Control Your Stress AND Get More from Your Workouts

My inner meathead dies a little bit every time my brain learns something new.

A few months ago I posted my most popular post to date: Is Exercise a Stress Reliever or a Stress Amplifier?  

As literally – and I do mean literally – everything I currently learn is about controlling stress.  Our brains may be able to compartmentalize different stressors – worrying about a mortgage, intense training routines, getting far too little sleep because you just saw a suspicious man walk up your fire escape (true story) – but our bodies can’t tell the difference.  The same stress hormones are launched in our bodies regardless if an issue is purely physical or mental.

You may want to get in a cathartic, pound-yourself-into-the-ground training session when you’re super stressed, but that’s about the last thing you need.  Making ourselves stronger and in better shape is based on how well we can recover from workouts.  If we’re constantly beating ourselves down with physical or mental stress, we’re either going to get hurt or burnt out.

When our sympathetic, “fight or flight” system can’t shut off, it’s only exacerbated by some types of exercise.

So how can you control it?

First, you need to determine your resting heart rate.  As I wrote about here, your resting heart rate is a great indicator of cardiovascular health as well as which branch of your nervous system is more dominant.  

But that’s just a starting point.  If you really want to get the most out of your training sessions and your health, Heart Rate Variability is the way to go.

Most people think our heart simply beats like a metronome – that’s what I thought a few years ago.  But the time between our heart beats is wonderful for illustrating the interplay between our two nervous systems.  If we have a large variability in between our heart beats, it’s indicative that we’re well rested and physiologically ready to train.

Here’s a great link to more information on heart rate variability.  But if you’re too lazy to read the whole thing, here’s the highlights:

• HRV was a better indicator than resting heart rate for overtraining in runners.
• HRV was highly correlated with performance of Olympic Weightlifters

When I was younger I couldn’t figure out why so many of my clients who were chronically underslept would develop back pain.  I knew there was something there, but I couldn’t figure out why?