Peter Hunter - Movement & Physiotherapy

Engage in all areas of your life! (The SAID Principle)

Engage in all areas of your life (the SAID principle)

Seek to increase your engagement in all areas of your life. You'll get better at doing that over time, because you are an adaptive system.

This is perhaps the most important concept in training.

The ability to adapt is an essential biological principle underpinning nearly all of our attempts to improve our experience, especially anything to do with training or exposure practice. In technical jargon, it's known as the SAID principle: Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands.

Put simply: You get specifically better at what you do.

And don't forget, it works in reverse too: You get specifically worse at what you don't do.

The classic way of understanding this concept in regards to training goes like this: Training is what stimulates adaptations, and recovery afterwards is what actually completes the adaptation.

This is true, but is a bit of a simplification that leaves something valuable on the table. (And we don't want to leave valuable things on a table, do we?)

A more nuanced understanding lies in the realization that the principle of adaptation never rests. The SAID-principle is at work all the time. Our bodies, our organism is adapting constantly to the totality of what we expose it too. Some examples:

"The law doesn't care what you believe" - Judge Dredd

It's there when you "train", it's there when you "recover". When you train, your whole body is adapting to the stimulus and experience of training. When you relax, your whole body is adapting to relaxing.

In this way, our body is practicing everything we do as we do it. The good and the bad, whatever you are doing, you are practicing that. Everything is a practice.

Everything is a practice.

Its not that we adapt and grow and learn in one area, but not in another. We are not "on" over there in the gym, but "off" over here in the sofa. We are always on. We are always alive. Until we are not. So just one more time.

Everything is a practice.

So the real question is, how skillful are you in creating the adaptations you actually want?

It can be a wicked and tricky process. Yet also surprising. Simple, not easy.

Take on a unifying approach to life: Seek to increase your engagement in all areas of your life. Through this search, you will adapt to being more engaged in all areas of your life.

Don't think that engagement will cost you energy. You create energy through it.

You will simply sink, and adapt to become a person who sinks, if you assume you don't have enough energy to engage.

You didn't sleep enough? You trained too hard? Too much on your plate? Things stressing you out? It's only too real.

Of course, try to sleep a lot, train the right amount, say more no to things and feel in control.

But what about when you don't? What about when life doesn't go your way and you feel fucked and unlucky and worn out? And recieve one more insulting inconvenience...

You haven't lost your energy. You simply cannot find it for this cirumstance. You aren't depleted. You simply cannot complete yourself in this circumstance.

But you can practice that. You can learn that. Engagement is a skill for all of your life.

I'll leave you with a simple practice:

In two columns, write down bullets for where in life are you MOST and LEAST engaged.

When is engagement nearly automatic? Where is it easy for you to be present? And when is it hard, nearly impossible? Where do you need to numb out or find your deepest patience to persevere?

Be as specific as possible. Perhaps name some names or describe a circumstance rather than just the title like work, relationship, hobby etc. As bravely as you can, face the realities of how you are not engaged.

Then, imagine how your best quality of presence could transform how you experience what you cannot yet engage fully in. Reflect on how you could let your best engagement come forth in those areas of your life.

“Life is so intrinsically confusing and precarious. But when we stop struggling against that reality, we are liberated at last to give this admittedly rather preposterous business of being a human absolutely everything we’ve got.” — Oliver Burkeman

Thanks for reading! And please add your thoughts, objections or questions below for other readers and myself to engage with ;) Would love to hear from you!

Further reading