S.A.I.D.

It is often thought, and I can understand why, that all I do is squat and row.  People who know me better are also aware that I find time to be a culinary wizard, provided I restrict myself to eight ingredients and one knife - no confusing utensils, and that I can play non-stop one minute chess on the Internet.  And then people who know me extremely well are aware that I sometimes go to work and that I read.

I'm currently reading the excellent "Fit" by Lon Kilgore et. al., and like most excellent books, it has excellent appendices.  One of those appendices is a chart of performance standards for various bodyweight movements, barbell lifts, and oddly the 1,000 meter row, with metrics ranging from beginner through advanced and on to elite based on age, weight, and gender.

I've been doing all of this long enough for me to score advanced in enough movements that I would probably be believed if I claimed to be advanced in all.  ("Oh, power snatch?  Well I did 750 of those in yesterday's work out; I'm a little bit sore today.")

I'm almost elite in the squat.  I'm close enough that I could load the elite weight on the bar, and on a perfect day, I'd squat it.  On a good day I'd take it low enough to fool the head judge if not the sides.  On an average day, I'd walk it out and decide I had better re-rack it, and for the sake of completeness, on a bad day I'd be headed to the hospital.

I'm so close to elite on the 1,000 meter row that I'm sure I could go in this afternoon, this being a non-lifting day, and do it without extreme exertion.  But I'm also so close here that I want to keep it in reserve for when I need an ego boost, like the next time some hottie shoots me down.  ("Look bitch, you wouldn't know what to do with my Elite ass anyway.")

To sum, I'm good at the stuff I'm serious enough about being good at to actually work on.

And that is what is meant by Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand [SAID.]

I think my favorite John Welbourn quote is still, "I never randomly got good at anything."  John worked very hard on being strong and being able to sprint 40 yards as fast as possible, and his work eventually got him a job in the NFL. 

I admit that being really good at something is an arbitrary decision, and that it's going to detract from something else; John Welbourn is not a marathoner, and I have some of the world's slowest recorded times on bodyweight movements.  Ideas of what constitutes really good or elite or whatever are also arbitrary of course.

In any event, if you're looking for a specific adaptation, be it your first pull-up, a sub-20:00 5 k, or whatever, you might well start by asking yourself where your imposed demand is.