What to expect this week:

Let’s get a little philosophical. No(thing) exists. There are no things, just processes. Galaxies are comprised of moving solar systems, which are made of planets, which are in a constant state of flux. One special planet is composed of living beings, which are comprised of countless cells and atoms. Even those cells and atoms that make up your body today are not the same ones as when you were born. Your physical body is ephemeral, and while it exists, it is constantly changing.

Importantly, you must understand that you have a degree of control over the direction of that change. If you remain passive and allow modern indulgences to plague you, it will result in an unhealthy bodily form. But, if you make the proactive effort to reject those indulgences and apply the rigor of exercise science to your daily habits, you can make vast improvements to your body.

Here, I present one scientist’s (Andy Galpin’s) framework for the types of improvements one can make to their body via a multitude of exercise protocols. These protocols are extensive but not exhaustive. To gain an even better understanding of what I discuss, I highly recommend you check out the playlist I’ve linked at the bottom.

Enjoy.

Housekeeping:

If a fitness regimen based around evolutionary principles sounds like something you’d be interested in, email me at [email protected] and I can help you formulate a plan!

Links to my e-Courses

• The Bare Minimum - FREE

• The Adaptive Scholar - $5

Exercise Science, Evolution, and Andy Galpin’s 9 Adaptations

Your body is a dynamic entity that you can alter through conscious effort. The key word there is “effort”. Changing the form or performance of your body is not a matter of wishing it into existence and anticipating the results to fall into your lap. It takes time and effort. Importantly, it takes stress - hormetic stress, which is when low doses of acute stress result in beneficial and adaptive responses.

A typical example of this in exercise science is muscle growth. Lifting weights applies resistance to a particular muscle, causing a healthy breakdown and repair of muscle fibers. As the tiny muscle tears heal, they grow bigger and stronger causing hypertrophy. This is only one example. There are plenty of ways you can apply pressure to your body with the intent for it to respond with a specific adaptive response. 

Andy Galpin, Professor and Scientist of Human Performance, categorizes these responses into 9 adaptations. In this article, I'll be exploring what these adaptations are and how they are responses to the methods of exercise science.

But first, let's frame this from the perspective of evolution, as we do with everything at Evolve.2.

Exercise, Evolution, and Adaptation 

We can look at the body’s ability to change in response to exercise from two evolutionary perspectives: by analogy and as an adaptation.

First, the human body adapting to change is analogous to change that occurs at the level of species. At its core, hormesis mirrors the selective pressures that drive evolution. Just as a species must confront and adapt to various environmental challenges to survive and thrive, hormesis posits that organisms respond favorably to moderate stressors, thereby enhancing their overall fitness. 

In the context of exercise, the repetitive stress placed on muscles, the cardiovascular system, and other physiological systems mirrors the dynamic interplay between organisms and their environment. Over time, these adaptive responses contribute to improved performance and resilience, akin to the gradual evolution of species in response to environmental pressures.

Second, it is evolutionarily adaptive to have a body that is malleable. From a more literal standpoint, the human body's capacity for hormesis reflects its evolutionary heritage of adaptability. Across millennia, our ancestors encountered fluctuating environmental conditions, necessitating the ability to adjust and thrive in diverse landscapes.

This evolutionary legacy is ingrained in our physiology, manifesting as the body's remarkable malleability and responsiveness to stimuli. Through exercise, we tap into this ancient resilience, stimulating physiological processes that optimize performance for specific outcomes. Muscle fibers grow denser, cardiovascular capacity expands, and metabolic efficiency improves - all testament to the body's adaptive prowess honed through millions of years of evolution.

What are these 9 Adaptations?

I was initially introduced to Andy Galpin’s ideas via his appearances on Andrew Huberman’s podcast. Here, and on plenty of other podcasts, he argues that there are 9 physiological adaptations that can be induced by exercise (or by the hormetic effect that exercise has on these physiological systems). These include:

1. Skill

2. Speed

3. Power

4. Strength

5. Hypertrophy

6. Muscle Endurance

7. Anaerobic Capacity

8. Aerobic Capacity

9. Long Duration Endurance

Improvements in any one of these can be induced via exercise, permitting the proper protocols to be followed. Those protocols include manipulating the following variables:

• Exercise choice

• Intensity (effort as a percentage of your one rep max or max heart rate)

• Volume (sets and rep ranges)

• Rest intervals

• Progressive overload

How you choose to modify and implement each of these variables will determine which of the 9 adaptations will be targeted. Here are the key takeaways regarding how these variables are important to each adaptation.

