6: How your body adapts to yoga -- and exercise in general

Matt delves into how the human body adapts to yoga and exercise. Reflecting on past misconceptions from his early teaching days, he clarifies a range of physiological adaptations, such as muscular hypertrophy, neural, cardiovascular, and connective tissue responses. Drawing on historical and scientific insights, including his personal experiences and education, Matt explains how repeated exposure to exercise leads to beneficial adaptations, including increased strength, coordination, and efficiency. He emphasizes the empowerment that comes from understanding these changes and promotes an active lifestyle. The episode also differentiates between adaptations and the broader benefits of exercise and touches on the physiological effects of pranayama.

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Transcript

Matt: 0:00

Hello and welcome to episode 6 of the Enlightened Anatomy podcast. In episode 5, I interviewed Bernie Clark, the author of Your Body, Your Yoga. Bernie talked about how our connective tissue, specifically our fascia, adapts to stresses placed on it. And so I thought it would be appropriate in the next episode to talk about all the different ways our bodies adapt to yoga and exercise in general. It's going to be a good episode and you're going to learn about how your body changes as a result of yoga practice and I promise it'll be interesting. So stay tuned and let's cue the intro music.

Saz: 0:54

Welcome to the Enlightened Anatomy Podcast, where we take a deep dive into the worlds of anatomy, physiology, and science to help you deepen your yoga practice. Now, here's your host, Matthew Huy.

