Introduction
The function of our physiology revolves around learning. Learning involves paying attention whenever something relevant and unexpected is going on. Later when nothing critical is happening, we can put our attention reviewing/processing the event. The situation/scene finally becomes more clear so that the next time we can deal with the situation more easily and better. That is the rhythm of learning.
This whole process takes energy. Metabolism is the word we use when looking at how cells manage energy. All activity in the cells draws upon batteries within the cell. When the batteries are being drawn upon, the cell starts burning food, which enables the cell to continuously recharge those batteries. After the situation is dealt with, the cells now can now slow down and spend time recovering and strengthening those parts that were strained during the activity. The next time you should be able to deal with the same situation with less effort. Notice that the rhythm of metabolism is the same rhythm as the rhythm of learning.
During the phase we are paying attention, information is flowing in. Because this requires energy, our boy automatically increases the flow of sugar into the cells . What often happens is people get used to and prefer that phase of learning relative to the processing phase. What ends up happening is that the food builds up just like the information builds up and they system becomes congested.
Whenever food/information flows for too long without recovery, the body is able to divert the information/food. We call this process deconditioning. The body is now functioning at a diminished capacity. On the one hand it protects the cell, but on the other hand the cells becomes vulnerable to having to work too hard because they are weaker and the body is less able to bring it nutrition. That is a how disease usually develops.
Training opposes the normal disease process. The goal is, instead of flooding the cell with too much nutrition, you gently slow the rate of burnable fuel entering the cell relative to what the cell is actually eating. Notice that this is precisely the opposite of what causes the congestion. This can be done either by increasing the activity of the cell, or by reducing the density of carbs relative to oxygen to the cell. The end result is that the capacity of the cell/nutrition system increases.
The higher and lower intensities have distinct fuel systems. As you pay more attention to the environment, your body drives more sugar into the cells. As you pay less attention to your surroundings, your cells start to process some of the built up sugar by drawing oxygen in.
When there is no pressing concern, we normally can take our time and catch up on things/plan more long term. The fuel system conducive to that involves using oxygen, which completes the burning of the sugar. If you can spend a few minutes understanding the simplicity of how the cell operates with these two different fuel systems, it will be easy to understand the consequences of training properly or poorly.
Let’s start with your cells not doing much, then suddenly starting to do something. Because the cells were not doing much their energy burning furnace was not active, so when they suddenly start doing things they will quickly run our of battery charge. The only way for them to charge their batteries is by burning the sugar nearby. So the cell immediately starts to burn this sugar.
This cannot go on for very long because there is no was for the cell to get rid of the waste. So the waste starts to build up almost immediately in the form of acid. Luckily, the body has a way to absorb or buffer some of the acid in the blood with something like baking soda, and in a trick of chemistry the acid is converted to carbon dioxide which end up being exhaled. That is why, during times of excess acid production, our breathing must change. It is not primarily intended to get a lot of oxygen in at this point. The cell has no use for oxygen during this time. Instead, the body is breathing out the acid indirectly in the form of carbon dioxide. The type of breathing has a dramatic influence on your metabolism.
In summary transitioning to the more intense metabolism requires a psychological need, which drives sugar into the cells, and at the same time initiates a state of faster, chest breathing.
Transitioning from being intense to being less intense is more difficult for most people. Three things must happen simultaneously, and you will notice that they are the opposite of what happens why getting amped up. The first is obviously psychological. If you are worried or have to prepare dinner for a party arriving in five minutes, you will be amped up for good reason. The second is that you can’t have too much sugar in you. But the third is related to the first, and you have to slow your breathing down. This should happen automatically of course, but if you’ve been stressed or had a bad diet your whole life, your system learns to be more sensitive to carbon dioxide. So learning to slow your breathing down gradually, even though you will be just a little uncomfortable, will, paradoxically, increase the amount of oxygen that gets in your cells. This is already starting to get more detailed that I planned on here in blue, so I will likely put this in black if it is hard to understand.
