‘A-type’ personality and cortisol
A lot of people know cortisol to be the stress hormone but what a lot of people don’t know is that cortisol often feels good and is probably why people over train.
Hello ‘Cortisol junkie’
People get addicted to exercise, they feel terrible but people still go and train themselves super hard and they have a short window of feeling good afterwards, this is due to cortisol.
Cortisol is a stress hormone and it gets your body to release energy right away, too much cortisol over time causes muscle breakdown, can cause fat storage and is a stress adaptation but in the short term it causes an energy release.
Overtime the body becomes resistance to this release and loses its effect leading to you being over trained, overworked (the real A-type personalities) , don’t sleep , lots of coffee, stress heaps, often late to appointments and also love the workouts because of the way it makes them feel at the time, even though they are overdoing it.
Typical day for these people:
- Over train
- High demanding job
- Lots of children
- Don’t sleep well
- Lots of caffeine
- Wine at night
- Gravitate towards Crossfit and HIIT training or other high circuit workouts
It’s typical these people have 5-10kg to shift and they find it hard, wonder why it’s not working, so they’ll train more and eat less, but unfortunately high HIIT training and high volume training is not the answer.
When you have wired energy all the time, it can tend to make you want to work out more all the time to get the release of more cortisol.
People who live with high cortisol tend to be late to appointments to ‘get the rush’, and also to want to train with high intensity and the ‘sweat factor’ to want the sense of accomplishment and spike of energy afterwards.
However all this overtime will cause hormone disruption and can lead to weight gain and major energy crashes.
If your goal is to build muscle and have more energy, you need to look at the goals you want to achieve and work out a way to work with your body, not against it.
Take note of your training style, if you’re going harder or longer and not getting the results you are after, you must realise what you are doing is NOT working, and need to change something you are doing – or not doing.
Good luck