Matt: 1:10

So when I was a young yoga teacher in my 20s, I could teach yoga, but I didn't really understand how the body worked. I didn't understand, how our body responded to yoga. I didn't understand the idea of wear and tear. I remember thinking that joints tended to wear down with age, and I also remember thinking that we should stretch muscles, but not tendons. Now, I have a very different view of the body, having studied anatomy and physiology for 20 years and having earned a master's in exercise science. And today what we're going to look at is how your body responds to stress, mechanical loading, exercise, whatever you want to call it, but basically this, stimulus that is placed on the body when you move it, when you stretch it, when you load it. So the technical term for what I'm referring to is physiological adaptations to exercise. I remember as a young yoga teacher that I had an idea of how to teach yoga. But I didn't really understand how the body worked, and I didn't really understand how our bodies respond to a yoga practice. I used to think that, for example, our joints were susceptible to wear and tear, that they just got worse and worse with age. And now I understand, while there are age related changes, our body is constantly adapting to the demands placed on it, including our joints. I also used to think things like, we should stretch our muscles, but not our tendons. And all of that has changed. One of the things that changed for me is, I remember in 2015, I had been a yoga teacher for about 10 years and I read an article by Jenni Rawlings, a great yoga teacher and yoga educator. And the article was all about how our fascia and soft tissues adapt to the demands placed on them. this was my first time really hearing about this principle of adaptation. Well, fast forward a few years and I went on to earn a master's degree in exercise science and now I have a very different view of how the body works and It makes me really reassured in teaching yoga. What we're covering today is basically day one of an exercise science degree. This information is the basis for any sort of education on physiology. Today we're talking about physiological adaptations to exercise. When yoga teachers hear the word adaptation, sometimes they think of adapting a yoga pose to a special population, say, an elderly population, or say, pregnant people. and so to clarify between that and what we're covering today, I refer to, to changing a pose as modifying a yoga pose, Adaptations, rather, are going to be the long term changes to your body as a result of stressing, loading, exercise. Okay, so what are these adaptations? Well, the same rules that govern how individuals adapt to the environment dictate how our body adapts to exercise. let's look at a different species altogether. Lawn daisies. These little flowers that grow in the lawn. If you do not mow your lawn, these little flowers will grow quite tall. But if you start to mow your lawn, they will make flower stalks that are much shorter. So that you can mow your lawn, and not disturb the flowers, and they can still be pollinated by, insects, and eventually bear their fruit. That is an adaptation to the environment. And that is the same principle that guides how our bodies adapt to exercise. So what is the definition of adaptations to exercise? the definition is our body's physiological response to training or the process of the body getting used to a particular exercise or training program through repeated exposure. So through training, whether that be a yoga class, whether that be cycling, whether that be strength training, we become stronger, we become more resistant to fatigue, we become better coordinated, And we become more powerful, which means that we can do the same task with greater speed. So you can do a pull up more quickly, You can swim a mile more quickly. Or you can even jump up into a handstand more quickly. we have different types of adaptations to exercise. Some of them are muscular, and that's the most obvious one, and that's what we're going to touch on first. We also have cardiovascular adaptations. That refers to the heart and the arteries and veins that move the blood through the body. We have neural adaptations referring to the nervous system. We have connective tissue adaptations, which has to do with fascia and other connective tissues, even endocrine adaptations, and there are even more. This is just touching a few of the items on the list. We(as in humanity"we") began our study of adaptations to exercise in the early 20th century with a famous, well, at least famous in the physiology world famous physiologist named AV Hill who conducted experiments that helped us understand how our bodies change with exercise and also how heat is produced by muscles and even by nerve impulses. And how oxygen is necessary in the recovery process. So it was really the birth of modern day physiology as we know it. And through the decades, we've learned more about physiology and really honed our understanding of how the body responds to exercise. Now let's jump into the specifics of these adaptations. So the first adaptation I'm going to look at is muscular adaptations, We know that, and you know this too, because you've seen it, as you get stronger, you will increase the size of your muscles. This is known as hypertrophy, or also pronounced hypertrophy, however you want to pronounce it really. This has to do with increasing the size of the muscle cell itself. And can I just say, please try to not let that put you off lifting weights, because you need to lift really heavy weights to bulk up. I'm particularly referring to women who don't want to have bulky muscles. the benefits of weightlifting really far outweigh the possible aesthetic of lifting heavy weights. So, I do encourage women to also lift weights. Other muscular adaptations include our ability to generate force. After all, it's our muscles that generate force in the body. They propel us forward as we walk. They propel us forward as we run. They allow us to lower into chaturanga with control. They allow us to press up into upward facing dog. And we can generate more force because our muscles are stronger. We also have increased fuel and oxygen stores within the muscle. So we can store more oxygen, we can store more ATP also within the actual muscle. The next adaptation is neural adaptations. these have to do with everything related to the nervous system. As you exercise, your nervous system will actually change. Not just in your brain, but even, in the peripheral nervous system, where your nervous system connects to the muscles. We can build more neuromuscular junctions, for example. So neural adaptations to exercise include changes or increases in muscle recruitment. So we can recruit more muscles in order to perform a task. Uh, we improve our coordination, and you know that about handstand, for example, at first it can be really difficult, really, sloppy, even just jumping forward, say, from downward dog to jumping forward, can be rough at first, and then we get better at coordinating it. This might mean using fewer muscles. If you think of how a gymnast makes things look so easy, and that's because they're very efficient at doing it. they're not tensing up all the muscles in their body, they know how to relax certain ones. Another neural adaptation is that we can change our firing rate. So you are not, sending a continuous message down to the muscles to engage, but rather it's like a pulse, like engage, engage, engage, engage. And that firing rate can increase. Or if you don't train, it can actually decrease. So those are the neural adaptations that we see. Another one is connective tissue adaptations. This has to do with all the tissues of the body that hold stuff together. So your ligaments, those are the tissues that hold your bones together. Ligaments are connective tissue which are high in collagen. Collagen is your most abundant protein in the body and these tissues will hold bones together. You have tendons, which connect muscle to bone. I can get more three dimensional than that, but we'll just keep it with that definition for now. And again, this is very high collagen content, um, proteins that, that connect your body together. We also have fascia, so that's just one type of connective tissue. And we have other soft tissues, and they all become stronger. based on the demands placed on them. So imagine if you are strengthening your muscles, which is like the horse that pulls the carriage, and then you have, let's say, some ropes that