A simple way to understand this transition is using the example of jogging. At first you might be a little short of breath, then after a while you get in a rhythm. What happens is that initially, the acid build up encourages slightly more oxygen to be absorbed by the active cells. That gets the oxygen burning going a little stronger. Soon afterwards, the cells start producing carbon dioxide, and it is the carbon dioxide that strongly encourages the red blood cells to release oxygen. Simply put, this can not happen during emergency type of breathing because that type of breathing expels way too much carbon dioxide. In this example of jogging, the breathing should be in the side of your ribs as opposed to the chest.
However this rhythm occurs in different time frames. It occurs on a daily basis, seasonal basis, etc. Most of the mistakes in training revolve around not understanding the more seasonal effects of changes you make.
Remember, the only two things we are playing around with at this point is your new exercise amount, and your food timing/volume. Suppose you start your exercise program at three days a week, which normally is about right. As you get in better shape, you decide to enhance your recovery by intermittent fasting one or two days a week, most likely on the days you don’t exercise. That would probably be about right for most people, but this is just for illustrative purposes.
The intermittent fasting might have pretty dramatic effect in terms of unwinding/relaxing your physiology. The best way to relate to this would be a time you went on vacation. You might notice that after a few days you feel more relaxed, but after a week you feel so relaxed it is hard to come back to work. Your body gradually unwinded over those days. Now imagine six months after retiring from a stressful job. The unwinding might be much more dramatic, which is why some many people either die or develop health issues during that time. You should never make that mistake.
Instead, you will go on vacation/skip dinner (both have a similar effect in terms of your metabolism) but only one time a week in the beginning. If will prevent a lot of problems. From there, you might add a day. For example as your training program changes, you will learn to have seasons. But in the beginning a smart way to start is with exercise first, then adding one or maybe two recovery days. The advantage if this is that it won’t shock the system but the disadvantage is that it is hard to really improve your fitness/recovery unless you think in terms of seasons. Just don’t do it when starting.
So, let’s say you are doing mild exercise three times a week, skipping dinner one day a week. It might be your biggest problem is that you are not strong enough, or you have some health problem you want to fix with your training.
Since you have some idea what your body can handle after a couple months, you can now have a season where you emphasize strength. You might shorten your workouts and make them gradually more intense. You are still having some recovery days, it is just that you are enhancing the strengthening. Or, for whatever reason, you might decide you want to lose weight and want to enhance your detox. You will just add one more day to the recovery days, and maybe reduce your exercise to two days from three. You might want to do an endurance build to train for a 5K, etc.. You might reduce your recovery days and weight lifting, and gradually increase the time of your training. The point is just that you are always pumping the system back and forth, and the greater amplitude of the pumping is the entire purpose of training at least in terms of metabolism, but if you go too high or two low all of the sudden it is a big mistake. On the other hand, if you just wake up and see where the wind blows, you are likely gradually destroying your system without knowing it.
A person who is under a lot of stress negates everything that was said above. Notice that for this system to work, a person has to transition to a lower intensity in order to get recovery. Stress is a power physiology. It is impossible to
This immediate system uses sugar from the blood for energy. The more long-term system is limited more by the volume of oxygen that can be delivered. Instead of putting your finger over the hose, it would be more like going to the faucet and turning it up. By endurance, we mean the maximum volume of energy you can get out of the system without resorting to the power system. These are the only two systems but because they function in a range we have delineated five distinct gears or intensities that occur while awake. It should be clear by now that metabolism is intertwined with our sense of urgency, meaning that we can combine the two in discussing the different intensities.
Information Processing
Five Daytime Processing Intensities
Anticipation (Power)
All new memories are formed a heightened physiology of anticipation. Whenever something unexpected happens, you have to be able to shift into a state of heightened perception to take it in as well as a state of heightened strength in case you can’t take it in. A person not able to generate intensity beyond a certain threshold, for example, will not be able to form new memories easily.
