The valley of adaptation: Considerations when building resilient athletes

"It's not stress that kills us, it's our reaction to it.”

- Hans Selye

Introduction

It’s 0600 and your default radar alarm sounds. Snooze is not hit because you’re the living definition of discipline. After tapping “stop” you immediately open ABCXYZ to review your sleep performance and aggregate readiness score. Unfortunately, you’re in the yellow. ABCXYZ advises you to wear pillows as clothes today, nap twice, roll out, view sunlight, and cold tub.

We live in a world where personal health and wellness is being commercialized at a rapid rate. Because of this athletes and coaches have an unprecedented amount of access to biometrics. There are most definitely pros to this, but there are also cons. Disregarding the arguments surrounding the reliability and validity of these products, the use of them can cause individuals to become risk averse. This fuels the recovery epidemic we hear talked about. An epidemic where practitioners can find themselves having an “all adaptation, no stimulus” problem. A problem where athletes and/or practitioners are obsessed with recovery and forget stimulus precedes adaptation.

Resilience is a dynamic concept that is summarized as an individual’s ability to function while under stress. An athlete’s resilience from a physical perspective is a product of their endured training stress, how they’ve recovered from it, and the environment they function in.

Despite your loading strategy (Central vs. peripheral fatigue, max vs. dynamic effort, micro-dosing, etc…), in the pursuit of positive training adaptation stress management is essential. Not avoidance, management. Consider Davis’ Law, soft tissue does not mysteriously adapt. It adapts according to the imposed demands placed upon it.

Understanding “the valley of adaptation” is a necessity to methodically develop the physical qualities you desire. The purpose of this article is to discuss what the valley of adaptation is, where it is, and how practitioners can coach athletes to and through it.

What is the valley of adaptation? The physiology of stress

The Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal (HPA) Axis is our “central response system” that is intertwined with both our Endocrine and Central Nervous System. The catecholamine system is influenced by the HPA Axis (E.g., Adrenaline and Cortisol), which interplays with the Autonomic Nervous System (I.e., Sympathetic and Parasympathetic balance) while triggering other processes (1). As an example, among other confounding factors, this is where heart rate variability (HRV) can be used as a lens to view one’s recovery from stress.

Central and peripheral exercise induced stress is then layered onto this which includes systematic pathways that involve cellular signaling, genetics, and protein metabolism (2). Our ability to manipulate these pathways varies, but is not nearly significant. General speaking, the onset of fatigue is proportional to the endured stress.

From a non-specific lens, Hans Selye’s theory called General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) explains how the body reacts to stress. It has evolved and describes the stages of physiological change that happen in response to stressors: alarm, resistance, exhaustion or supercompensation (3).

In the first stage of GAS, your body is in a state of alarm as an acute response to stress. The second stage is called the resistance phase where adaptation occurs. The third stage can be the supercompensation phase or the exhaustion phase. Supercompensation relates to the potential positive adaptation made from your training stimuli. Exhaustion relates to the potential for negative adaptation via non-functional overreaching or overtraining (3).

Figure 1: General Adaptation Syndrome theorized by Selye in 1956 and published in the NSCA's Guide to Program Design, adapted from Fry et al., Stone et al., and Stone et al. (4).

Evidently stress comes in many forms and our body’s mechanisms may interpret much of it the same. This must be considered when in the daily training environment. Coaching happens in the grey, and it is important to be cognizant of other demands outside of “hanging and banging”.

Where is the valley of adaptation? Functional overreaching 101

A stimulus is an event that evokes a specific functional reaction in an organism. Stress is a response to a stimulus that causes a disruption to the homeostasis of an organism. Homeostasis can be thought of as our ideal setpoint. Allostasis is the body’s deviation from this where efficiencies are demonstrated. Leading to allostatic load, which is the wear and tear of our bodies remaining stable by being variable (5).

Hormesis can be defined as an adaptive response of cells and organisms to a moderate and usually intermittent stressor. The concept of hormesis is that a low dose stressor can yield net positives, where a high dose stressor can yield net negatives. Adequate stress management should allow for structured allostasis via hormetic stressors, which will then lead to an improved allostatic buffering capacity (6,7). In layman's terms meaning an increase in fitness.

Functional Overreaching is the key ingredient to hormesis, where a short-term decrement in performance will be seen as a residual effect of accumulated training stress. It can be further defined as an adequate accumulation of allostatic load. With appropriate exposure to exercise induced stress, a cascade of processes is triggered by this disruption that leads to net positive adaptation (I.e., allostatic load type I). Not to be confused with non-functional overreaching or overtraining (I.e., allostatic load type II), where the athlete is inappropriately exposed to high levels of chronic stress (5,6,7).

Load accumulated will be a load that is tolerated. This is demonstrated in the literature surrounding acute:chronic workload, where the acute workload is viewed as stress or fatigue and the chronic workload preparedness. With avoiding under and overtraining, gradually progressing training load is advantageous (8). Stress is a tool for improving performance. The valley of adaptation connects short-term performance decrement to long-term improvement.

