Here’s post #1 on my woo woo voodoo stuff. This is one of the concepts I got from StrongFit. A lot of their stuff complements and/or fills in the gaps of my PT school education and contributes to my knowledge of “movement principles.”
It is often talked about how exercise helps mental health. This kind of explains the how. The first thing to realize is the body doesn’t really differentiate between mental and physical stress. The response your body goes through is the same regardless. This is neither good or bad, it just is.
The Phylogenic Heirarchy Wheel
Image you’re a deer in the forest, eating some grass. Nice and relaxed, in the FLOW state. You’re still in the woods, so you aren’t totally oblivous to your surrounds, but you’re more relaxed than not.
You hear some rustling in the bushes, so your HR speeds up a little. Then all of a sudden a tiger jumps out and starts attacking you. You are now in a FIGHT.
You’re a deer and he’s a tiger, so the fight won’t last long and you’ll need to run away. We will call that FLIGHT.
The tiger is bigger/stronger/faster, so he will catch you and try to EAT you. The brain prepares for your impending death and pumps a bunch of pain killers into your body to minimize the effects, and you FREEZE.
You don’t want to die, so you are still looking for a chance to run away. You find your opening and go back to FLIGHT, perhaps you throw a couple of left and right hooves to FIGHT your way out of it.
Eventually you get to a hiding spot and have a chance to calm down, eventually getting back to FLOW and it’s like it never happened.
That journey through FLOW, FIGHT, FREEZE, and FLIGHT (and back) was the Phylogenic Heirarchy. The wheel represents the fact you can only go around the wheel, either direction.
So Flow —> Fight —> Flight—> Freeze —> Flight —> Fight —> Flow
One way in, one way out. You can’t go from Freeze to Flow. That’s why you feel like shit when you wake up after getting black out drunk.
Deer Tiger was a primitive example. A more modern example would be you at work.
You’re working on your side biz, in the FLOW state, then your boss comes around and mentions the TPS reports again. It throws you off your groove and increases your workload. Now you’re in a FIGHT with paperwork.
You’re okay for a bit, but you start making mistakes. FLIGHT is kicking in. Instead of taking a break you try to power through, and now nothing even makes sense anymore. You FREEZE. You have to take a break so you can refocus.
Mental vs Physical
So 2 examples, 1 physical, the other mental, but your body has just the one system to handle stressors. Both stressors (tiger, paperwork) got to a point they were overwhelming. The body doesn’t care the differences between the stressors, it just does what it knows how to do.
How Do We Get Hurt?
For life, exercise, whatever, ideally you want to stay in FLOW/FIGHT, and your training should promote some type of balance bewteen the two. The key to this is winning.
It’s not a 1:1 ratio either, so you don’t do 30 minutes of easy work to 30 minutes of high intensity work. It’s probably like 80% easy/20% hard, maybe even 90/10.
For whatever reason people aren’t even doing 50/50 easy/hard, its more like 80/20 hard/easy. That has to do with the commodization of fitness. The likes Peleton, CrossFit, F45, Orange Theory, etc, all compete on price. They have to promise ass kicking workouts to set themselves apart.
Summary
Injuries occur when balance is out of wack. To get uninjured, you have to restore balance, which usually involves lots of easy work. For most people, easy work is mentally challenging.
Future installments will be on how to do the easy work, and how to do the hard work in a way that limits injury.