There are two versions of the power physiology. The typical weight lifter/cross fit athlete would be an example of a balanced power physiology. In order to generate power, the brain has to build up anticipation first. So the balanced power person has a strong capacity to take information in as well as a strong ability to discard information. In other words, they will have a tendency to get worked up, but at least they can release the pressure by high intensity workouts.
What if a person has a high degree of anticipation (always associated with taking new information in easily) but can not process it? Then there is the ADD type of person, who is very aware of everything but is not able to process or discard it. The ability to take everything in makes a person very open minded, which is the first stage of processing. The problem might be that this person feels most comfortable taking in information but is totally bored with the mundane process of applying it or unable top unwind enough to focus. The common denominator in all ADD type physiologies is poor processing which can be trained.
Sports Skills
The left and right hemispheres of the brain are of different compositions. What happens is that this new piece of the puzzle, now that you know what it actually looks like, starts to be seen in two different ways as the scene is replayed repetitively. In the right hemisphere the picture (or sound, etc) is seen at high resolution. In the left hemisphere, with repetitive scanning, sees the minimal amount of information necessary to identify the thing. I used the example of Abraham Lincoln because if I just saw a picture of a person with a certain hat the first thing I would think of is him. The ability to delineate the left and right hemispheres is developed when learning all the diagonal drills, which culminate in throwing, kicking, jumping, freestyle swimming, and swinging. The way people move demonstrates how well the brain is divided and part of that division is between left and right.
Specific Focus
Later on, as you are a little more relaxed, the event will circulate and the essence or important part will surface. Suppose you got a big shipment of stuff for your kitchen. In a short time you will simply put everything away except for the one thing that does’t have a place. You are now going to basically focus on this one thing and figure out the shape of it so you can know where it fits. It might not actually fit anywhere, but for now you will probably want to familiarize yourself with its’ shape, etc.
Endurance
Running is the purest form of endurance, but this also applies to walking or any repetitive activity of the whole body. A few critical things happen in terms of neurological organization. The brain is activated in a rhythm. Back left quadrant of the body and corresponding part of the brain is activated, followed by the front right, followed by the back right, etc. Because the gross nature of the motion as opposed to fine detail nature of focus, more general themes are circulating. Additionally, after some time, the body starts to more intensely ignore the environment via the serotonin system which includes the endorphins, which actively block out pain but also fear. It is for this reason that you feel better and also more idealistic.
Some people feel horrible and even swell up when taking a few days off from exercising. When exercising, a high volume of blood is circulating to a more relaxed brain at the same time pain/fear is blocked. However, this person otherwise might be low energy because it is not easy for them to instantly drive sugar to the brain. Put another way, the endurance person becomes so efficient that on days they don’t exercise, their metabolism is very slow. Having a larger volume heart, it can become a problem to slow it down enough for the circulation to match this slow metabolism.
Posture
Posture means you are awake but not doing anything difficult. If you have a very stressful day or a very physical day, it is obviously easy to be awake. However, if you are home sitting on a comfortable couch, you might fall asleep. Once you stand up and move around, you are stimulating your posture system. But the posture system does not only have to do with you physically holding your body up. It has to do with all your senses. If you are doing something easy and repetitive like laundry or dishes, you are in a posture intensity. The activities are hard enough to keep you awake yet easy enough not to make you focus. What ends up happening is that your brain will start to wander. A specific and important part of processing can only occur in this state.
Once you have to do something on the computer, it draws you in and makes you focus. That would be ok to do a certain amount of time, but the day is too long to focus all day. Many people get uncomfortable when they have nothing to focus on. It is not that there is anything relevant that they need to focus on, instead they need something to keep their attention (the word entertainment derives from ‘holding attention’) in order to give them energy. Is is simply a weakness in their posture physiology. That is why it requires a little planning. The easiest way to get into the posture zone is doing something like going for a walk.
The idea of no mans land sort of illustrates the posture range. If you are doing something that is not relevant or interesting but still takes up all your attention, you are in no mans land. It makes you focus which means you can’t think. You don’t get and recovery or processing.
