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Habituating Hardcore
You walk into a dark room and can't see. After a minute, you can see just fine.
You notice the sound of a ceiling fan when you first turn it on, but soon you can't hear it anymore. You only notice the sound when it's turned off.
You notice the odor of the garbage can, but if you stay in the room a while you'll no longer notice it.
If you never wear a watch and then you start wearing one, you'll feel it on your arm and be aware of its presence. But after a while, you'll stop feeling it and even forget you have it on.
These are examples of something called habituation. Expose an animal, including a human animal, to a repeated stimulus and soon it will no longer respond to that stimulus. Habituation can be a mental thing or involve neural adaptation in sensory nerves.
Cool, geeky stuff, huh? Now let's apply habituation to training and diet.
Do Too Much, Sometimes
Lift weights when you never have before and the new stimulation will cause a response: you'll get stronger and build muscle. But if you keep exposing your body to the exact same stimulus -- the same training program, the same weights, etc. -- then the response will diminish as you habituate.
Not good. Time to adopt a new plan, add weight, or switch up sets, reps, splits, tempos, or exercise choice. New stimulus, new response. That's a good thing.
How else can we manipulate the habituation phenomenon to our advantage? Every once in a while, do something very hard. Do something that's "a little too much." Push it a bit too far. In other words, habituate hardcore. Reset the bar. Force new physiological and even psychological responses.
Push a Prowler, do 10 sets of sprints, do a strip set of leg presses, play a game of Metabolic Fetch. In other words, shock the system. Keep the new stimuli coming. Teach your body that what it thought was hardcore wasn't hardcore at all. This will help you dodge adaptation, which is spelled S T A G N A T I O N in the body-transformation world.
Double-Edge Diet
Dietary habituation can also be a double-edged sword. Eat something that's toxic to your body (a new stimulus) and you'll feel bad or get sick (response), but keep doing it and your body may get used to it... you'll no longer respond in a healthy manner.
I believe that people habituate when it comes to junk foods, fast foods, and packaged foods. Those foods still do plenty of damage to our bodies, but we no longer feel sick from eating them. Our natural response is blunted with repeat exposure. In fact, we may feel temporarily sick if we don't eat them. (Fast food and heroin have a lot in common in that regard.)
But habituation can also have a positive effect. Many TNATION programs -- The V-Diet, the Pulse Fast, the Pulse Feast -- "shock" the body with new stimuli: protein shakes instead of lunch at Wendy's, metabolic hits of MAG-10 instead of breakfast and lunch, large anabolic meals after a day of "priming."
Bad habits (eating mindlessly, stress eating, food addictions) are replaced by physique-supportive habits (mindful eating, increased body awareness, re-sensitization of instinct, food rehab).
The Lesson Here?
Make hardcore a habit. Take control of habituation and you'll take control of your body, telling it exactly what you want it to do: build muscle, lose fat, perform optimally.
The tools are here. All you have to do is pick them up and go to work. -- Chris
PS: Rants (and more) in 140 characters or less. Follow me on Twitter.
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