In the realm of exercise you may have heard of ‘adaptive fitness’. It is training for people with both temporary and permanent disabilities, adapted to the needs of the individual. On a faith and fitness level it means realizing that God switches things up and thus you continually need to adjust to what God is doing. It’s digging deeper into having the mindset that none of us can ever fully know the mind of God. God doesn’t want you to just accept that truth, He wants your life to be a celebration of that – be eager to see where God leads you next and have full confidence in him. It is realizing that we can only see part of God’s grand plan. He reveals more in time. Let’s talk about how to adapt to God’s Spirit,
You may have heard of muscle confusion. David G. Behm, Ph.D., a university research professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, tells SELF, “Fitness improvements are dependent on the body adapting to handle a new training stimulus. Once it adapts to handle a stimulus, it doesn’t have the need to adapt any further.” That results in what is known as a workout plateau (you aren’t making gains). BUT – while there is an element of truth to the concept of muscle confusion, it has been over celebrated and exaggerated to the extent that it confuses people and can put them at risk of improper form and injury.
PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD: Consistently lifting more substantial weights, increasing repetitions, enhancing running speed or distance, opting for a more challenging version of a familiar exercise and continually working to improve your diet and get better rest to achieve overall improvements and stimulate growth in all areas.
Progressive overload is the better conceptual approach to training. If you want to maintain a certain level of fitness then doing the same things at the same level of challenge or difficulty can help keep you at some version of a “plateau”. However if you want to get stronger, faster, with bigger muscles and leaner body weight, then progressively adding weight or increasing the difficulty or challenge – doing more will be key to continually overload your muscles, thus tearing them down and then letting them recover and through that recovery achieving growth.
Suffice it to say – there are no spiritual plateaus with God. God wants to take you and others further – ALWAYS! So proper faith and fitness form is to both be attentive to God and then adapt with God. It’s the, where YOU lead me I will FOLLOW mindset. God does it more than you might expect. It totally blows out of the water any attitudes we may have that God is old fashioned, stifling and not progressive. The real truth is that we can never catch up to all the innovations God wants to accomplish in us and through us. The creative and new nature of God is the real powerful force behind spiritually switching things up and a journey with God built on progressive overload.
ATROPHY OR A TROPHY
The concept of reaching or staying at a plateau isn’t really an accurate understanding of God’s design. We never really plateau – physically, mentally, financially, relationally and certainly not spiritually. Learn how to not have spiritual atrophy but instead be a trophy for God.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- Think about the times you feel like you plateau in your training, fitness and diet. How would you describe what you’re experiencing? How would you describe atrophy? How do both differ from making gains?
- What happens physically, mentally and relationally when you make gains? What specific ways do you go about doing progressive overload in your training? How can you apply that to your career, learning, relationships and more.
- How has God challenged you with progressive overloads? How well did you adapt to God’s Spirit? Describe the spiritual gains you made. What does it mean in the Bible to participate in His sufferings? Compare the concepts of “no pain – no gain” and “obedient unto death”.