Pathology
The first of the two basic classes of diseases involves weak processing relative to perceptive.
The most common pattern would be a person who gets energy from being alert and therefor feels more comfortable taking things in than they do processing which occurs in a less alert state. This creates a constant driving of food towards the cells that can only eat so much.
The body adjusts for this simply by diverting the excess in some form. It could be the excess is diverted in the form of weight gain. It could be in the form of the cell just not taking food in which is diabetes. It could be in the form of decreased circulation, indigestion, etc. Most people assume correctly that this process requires your genes, but they incorrectly assume that therefor the genes are flawed.
The second class of disease is simply a decreased capacity due to attrition. People who don’t do anything too extreme but also don’t challenge their physiology gradually get weaker, and end up eventually with a decreased capacity. At some point when your capacity/fitness is too low it is impossible to stay alive.
In anticipation of having to perform, whether it is mentally or physically, the system starts the process of driving sugar into the relevant cells. As mentioned previously if you were to sprint up a hill without enough nutrition you could be seriously damaged. That would be an example of not anticipating enough. On the other hand, if one would anticipate too much, there would be an excess volume of sugar allocated towards the cells. This is tempting because it is the anticipation that makes us feel alert. However, when there is no activity during that time, more sugar is flowing than what the cell can process. Virtually every named disease you hear about is simply the body diverting that excess. These diseases are always genetically coded ingenious, and temporary ways to deal with the excess. Weight gain, COPD, CV disease, and diabetes are examples where the capacity of the nutrition delivery system is diminished so that the actual amount of sugar entering the cell corresponds to what it actually can eat. These things keep you alive despite human error but in a diminished form. The purpose of training is simply to change your behavior to restore your capacity. If there was a way to modify these genes it would, in most cases, not prolong your life but instead shorten it.
What if a person has a high degree of anticipation (always associated with taking new information in easily) but can not process it? Then there is the ADD type of person, who is very aware of everything but is not able to process or discard it. The ability to take everything in makes a person very open minded, which is the first stage of processing. The problem might be that this person feels most comfortable taking in information but is totally bored with the mundane process of applying it or unable top unwind enough to focus. The common denominator in all ADD type physiologies is poor processing which can be trained.
Training
The first stage of training for most people primarily involves improving fitness. The actual capacity of the cell to eat food increases, which puts a strain on the nutrition delivery system in the opposite direction of anticipation. In other words, instead of there being an excess of nutrition in the system, there is a deficit. Just as the excess creates the diversion, the deficit plugs up the diversion.
After a phase of training, the system is now more efficient, which creates some minor challenges with some major benefits. The challenge is that now, without changing a couple key habits, a person is even more capable of flooding the system. But the benefit of this increased capacity is that during the second phase of training, recovery periods can be safely added because the system is no longer dependent on the anticipation. From this moment on, your training schedule will alternate between slightly harder days and slightly easier days.
Basic Profiling
Most of us have a preferred comfort zone. Some people like focusing on something like reading, etc. Others feel best when exercising. Others feel best when there are a lot of things going on at one time. Others feel best when it is quiet. Each of these qualities represent one of the four or so intensities at which our whole body operates in. You might be able to think of yourself and a few people around you what type of zone do they prefer?
The Intellectual
The intellectual is most comfortable focusing. Being drawn to some detail and directing it requires not a high volume of energy in the sense that the entire system is strained, but instead a high concentration of energy in the brain. That is why the figure shows sugar being shunted to the brain.
As mentioned previously, focusing on a piece of a puzzle is an important part of processing, but will always result in a distorted reality if the other types of processing are not occurring.
Not only does this create a distortion in terms of understanding, it also creates a distortion of ones metabolism. The sugar cannot be continuously driven into the brain, because it will become congested and there will be a force in the opposite direction attempting to slow down the influx. That is why the intellectual who does not train properly will usually complain of fatigue as the brain catches up and processing all the undigested pieces of sugar. But because the intellectual prefers focusing, he (more common) or she, after resting just enough, will go back to focusing.