Are You Training or Draining? How Muscle Stress, Recovery, and Adaptation Align with the ERM Framework

Healing_ Passion
Aug 3
4 min read

August 2025

In the world of sports science and functional medicine, we often talk about building strength, improving performance, and pushing limits. But what if the very stress we apply to improve muscle function could, over time, lead to depletion—hidden exhaustion that doesn’t show up in a performance test, but leaves its mark deep in the tissue?

This question lies at the heart of the Exposure-Related Malnutrition (ERM) framework—a model I’ve developed to explain how chronic stress, even when subclinical, can erode metabolic resilience over time. A closely related concept, the Catabolic-Anabolic Cycling of Hormesis (CACH), highlights how stress must be dosed and timed to allow tissues to recover and grow stronger, rather than degrade.

Recent findings from sports medicine and physiology offer powerful validation of these ideas—particularly in the muscular system, where metabolic tempo, recovery mismatches, and stress-response cycling play out in striking detail.

📌 1. Monitoring the Microcycles: Gabbett et al. (2017)

Reference: Gabbett TJ et al. (2017). The athlete monitoring cycle. Br J Sports Med.

This landmark paper introduces a dynamic model for athlete monitoring, centered around a feedback loop of:

External load (e.g., sprint volume),
Internal response (e.g., heart rate, cortisol),
Subjective well-being, and
Readiness to perform.

While not framed in clinical language, this model mirrors the micro-adaptation cycles described in ERM and CACH: stress exposure, internal strain, recovery, and re-exposure. When an athlete's readiness drops despite controlled training load, it signals a depletion of adaptive reserves—a hallmark of subclinical malnutrition and stress overload in the ERM model.

Bottom line: Monitoring only the output (e.g., power, speed) misses the deeper story. ERM shows us that stress-response patterns must be viewed as metabolic cycles, not just workload numbers.

📌 2. Recovery Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All: Gabbett & Oetter (2024)

Reference: Gabbett TJ, Oetter E. (2024). From tissue to system: What constitutes an appropriate response to loading? Sports Med.

This comprehensive review is a goldmine for understanding bioenergetic tempo in the musculoskeletal system. Recovery timeframes vary drastically:

Muscle (after eccentric loading): ≥72 hours
Tendons: 24–48 hours
Cartilage: ~30 minutes
Bone mechanosensitivity: lost after 20 cycles, restored after 4–8 hours

In ERM language, this demonstrates that mismatched tempo between imposed stress and tissue-specific recovery leads to catabolic dominance. For example, training hamstrings hard every 48 hours might still be too frequent, even if soreness is gone.

What’s more, the authors show how systemic loading (e.g., low-stress aerobic activity) can preserve overall metabolic function during recovery—supporting the anabolic half of the CACH cycle, even when local muscle recovery is in progress.

📌 3. The Forgotten Pioneers: Viru (2002) on Russian Stress Physiology

Reference: Viru A. (2002). Early contributions of Russian stress and exercise physiologists. J Appl Physiol.

Before "adaptation" became a buzzword, Soviet-era physiologists were laying the foundation. Yakovlev's discovery of supercompensation—the post-exercise rise in glycogen and creatine phosphate—is one of the earliest descriptions of anabolic rebound after catabolic depletion. Meerson’s work on stress-limiting systems (antioxidant enzymes, opioid responses) closely mirrors what we now describe as resilience pathways.

These findings, mostly unknown in the West, support the ERM framework’s claim: that adaptation isn’t endless. There’s a metabolic cost to resilience—and if that cost is not reimbursed through recovery, nourishment, and hormonal balance, adaptation turns into exhaustion.

📌 4. Sprinting as Stress Test: Carmona et al. (2024)

Reference: Carmona G et al. (2024). Acute changes in hamstring injury risk after sprinting. Sports Health.

In this experimental study, amateur soccer players performed 10 maximal 40-meter sprints. Even with long rest periods between sprints, they experienced:

Reduced force-generating capacity in hamstrings for up to 72 hours,
Elevated creatine kinase (CK) and soreness,
Subtle but persistent changes in pelvic tilt biomechanics, which can increase injury risk.

Here’s the kicker: performance metrics (like sprint time) mostly recovered by 48 hours, but underlying stress markers did not.

This directly supports the ERM model of “invisible depletion”—where the body appears recovered, but deeper metabolic signals (CK, tissue strain, loss of fine control) suggest ongoing stress debt.

🧠 Muscle, Maladaptation, and the Metabolic Cost of Performance

These four papers—spanning elite sport, physiology, and history—converge on a powerful truth:

Performance is not always a sign of readiness.

Muscles may still contract. Sprint times may remain fast. But if recovery tempo is ignored, metabolic tempo misaligns, and the balance shifts toward:

Incomplete protein synthesis
Mitochondrial strain
Microvascular inflammation
Cumulative structural fatigue

Over time, this pattern manifests as Exposure-Related Malnutrition in the muscular system—a failure of the anabolic arm of adaptation to keep up with the catabolic burden.

🔁 Closing Thought: It’s Not Just the Load—It’s the Timing

In the CACH model, hormetic stress builds resilience only if followed by adequate anabolic resolution. These studies validate that framework in muscle physiology—showing that when tempo is respected, stress becomes strength. When it isn’t, strength becomes stress.

So next time you're assessing recovery or prescribing training:

Ask not just “How much was done?” but “How fast can this tissue adapt?”

The answer may be the difference between thriving and silently breaking down.

Further reading:

Gabbett, T. J., Nassis, G. P., Oetter, E., Pretorius, J., Johnston, N., Medina, D., Rodas, G., Myslinski, T., Howells, D., Beard, A., & Ryan, A. (2017). The athlete monitoring cycle: A practical guide to interpreting and applying training monitoring data. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 51(20), 1451–1452. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2016-097298
Gabbett, T. J., & Oetter, E. (2024). From tissue to system: What constitutes an appropriate response to loading? Sports Medicine. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-024-02126-w
Viru, A. (2002). Early contributions of Russian stress and exercise physiologists. Journal of Applied Physiology, 92(4), 1378–1384. https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00812.2001
Carmona, G., Moreno-Simonet, L., Cosio, P. L., Astrella, A., Fernández, D., Padullés, X., & Mendiguchia, J. (2024). Acute changes in hamstring injury risk factors after a session of high-volume maximal sprinting speed efforts in soccer players. Sports Health. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/19417381241283814