Chapter 5 - Principles and Guidelines

(excerpt)

Understanding The Diet And Exercise Game With The Building Blocks Of Common Sense Principles And The Universal Laws That Regulate Your Body

We are now going to move into The Principles and “Know How” of the tools that we have available to us in our HWP™.

The six basic principles that we are going to cover:

1) Recover and Rebuild
2) Workload 
3) Progressive Overload, “Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back”
4) S.A.I.D
5) Shuffle
6) Sun Burn or Individual Response

All six of these basic principles can be used to guide you in your program development in all areas of your portfolio. We will also cover two additional principles:

7) Environment
8) 80/20 rule.

How will you be rewarded by taking the time to learn these principles and guidelines? Armed with the right questions to ask, an understanding of these principles, and a few directed goals, you will be able to get more done in a timelier and more efficient manner than you ever thought possible. You will be able to put together a game plan that meets your goals and lifestyle and have the know-how to be able to make adjustments as your goals and lifestyle change.

1)Recover and Rebuild (R & R):

When you exercise, you are placing a demand on your body above what it views as normal. You are saying to your body, “Hey, I want to do this, and I want to be able to do it better than I can right now.” You are giving your body a snapshot of what you want it to be able to do and your body, being the masterful engineer that it is, takes that snapshot and puts together a blueprint of what it is you want and begins to build it during its R & R time.

As is illustrated with the R & R graphs on the next two pages, after you put a stress on your body its ability to do work drops below its normal level. It is during the R & R phase that your body does the actual building, repairing, and adaptation!! That is why getting enough R &R is just as important as getting enough added stress. How far below normal you go depends on how much of a stress you put on your body. The higher above normal the stress is, the further the drop below normal the R & R will be. A “building cycle” gives the body enough of a stress to make it want to build a new and better body, and then gives it enough time to recover and rebuild to normal levels and beyond.

A “cycle of doom and gloom” gives an amount of exercise stress, that over the course of time does not give the body enough time for R & R. The gap needed for R & R grows and grows and sets up a “New Year’s Resolution” burnout and failure. All this can be avoided by understanding and applying the next two principles, Workload and Progressive Overload.