For skill, exercise choice is the most important, because it directly applies to the movement quality desired. 

After that, adaptations 2-9 can be induced with a special focus on the three variables of intensity, volume, and rest intervals. Roughly speaking starting at speed and working our way down to long-duration endurance, intensity is reduced, volume is increased, and rest periods become shorter.

For example, building speed, power, and strength will depend on applying greater intensities, such as lifting 90% of your one rep max or an explosive vertical jump with 100% effort. In doing so, volume will decrease. If you can do 5, 6, or 10 reps with a weight, it’s not actually 90% of your one rep max - by definition. Additionally, your nervous system will require longer rest periods due to that intensity. 

The general protocols to improve these adaptations follow the 3-5 rule:

• 3-5 reps

• 3-5 sets

• 3-5 minutes of rest between sets

• 3-5 days per week

As we move down the hierarchy of adaptations, hypertrophy (building muscle) and muscle endurance will require less intensity, less rest between sets, and more volume. 

Protocols for hypertrophy:

• 5-30 reps

• 10-20 sets (per muscle group, per week)

• 30-60 seconds of rest between sets

Protocols for muscle endurance:

• Workout choice - precise to muscle and movement

• 15-50 reps (very close to failure, adding a rep or two per week) 

• 10+ sets per week

Once we are past muscle endurance, we begin to see adaptations to full body systems. Primarily, the cardiovascular system. This means that we are reaching movements, intensities, and repetition ranges that recruit large amounts of effort from the lungs and heart in particular. These will include things like running, swimming, rowing, biking, etc. What these adaptations are might be slightly less obvious, so here are some definitions, along with protocols to trigger them.

Anaerobic capacity is essentially the maximum amount of work you can do for a short period of time - from a few seconds to a few minutes. Sprinting would be a great example of this.

Protocols to build anaerobic capacity:

• 30 seconds of (close to) 100% effort

• 30 seconds of rest

• 4 sets

• 1-2 days per week

Obviously, maximum intensities like this can’t be sustained for long periods, hence the short time intervals. When we extend the time intervals and lower the intensity, we start to fall into aerobic capacity - roughly how hard you can work for 5-15 minutes. 

Protocols to build aerobic capacity:

• 5-15 minutes of effort

• 1 set

• 1-2 days per week

Because it is very difficult to engage in exercises that build these previous two adaptations, they should be supported by incorporating long-duration endurance, rather than simply adding more days of anaerobic and aerobic training. We can define long-duration endurance as the ability to sustain submaximal effort with no breaks. It’s also known as steady-state training. 

Protocols to build long-duration endurance:

• 15+ minutes of continuous work, maintaining a consistent pace

• Try to do this while nasal breathing only

Given all of these adaptations and protocols, the one common denominator to improve them all is progressive overload. This is the idea that as we progress, week by week, some variable of your exercise must increase in difficulty. Once you acclimate to your current level of hormetic stress, your progress will slow down or plateau. 

In other words, you must add reps, weight, time, or distance for your desired adaptation to continue improving. 

Conclusion

Exercise is a cultural adaptation to the modern world. It induces physiological adaptations that increase our health and fitness, relative to the sedentary habits of modernity. Exercise science is the study of how specific protocols trigger specific adaptations by applying hormetic stress to their respective systems. 

Andy Galpin’s list includes the most fundamental of these adaptations, and he provides the basic protocols necessary to improve them. 

I hope this information is both useful and motivational. I hope it’s useful in that you experiment with and apply these protocols to achieve your desired goals independently. I hope it’s motivational in that you realize you are not stuck in your current body. Rather, your body is an ever-changing system that you have control over. Change it how you’d like.

References:

Below is Episode 1 of a 6-episode playlist, from which I derived most of the information in this week’s article.

Fit Fuel Song Suggestion

The Fit Fuel song suggestions are hand-picked by yours truly to elicit the motivation (and possibly aggression) needed to initiate or persist through a grueling workout. They consist of heavy, brutal guitar riffs and gruesomely guttural vocals. Additionally, I timestamp what I believe to be the best riff of the song - one that will kick your nervous system into overdrive when approaching a personal record (PR).