Explain like I’m five, how do people new to working out get newbie gains? Why isn’t it just the same amount of progress per session for people who have been doing it for a long time?
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The short answer: **the human body has a maximum capacity for fitness.** You can’t just become endlessly more fit. The limits can be pushed, but only slightly — for example, the record for fastest mile doesn’t change all that drastically from year to year.
Completely linear growth isn’t possible with fitness. If it were, someone could simply work out every single day of their life and become _infinitely_ strong. But even the toughest Olympic athletes have a limit to their physical abilities — at a certain point, your muscles just _can’t_ get much stronger.
The more fit you become, the harder it is to become even fitter.
Your body starts to stabilize. When you first start working out, there’s a lot of room for growth — your body can improve in fitness pretty fast. But then it hits a point where it’s pretty capable of the stuff you’re asking it to do, and is starting to reach its maximum performance.
So the basic definition of “why”? Well, because human bodies aren’t capable of infinite growth.
A visual metaphor would be… I dunno, cooking chicken. There is a huge difference between how raw chicken looks when you put it in a pan vs. how it looks one minute later. There’s not much difference between how it looks after 5 minutes under heat vs 10 minutes vs 30 minutes. You can’t just infinitely make the chicken “more cooked.” It goes from raw to cooked to… a fairly consistent state of burnt-ness.
This metaphor is purely for understanding nonlinear growth, of course — fitness is nothing like cooking chicken, lol.
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