Survival Mode

by Mitch Hauschildt, MA, ATC, CSCS

“How do I ensure that I can get done tomorrow what I am doing today if I don’t have food, water or other resources?”

This is what the brain thinks about every second of every day.  The brain is simply concerned with one thing…Survival.  Living another day is always its top priority.  This is why the brain is so accommodating and adaptable.  This can be good and bad.  Before we get to the topic of how to use it to our advantage, I first want to demonstrate some of the various ways that the body protects itself to help illustrate the point.  Here are a few examples:

• When an injury occurs at a joint, the brain’s first reaction is to spasm around the joint in order to prevent motion and what it perceives as a threat.  One of the last things that a surgeon does in a joint reconstruction surgery to take the joint through a full range of motion to make sure everything is moving well.  But, only an hour or two later when they have come out of recovery, they magically seem to have lost all of their motion.  I can guarantee that they haven’t build scar tissue in that short time period.  The brain is protecting the body from further damage to make sure it survives another day.  The immediate lack of motion is a nervous system response to trauma.
• When the body’s stabilizers aren’t doing their job, a prime mover will take over.  We see this a lot with the toe touch exercise that I use as a demonstration in a lot of my courses.  If the stabilizers of the trunk and core aren’t doing their job, the hamstrings will kick in to control the pelvis and essentially become a brake when a person goes to touch their toes.  This is the brain’s way of protecting you and not allowing you to face plant when trying to touch your toes.
• When you go to the gym and see the same person on the same cardio machine every single day and they never change.  This is common in every gym.  People get comfortable performing one movement on one machine and they are reluctant to change.  The problem is that the brain is really smart.  It will find a way to get through that exercise bout while burning less calories today than tomorrow, just in case there is no available food to eat tomorrow.  This is a built in survival strategy we all have related to our ability to perform physical labor.
• A female who isn’t consuming enough calories will at some point lose their menstrual cycle.  The brain realizes that it doesn’t HAVE to have a menstrual cycle to survive, so it cuts it out.  We understand that a lack of a cycle has long term effects in other areas of the body, but the brain also knows that in the short term, it can survive with this strategy.
• As Thomas Myers points out in his book Anatomy Trains, habit becomes posture and posture become structure over time.  When we utilize a body position over time, the brain looks to change the body in order to keep the effort of daily life to a minimum.  So, over time, we start to build in movement patterns that become the easy default pattern (posture) and eventually, the body will lay down more connective tissue in certain areas to support the area of the body and make simple things like
• And the examples could go on and on…

Knowing the survival mode of the brain, how does this affect how we train people?  How can we use the survival mode to our advantage to improve movement and training for our patients and clients?

• Periodization matters.  Whether you are training athletes, the general population for weight loss or rehabilitating people from an injury, how you vary sets, reps and load is extremely important.  I view periodization as a basic form of evolution.  You give the body stimulus and watch how it reacts.  If you give it the right stimulus, you get the product that you want.  If you give it the wrong stimulus, you gets something that you aren’t interested in.  But, giving it the same stimulus over and over, will result in accommodation and poor results long term.  I’m not overly partial to any specific periodization model (linear, undulating, block, etc).  I do care that we provide strategic variety to our programming and planning with those who we work with, regardless of our setting.
• Remove the Threat.  The body reacts to a threat (actually a perceived threat), by reducing range of motion and changing neurological patterns in unpredictable ways.  This is why we always work to eliminate pain prior to moving to corrective exercise.  Taking the brain out of a threatened state can be done with a variety of strategies ranging from manual techniques, to heat and cold, to vibration, to taping, to mental training and tons of things in between.  By changing the input to the system, we essentially tell the brain that it is safe to move again.  Sometimes this strategy can be a bit tricky to figure out what strategy will work for each person, but when you do, it can be like magic.
• Be Holistic.  Simply put…diet and sleep matter to a person’s training just as much as what you do with them during their training session.  If they body is always trying to defend against hunger, lack of sleep or other issues, it can’t be performing.  Poor diet and sleeping patterns push the body into a survival mode, which makes motor learning difficult at best.
• Be Proactive.  Recognize issues when they are a habit and correct them.  This will prevent the brain from looking to change they body’s structure.  Adding variety to your programming (as discussed earlier) works well to combat structural issues as well.  Many times our tendency is to only address the specific areas that our patient and client are complaining about.  But, if we can train the entire structure of the person by recognizing and training potential problems early on, we minimize their long term damage.
• Make Plastic Changes.  Lets use the adaptable nature of the brain to our advantage, instead of fighting it all of the time and strategically rewire the brain.  Plastic changes occur in the body when we perform low threshold, high repetition activities.  Find the movement patterns and solutions that work for your patient or client and lock it in with high quality reps over and over again until the new thought or pattern becomes the default.

Recognizing the simplistic nature of the human brain is important for understanding the dysfunction that exists in all of us.  As complex as the human body is, the reason it is so complex is because to make sure it accomplishes one seemingly simple talk…survival.  Use the survival strategies to your advantage.