CORTISOL EFFECTS WITH TRAINING
High stress training on top of high stress jobs will not see the results you set out to do.
You want the fitness to benefit your body – you need to get the right dose, complimenting true change and muscle building pathways versus adding more stress onto the pile in the body.
The right dose and the application of the right exercise will maximise the results.
Anything outside this, too little or too much of the dose is going to result in reduced results.
If you continue to push outside these, you will not only get no results, you will get negative returns.
‘A type’ and highly tuned people have the mentality to go all in, and wonder why their strength doesn’t go up, it can reduce, their waistlines expand, their energy doesn’t lift and their moods are horrendous.
People that are drawn to HIIT, marathons, 6 days a week training are in a mindset of push, push, push, and don’t schedule in down days of stretching, yoga, sauna, water therapy.
This helps to balance out the body.
Unfortunately in today’s society it’s the ‘grind it’ mentality that harms our body’s nervous system and hormones.
- Cortisol is not a bad hormone, we need to to alert us and helps us stay out of danger, but it’s when you stay in the elevated level of stress that is strips away
- Cortisol also feels good within the adrenaline response, think of people that go on certain corticosteroids, (similar to cortisone as it’s anti-inflammatory), they feel they have more energy and feel good.
But over time if it’s high all the time, it starts to break everything down, it degrades things, it starts to promote fat storage in an indirect way of telling your body to store more calories because you’re so stressed all the time.
So if you are one of these people always in this state and you feel good, how do you elicit that state when you go to the gym? You just hammer the hell out of yourself right!?
And in the meantime, in the short term, you feel good all of a sudden, loving the spin classes or hour long intense sessions, then a couple of hours later you feel like rubbish again, and then you reach for a hit of that cortisol drug again.
You need to train appropriately for your lifestyle and abilities – consider strength training at a pace that is safe with the right amount of rest and repetitions.
Weight training three times a week is good for adequate rest in between and the active recovery days can be something like a yoga session, massage, walking, swimming or things like sauna and breathwork.
This mixture throughout the week helps to relax the central nervous system and stimulate the central nervous system, this helps to get the results you set out for.
If you’d like help with some balance and smart training regimes send me a message
