinning or got you upset, it is not new knowledge. Everyone who knows ‘The Law of Supercompensation’ knows that we break down our system to build it up. If you already know the graphic representation of the Law, you can skip this part.

Graph by Shmuel Csaba Otto Traian

The concept, coined by Nikolai N. Yakovlev in 1949 represents the stress or damage that physical exercise/input exerts on the system, the time of recovery/adaptation and then the supercompensation that occurs. Supercompensation refers to the phenomenon that your organism compensates for initial ‘weakness’. Weakness is here viewed as the lack of capacity, that allowed the initial physical input (ie. exercise or movement) to damage your organism. However, your organism does not compensate for said weakness by bringing you back to status quo but instead raises your capacity to withstand that specific, potential damage, so that you can better withstand it “next time”.

The Graph is an oversimplification in more than one sense:

1. The time of fatigue and time of recovery does not always look the same since it will depend on your workout and your initial state before the workout and during your recovery.

2. The time of deterioration and regeneration of different kinds of tissue will differ depending on the turnover rate of each kind of tissue and the properties of the different kinds of tissue.

Understanding and applying your knowledge

The important takeaway is this: damage is required for strengthening to happen.

While this is something that most people can nod their head in agreement to, if they are familiar with the principle, most people seem unable to apply it in their own teaching or in the planning of their own training.

“Don’t deadlift with a round back, you might get injured!”

“Don’t bounce at the bottom of your squat, it hurts your knee!”

“Track your knees over your toes, or else you will hurt the medial structures of your knee!”

Using the last one as an example: Well, Yes! You will, but that would make the medial structures of your knee stronger in time — if given the proper amount of rest. Exactly like how a squat with knees tracking over your toes will hurt your anterior and posterior structures/tissue of your knees and that will make those structures stronger in time, BECAUSE of the DAMAGE imposed upon them.

The medial structures of your knee do not adapt to stress under any different principles than your posterior/anterior structures. While bone, tendon and cartilage (in that order) might have a longer turnover rate than muscle, it still breaks down and builds up again while adapting to the stress imposed upon it.

So ask yourself this: Why is it that you advise against certain movements or exercises with the reason that they are dangerous or damaging — especially if you know that all forms of exercise are about micro-dosing damage to the organism?

Furthermore, I fully understand that it might be easier for you, the teacher, to tell your students that something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ rather than delve into the complexities of technique, neurology or physiology and elaborate upon the years and years of experience it took you to pick certain methodologies over others. Trust me, I do.

However, I urge you to consider the ramifications of your actions as your students, clients or patients pass on your personal experience and preference as dogma — building a world around it, rather than getting the tools to think for themselves.

Enjoy your conflicts

Thais Hvid