Lessons From Our Cells

In his book, The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton draws on his experience as a cell biologist to create an elegant framework for understanding our lives and our health. Among the many lessons in his book, I'm emphasizing one in particular. Human beings, like each of the 50 trillion cells from which we are made, are never stagnant; we always move either into growth or into protection.

His particular experiments involved cloned stem cells in a petri dish. They exhibited two survival mechanisms. In the presence of nutrients, they opened themselves to their environment and brought those nutrients inside as part of a growth response. In the presence of toxins, they closed themselves off and moved away as part of a protection response. The cells' growth and protection structures were totally different from each other, and they could only be in one mode or the other at any one time.

Humans, too, can exist in either a growth state or a protection state. When we are mobilized against stress, our sympathetic nervous system literally takes our energy away from growth and repair processes. Only when we are relaxed does our parasympathetic nervous system direct the processes that lead to growth.

So why, you may wonder, must we always be in either of these states and not just stay neutral? The answer is that just to remain alive, our body has to build hundreds of billions of new cells each day to replace those that die. So a certain amount of growth is necessary just to maintain life. Additionally, growth-oriented processes like digestion are required to produce the energy that we require to move, think, breathe, etc.

Moving one step further, a natural conclusion is that we are always somewhere on the spectrum between growth and protection. Everything that we do moves us in one direction or the other. And our body is always responding to every stimulus that we encounter, including our thoughts, our movements (including the position in which we hold our bodies), our interactions, our food, our breath, etc. Whether you look at this spectrum as growth-protection, parasympathetic-sympathetic, anabolic-catabolic, health-illness, or life-death, be aware of the importance of each and every thing that you do and think. Every moment is an opportunity to move along this spectrum in the direction of your choice.

Emotions, Exercise, and the Stress Response

A 1981 study demonstrates the effect that our mental-emotional state can have on the outcome of exercise. Previous studies found, for instance, that anger and fear both raise heart rate and blood pressure while at rest, but didn't show what happened during exercise.

The study itself involved college-level acting students, who would be relatively comfortable accessing different emotional states and displaying them in public. They accessed different states through visualization. The mind-body connection's power is clearly seen: in all cases the visualization produced physical changes. Before beginning their exercise, the subjects all had elevated heart rate and blood pressure levels while experiencing anger, fear, and happiness. Their heart rate and blood pressure were lower in both relaxed and sad states. All of the test subjects then did the same exercise sequence (stair-climbing) in each of the emotional states.

There are a few interesting observations corresponding with different emotions, and they are relevant to our ability to access sympathetic and parasympathetic states. (Quick review: sympathetic is the fight or flight response to stress that mobilizes our body for immediate action, and parasympathetic is the relaxation response in which our body recovers, repairs, and regenerates). Performing the exercise sequence in a relaxed state, the subjects saw an increase in heart rate and blood pressure that seemed relatively appropriate for exercise. We do need an increase in both of these markers, after all, to get blood to our working muscles. In fearful, angry, and happy states, heart rate and blood pressure rose much higher, indicating an exaggerated sympathetic state. In a sad state the subjects actually had too little increase in heart rate and blood pressure, indicating an overly parasympathetic state in which they could not mobilize their energy stores at all.

The takeaway here is that there is an optimal level of emotional-intellectual stimulation during exercise. If we want the long-term health benefits of exercise, then we should use our training as an opportunity to learn to handle more and more stimulation without having to dip into our sympathetic reserves. Under real stress, our bodies release adrenaline and other stress hormones to help us deal with the situation at hand. And when we have genuinely stressful situations, that is a good thing. The problem is that most people in our society are dipping into their adrenaline stores too often, which is the cause of chronic stress-related diseases. Proper training can actually help them learn to stay more relaxed and only go to their sympathetic reserves when absolutely necessary, which will have a dramatic effect on long-term health.

Consistency and Specificity in Training

I've been reading Dr. Joe Dispenza's book, Evolve Your Brain, and in this book he writes about a neuroscience experiment done by Alvaro Pascual-Leone. The experiment compares the effects on the brain of four different activities: practicing a consistent piano sequence every day for a week, playing the piano in random patterns every day for a week, visualizing (without actually touching a piano) playing a consistent piano sequence every day for a week, and doing nothing related to the piano whatsoever.

The group of people who practiced the same piano sequence daily showed development in new areas of the brain; they literally added a new, functional neural network. The group who visualized themselves playing the same sequence every day demonstrated the same, positive neurological adaptations. The groups who played random piano sequences every day showed the same results as the group who played no piano at all: no new neurological development whatsoever.

So, what are the ramifications of this study? First, since visualization created the exact same neurological development as actually practicing the piano, we see that visualization techniques are tremendously valuable. Second, the concept of consistency (and specificity) becomes incredibly important in training.

The group that randomly practiced the piano put in the same amount of effort as the groups that practiced the same sequence over and over again (whether on a physical piano or in their minds), but achieved none of the results. Many athletes who lift chest one day, do cardio the second day, arms the third day, hot yoga the fourth day, and legs the fifth day see the same pattern: effort in the gym does not translate to results on the field, court, ice, etc. Consistency of stimulation, we see, is required to create adaptation in the nervous system. And since we know the nervous system controls all of our movement, consistency is an absolute necessity for effective training.

Let's look at training to sprint, for example. Effective training requires consistently activating the neurological patterns that create the powerful movements of a sprinting stride. One possible way of training is to simply go out on the track and sprint. If this sprinting is done correctly (position) and maximally (velocity), that can work. As every track athlete knows, however, it can be difficult to maintain maximal velocity longer than 2-3 runs of 100 meters. That means anywhere from 20-40 seconds of proper neurological programming.

What if, instead, there was a tool that allowed you to get 300 continuous seconds of that exact same neurological programming, consistently, in every workout? Fortunately this tool exists -- it's called the extreme isometric. And when done according to our specifications, this technique improves sprinting in exactly the same way as repeatedly practicing a piano sequence improves the ability to play the piano: it consistently programs the same pattern into the body so that the new pattern takes hold.

The other major takeaway from this experiment, visualization, also plays in to our system. When you participate in extreme isometrics with us, we instruct you to visualize your outcome for the duration of the exercise. When your brain sees the end, it can take you there. And the ability to see the end from the beginning is what empowers us to do great things.