Your body is equipped with a highly sophisticated metabolic system that is committed to one single mission: keeping you alive—especially during times of adversity. It’s amazing how well we’re programmed for adversity. The human body is like a stress converter. It turns pain to power.
Hunger and hardship are the real triggers of your body. This may seem surprising, but it’s the truth. Challenging your body with these primal triggers is what forces it to adapt and improve.
Accumulating evidence indicates that your body thrives when challenged with nutritional and physical stress. Both hunger and physical hardship have been shown to benefit human survival, and the benefits you get from hunger and hardship seem to be deeply rooted in your biology.
The Pain to Power Principle
Lack of food apparently triggers a survival mechanism that helped early humans endure times of food scarcity. Along similar lines, exercise benefits us by triggering a primal mechanism that enabled early humans to endure extreme physical hardship.
These inherent mechanisms are part of the human survival apparatus. When triggered, they help us by increasing energy efficiency, recycling tissues, improving body composition, and boosting strength and the capacity to resist fatigue and stress. Your survival requires challenge and action. The biological rule is as plain as it is bold:
ACTIVELY SURVIVE OR PASSIVELY DIE
It is now known that the human body evolved to better survive when challenged. Both your brain and muscle develop only when adequately stimulated. Yes, we often need to go through a painful experience to develop a skill. That’s how soldiers, athletes, doctors, and musicians become successful. Pain comes with the territory.
Conversely, the lack of mental or physical hardship leads to stagnation and degradation. Indeed, when passive, sedentary, or only moderately challenged, the body begins to waste. The consequences are muscle degradation, excessive fat gain, chronic disease, and a shortened life span. Aging, for instance, is a tissue-wasting process.
Can you block this process? Your body is certainly equipped with the means to counteract aging, but modern lifestyles and fitness systems are not designed for that.
What’s Wrong with Your Fitness?
Nowadays, we don’t need to hunt, fight, or flee to survive, and we rarely need to endure hunger. Virtually everything that our early ancestors had to struggle for is now readily accessible to us. But this is the core of the problem.
We have been shifting away from our species’ original program and from the necessity to actively survive. Typically our bodies are inadequately challenged. And the very stressors that had made our species thrive in the first place don’t apply to us today. These days, humans live “safely” like farm animals. And like our livestock, most of us are overfed and overweight.
What’s the Solution?
To reclaim your fitness you need to know how to trigger the biological mechanisms that preserve and build your muscles.
Muscle retention is the most critical element of human fitness. Skeletal muscle is the largest energy facility in your body, and it plays key metabolic roles. Besides force production for physical movements, your muscle participates in the regulation of glucose and lipid metabolism and protects you against insulin resistance, obesity, and cardiovascular disease.
Muscle wasting, which can develop from inadequate exercise, aging, or metabolic disorders, leads to the loss of physical capacity and increased risk for chronic disease.
So how do you turn on your muscle-building mechanisms? And how do you rejuvenate your body?
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Ori Hofmekler is a modern renaissance man whose formative military experience prompted a life interest in survival science. A graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he received a degree in Human Science, he is a world-renowned artist whose political satire artwork has been featured in books and magazines worldwide.
As editor-in-chief of Mind and Muscle Power magazine, Hofmekler introduced his diet approach to the public to immediate acclaim from readers and professionals. He published his best-selling The Warrior Diet in 2002, and a new, revised edition was published by North Atlantic Books in 2007. In 2005, Hofmekler authored the highly acclaimed Maximum Muscle, Minimum Fat: The Secret Science Behind Physical Transformation and a second edition followed in 2007. The Anti-Estrogenic Diet, which offers natural dietary strategies to combat hormonal-disrupting chemicals in our food and environment, was published in 2006.
Hofmekler’s Take No Prisoners newsletter exposes fallacies in the areas of diet and fitness. It presents the true principles of human survival and how to put them in practice in today’s world. For more information about his nutritional and training protocols and to get his newsletters and blogs, log onto www.warriordiet.com or www.defensenutrition.com.
Recommended Reading:
CLICK HERE for Ori Hofmekler’s explanation of why our common approach to fitness is failing miserably.
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Image by Gruban / Patrick Gruban from Munich, Germany. Courtesy of Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Licensing
