Mark Rippetoe on Stress & Strength at PJ Media

Mark Rippetoe's latest article for PJ Media explains how stress makes us stronger.  First, he defines stress. 

“Stress” is that which causes a perturbation of the steady state of a system — in this case, your physiology. If the stress is mild, it causes no response. It doesn’t disrupt the situation enough to be noticed. If the stress is too great, it can kill you. This is what happens when you fall off a building or get mauled by a bear.

Then he explains how we use stress - and the body's reaction to it - to improve strength.

You apply a stress that is appropriate for you, a stress you can recover from. The process of recovering from the stress results in adaptation to the stress, then you apply a little more stress to your now-adapted self, and the process proceeds in an upward direction, each step resulting in more adaptation to the stress. 

You get stronger by starting with the weights you can do now, and then adding a little bit more next time, and every time you work out, until progress stops. This will be quite a while, many months for most people, and when that happens we’ll get more fancy about programming. 

But not until then — as long as this simple process works to improve your strength, anything more complicated is a waste of time.  

He also explains why strength is the foundation of fitness.

But the funny thing about getting stronger — the thing that makes it better than jogging — is that strength is such a basic and widely applied adaptation that it benefits every other physical characteristic regardless of specificity. 

Strength is the only physical characteristic that benefits all the others. If you get stronger, you run better, throw better, dance better, do everything better, because strength is the most general physical adaptation, the physical basis of all the others. In other words: strength benefits running, but running doesn’t benefit strength. 

Read the whole thing.