Homeostasis and disrupting it

It is somewhat curious and slightly amusing how many different ideas and observations can be boiled down to only a handful of fundamental concepts. It may be selection bias, but in the past years I have time and again hit my head on evolution in various different areas. More recently I have been very much intrigued by physical training and conditioning of humans, vis-à-vis my own journey in Boxe Francaise, which has also led me to briefly touch upon thoughts in the strength training field.

It is not anything new as such, but training, especially in respect to strength and general fitness, seem to again link back to forcing the human body to adapt to changing levels of stress. More specifically building strength through building muscle, which is ultimately just disrupting the homeostasis of the body to provoke a reaction and adaptation, fostered with enough resources to enable the adaptation to occur. Despite the early easy linear gains which can be achieved, at some point triggering the adaptation becomes harder and demands more. If the homeostasis is not disrupted by challenging the body enough, no adaptation occurs and training becomes stuck. Intelligent variation then becomes the key to betting unstuck; altering the program to build for the certain key training sessions when personal bests are strived for, followed by enough lighter training to allow for adaptation without overtraining.

Again this appears to link very much back to some of the core ideas in evolution and population ecology, be it biological organisms or artificial structures such as industries. Homeostasis can be met in organizations as well, which I guess can be related to inertia, which stabilizes the organization's structure. Changing environment reduces the fitness of the organization and ultimately results in existential questions regarding the survival of the organization. In a way, this can be indeed seen as a Red Queen race, where adaptation is needed not only to progress, but to even keep in the current competitive position. Adaptation tends to be painful, and hence disrupting the homeostasis in the organization is something that is met with the previously mentioned inertia and unwillingness to change until it is almost too late to change anymore. At the point when the proverbial shit is about to hit the fan, the amount of adaptation needed is so significant that again the existence and the ability to survive the adaptation comes into question.