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>what actually happens when you get an adrenaline rush to make you so significantly stronger?
A flight-fight response does not make you stronger. It simply removes pain responses and all the inhibitors and barriers that would, under normal circumstances, prevent you from any kind of exertion likely to cause you an injury.
You are – right now – absolutely strong and able enough to impale your feet on thick brambles, break many of your own bones and dislocate all of your limbs. But doing that is a bad idea unless the payoff is not getting eaten by a tiger.
When you are in a potentially dangerous situation, your adrenal glands produce lots of adrenaline directly into your blood.
The adrenaline is essentially “go fast juice” for your body and it prepares you to either “fight or flight” your way out of the dangerous situation.
Your heart rate goes up, your pain tolerance skyrockets, your breathing rate will increase and you become super alert. There have also been examples of people performing superhuman feats of strength with the help of adrenaline in a scary situation.
The human body is much more capable than your normal everyday efforts.
But your body is first and foremost want to stay alive, so there are numerous backups, redundancies, safeguards and first and foremost reserves that are “built in” so even if you feel exhausted after a long run or lifting weights, your internal systems just would not collapse.
Even when you are beaten you actually are very far from your physical limits, what would actually endanger your life
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When you are in adrenaline rush, that is what called fight or flight response. The limits and regulations on your body are somewhat lifted so you can fight or flight for your survival. But that is gonna be take it’s toll later.
Another example of these limiting factors are coffee. Caffeine does not give you any energy (coffee has no calories) it just tricks your body that it is not that tired, allowing you to dip into those reserves. That is why if you abuse it, there is a caffeine crash where the tiredness starts to affect physical functions and your body switches to emergency mode and no longer relies on the monitoring of tiredness what coffee messed up. You become extemely tired incentivising sleep and even can faint and go into “power saving mode” to protect vital systems
Fun fact, you being awake and be able to think, speak and just live is actually not essential for you to be alive. That is why when you are tired, concentration is among the first that goes away. Higher brain functions are secondary to vital organs
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Also this fight or flight could be triggered by stress, when your brain thinks you have to fight for your life, anxiety literally burns you up and then you crash and you are burnt out
This is why anxiety disorders can affect many of your systems.
The other answers have come close but missed out explaining why. Humans are usually operating on stay alive for 100 years and keep your energy expenditure even across the whole day, doing anything that risks either is hard.
Panic responses generated by adrenaline change that focus to survive the next minute. So amongst the extra blood flow, oxygen, and lack of higher order cognitive functions, it significantly changes the psychology of how you utilise your muscles. Rather than the usual of a small percentage of your muscle fibres distributed across the whole muscle firing when you use a muscle, it makes the whole muscle fire synchronously. The first method controls your force output, and also allows for endurance of your body. The second risks snapping your bones or tearing your muscle off the bone, the average person will do one of either without the conditioning of regularly lifting heavy weights. Despite the risk of damaging yourself it can be worth it to keep you alive.
Powerlifters and olympic weightlifters have to train themselves to support full muscle firing and get around the psychological block that prevents you from doing this. So, under adrenaline you’re jumping into temporarily being an olympic weightlifter and can do feats like push a tractor off your dad as a toddler, stop a car rolling down a hill towards your child, flip a car on its side to free somebody stuck underneath, but without the conditioning these real life ‘superheroes’ all got spinal damage from their own muscles.
So in summary, a psychological block being removed allows you to be insanely strong but also gamble over if you cripple yourself by moving
The simplest answer is that normally your body uses about 30-60% of the fibers in your muscles. Adrenaline makes this much higher 80-100%. But this does cause injury so your body can’t always be in this “mode”.
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