How Long Will It Take?

In his book Supertraining, Mel Siff quotes a research paper describing time scales of muscle and connective tissue adaptations: “Muscle tissue adapts to increased loading within several days, whereas connective tissues (such as tendons, ligaments, and joint capsules) or systems which contain a high proportion of connective tissue (such as bone or cartilage) only display significant adaptation and hypertrophy after several weeks or months of progressive loading.”

In knowing these details of specific tissues, and educating client-patients with this information, makes the treatment and training frequency recommendations more accurate and the client understands how and why I’m recommending such. 

Choosing which ecology, or ecologies, to scale up will help determine things like treatment and or training visits, intensity, load, and volume. 

For example, do you need more connective tissue architecture? That will take weeks to scale up and “see” some improvements. Do we need more muscle mass? That change happens over days. Do we need to make plastic changes to the central nervous system? We can train the CNS to change it’s response to an intrinsic or extrinsic stimulus in much shorter time periods, like a single treatment. 

Here’s the thing…

We can recreate nature in a constrained environment using treatment and training. We have to choose which ecology we want to scale up. Use logical and specific methods and means sequentially and progressively, stimulating changes over time.