Coaching to and through the valley of adaptation

Load monitoring is synonymous with stress management. A common misunderstanding is that monitoring is strictly responding to threats, however searching for opportunities is the forgotten piece. The monitoring piece is secondary to programming planned stress. Load management begins in the off-season where high loads need to be built up to. As they interact with the daily training environment, athletes should then be monitored with rollover data to allow the practitioner to make informed decisions based on individual trends within the context of the current periodization strategy.

Accumulated stress exposure will improve one’s ability to withstand stress. As a general reference using figure 2, general physical preparation should have an athlete progress from green/yellow to yellow/orange. During specific physical preparation a visit or three to the red is appropriate with majority of time being spent surfing yellow/orange waves.

Figure 2: Stress-Adaptation-Recovery Model inspired by the Yerkes-Dodson Inverted U Theory from 1908.

The principle of progressive overload is not novel. Whether refining figure 2 to use acute:chronic workload, TRIMP, and/or other subjective or objective metrics, the athlete needs an “easy button”. Reverse engineer from the demands that need to be met. Aim to achieve these workloads, and at times higher, to equip the athlete with the buffering capacity to handle it regularly. “That was easy.”- The athlete can now express their physical potential when tactical and technical elements are amplified.

As generalized in figure 2, once the stimulus box is checked various recovery modalities can then thrive. However, it’s also where fear can set in. Because of this many will limit subsequent stress exposure. For example, Player X has a below average HRV and/or a low readiness score. Player X is now told to ride the bike and stretch for today. We must now ask, how does this impact Player X long-term and the greater objective of the program? How will your reaction influence future adaptation? Is this a one off or a weekly occurrence?

A “yes” environment must be created to expose the athlete to consistent exposure to stress. One session missed may not be relevant, but limited exposure over time could be detrimental. Friction should be reduced around the behaviours and actions we want to be made, while creating friction around those we don’t. All to develop a sustainable workload that adequately hosts the physical qualities needed.

Consider the following when preparing to coach athletes to and through the valley of adaptation:

Don’t focus in on one metric: Create structural, objective, and subjective filters to be used when making informed decisions
Value internal drive not just external validation: Allow athletes input into their reactive programming scheme
Plan your visit to the valley: Stress + Rest = Adaptation, tradeoffs can be better than balance at times
Be mindful of language/communication around risk and failure: Encourage sensible risk-taking with supportive education
Utilize situational coaching tactics: Influence readiness acutely
Context is needed: At this point in the YTP is stress exposure or stress reduction valued?
Don’t Jump at shadows, listen to trends: Use standard deviation and Z-scores to respond to red and yellow flags appropriately
Individualize autoregulation strategies: Everyone perceives and copes with stress differently
Reverse engineer: Use historic data to determine the demands that need to be met and meet or exceed them in preparation
Don’t use recovery as a prophylactic: Stress should be the pace car for one’s reliance on recovery modalities

Figure 3: A summary of the aforementioned considerations integrated into an actionable framework.

Summary

Positive adaptation is what we all long for. Upregulation is needed before downregulation (and vice vera at times). You cannot be all stimulus, or all adaptation, there needs to be a blend that is fluid with the times. In order to obtain a training effect (change caused by stress), training is needed (applied stress) prior to recovery (adaptation). A periodization scheme should be built as a beacon that has the athlete travel to and through the valley of adaptation multiple times. While expecting these visits, tactics then can allow the ship to stay the course outside of a controlled environment. When it comes to developing the physical resilience of an athlete, it is possible to influence the stress, subsequent recovery, and the environment the individual functions in at large. We must create resilient athletes that are robust and able to be left at the mercy of their sport/tactical demands. Give it GAS!

Alexander J. Morgan, MSc., CSCS, RSCC, CEP

References

1. Mastorakos, G., Pavlatou, M., Diamanti-Kandarakis, E., and Chrousos, G. (2005). Exercise and the stress system. Hormones, 4 (2): 73-89.

2. Spiering, B., Kraemer, W., Anderson, J., Armstrong, L., Nindl, B., Volek, J., & Maresh, C. (2008) Resistance Exercise Biology. Sport Med, 38(7), 527-540.

3. Haff, G., & Triplett, N. (2016). Essentials of Strength and Conditioning (4th ed.). Human Kinetics.

4. Hoffman, J. (2012). NSCA’s Guide to Program Design. Human Kinetics.

5. Sterling, P., & Eyer, J. (1988) Allostasis: A new paradigm to explain arousal pathology. J.T. Handbook of Life stress, Cognition, and Health, 629-649.

6. Mattson, M. (2007). Hormesis defined. Aging Research Reviews, 7 (1): 1-7.

7. McEwen, B., & Wingfield, J. (2003). The concept of allostasis in biology and biomedicine. Hormones and Behaviour, 43 (1): 2-15.

8. Gabbett, T. (2016). The training-injury prevention paradox: Should athletes be training smarter and harder? Br J Sports Med, 50, 273- 280.

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