connect your horse to your carriage. Now imagine if the horses get really strong, but you don't strengthen the ropes, and you have these really weak ropes from when your horses were ponies. If the horses got strong enough, they could potentially break the ropes and your carriage would be stuck there. So as a result of your muscles getting stronger, we also need our tendons to get stronger. when you exercise, when you load your body, and even when you stretch, your tendons respond by actually getting stiffer. This is referred to as tendon stiffness and this does not make you less flexible overall. It just actually makes you more efficient. Now we can really get into the weeds here and talk about the load required in order for a tendon to get stronger, but I'm going to leave that aside for now and just say that yes, your tendons do get stronger as a result of exercising. And so do your ligaments, which connect bone to bone. So if you think of doing a side plank, and we have the femur, the thigh bone, and that connects to your tibia, which is your big shin bone. Now what connects those two together? It is ligaments. And when you come into a side plank, you are putting stress on the outer ligaments that connect your femur and your tibia. And guess what? Your ligaments will get stronger as a result of that. So, you know, this idea that you shouldn't place your foot on your knee in tree pose. Well, if anything, that's going to be applying the same pressure on the knee that we would apply in side plank. And really, I think it's quite a minimal amount of pressure. So for me, that's just not even a concern. You know, if someone wants to put their foot on their knee, cool, go for it. If it hurts them to do that, okay, don't do it. But remember that actually your ligaments also can adapt and do adapt to the demands placed on them. Now let's move on to bony adaptations. these are adaptations to the bones of your body. This is also known as Wolff's Law. in short, bone mineral density increases or decreases based on the demands placed on them. So, astronauts in spaceflight, due to a lack of gravity, return to Earth with what's known as spaceflight osteopenia. Osteopenia is the precursor to osteoporosis. even though astronauts are required to exercise two and a half hours every day, six days a week, they still come back to Earth with decreased bone mineral density. In fact, they lose 10 percent bone mineral density for every six months in space flight, and this is why they're only allowed to spend a certain amount of months up in space. It can take several years to get back to normal, but yes they can get back to normal. So that's another beautiful adaptation to consider when going into your arm balances you are potentially building bone mineral density in your arms, in your shoulders, in your wrists, and even when you're balancing on your legs you will be at least sustaining the amount of bone mineral density you have. if you want to progress that further, it's a good idea to pick up some weights, or increase your loading in some way. Now, another adaptation we have is cardiovascular adaptations. This has to do with changes, to your heart and the vessels that move blood around the body. So one of the adaptations that we see, particularly when people engage in endurance training, is increases in heart size. I just love that idea. So your heart gets bigger as you exercise, particularly with endurance training. Endurance Olympic athletes can have hearts about 25 percent larger than the average person. We also have increases in the strength of the heart muscle. heart muscles get stronger with each pumping or stroke. As a result, they become more efficient. And you have a lower resting heart rate as a result of exercise. So you stress your heart during exercise, it gets stronger, and then it rests better when you're resting. Again, I love that idea. We also have an increase in the stroke volume as it's called. So how much blood can be held by the cavities of the heart and then also pumped out through the heart. We also have changes to our endocrine system We can see changes in how hormones are released in the body, including human growth hormone, which is essential in helping to create some of these adaptations that I mentioned previously. And that is really just the beginning of the list of the many adaptations that we see as a result of exercise. You can even have adaptations to pranayama, which are breathing exercises. One of the things that we do in yoga is to hold our breath during pranayama. When you hold your breath, your body is sensing how much carbon dioxide is in the blood. So these carbon dioxide sensors all throughout our arteries will notice if there is a rise in the carbon dioxide content of your blood and it will give us this overwhelming desire to breathe. But one of our adaptations is that we can increase our carbon dioxide tolerance. So it's one of the ways that even just by engaging in pranayama exercises, our body will also change. So that wraps up some of the ways that our bodies adapt to exercise. I just want to also take a moment to clarify the difference between adaptations to exercise, and benefits of exercise. the benefits of exercise, I'm referring to are how exercise can significantly reduce your risk of developing, for example, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, depression, anxiety, osteoporosis, certain cancers, and many other chronic conditions. It's often the adaptations that lead to the exercise benefit, they go hand in hand, but I just wanted to clarify the difference between the two. Now, how does this all apply to yoga? Well, first of all, I think it can be really enlightening to know how your body adapts, how it changes, which is why, my podcast is called Enlightened Anatomy. It's combining the enlightening information that we can learn through the study of anatomy and physiology and applying it to yoga. Knowing how your body adapts to exercise and yoga should help you to become less fearful in encouraging people to challenge themselves more, though of course that should always be at the individual discretion of the practitioner. And knowing that our body gets stronger as a result of exercise can really change our relationship with it. instead of being afraid of moving it, we can be empowered to keep an active lifestyle and make sure that we are all meeting our physical activity guidelines, which are laid out in episode one of the podcast. Those are to be getting 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise every week, as well as two days of strength training every week. It's also helpful to know about these adaptations if someone came to you with a specific desire to say, improve their golf swing, or to improve their cardiovascular endurance. now there's a limit to how much yoga can improve cardiovascular endurance, but nonetheless, you could certainly apply these principles to designing a program. Or you could simply say, your best route of action would probably be to engage in cardiovascular exercise, including, running, treadmill, rowing, cycling, that sort of thing. So just to wrap up today's episode, it's important to realize that our bodies do adapt to exercise, and that includes yoga. When it comes to how you're moving your body, a lunge is a lunge. Your body doesn't know if it's at the gym with a personal trainer, or it's in a yoga class. You're still going to be strengthening the same muscles and stretching the same muscles also. We have specific adaptations and these include muscular, neural, cardiovascular and connective tissue to name just a few. So, I hope today's episode has helped you realize some of the many ways our bodies adapt to exercise, including yoga. I encourage you to reflect on your own practice and consider how understanding exercise adaptations can deepen your own yoga experience. Be sure to tune in for future episodes where I blend science with yoga to help you deepen your yoga practice. Now if you haven't done so already, it would really mean a lot if you could leave a five star review and follow this podcast. And be sure to go to my website, matthewhuy.com. That's matthewhuy.com. And there you can download a free mini ebook called"Five Truth Bombs to Make You a More Confident Yoga Teacher". Until next time, get enlightened and help others.

Saz: 23:55

Thank you for listening to the Enlightened Anatomy Podcast. We would be grateful if you would leave a review and a five star rating. Be sure to tune in next time for more science based knowledge to get enlightened and help others.