Training is only 10% – Part Deux

In the first part I laid out that if training is only 10% of achieving your physical goals, then the remainder is made up from:

Sleep – Training equals trauma, sleep is when you repair. Poor sleep means little improvement.

Nutrition – If you ain’t got the bricks and mortar, you ain’t building the body you want to live in.

Stress free lifestyle – Stress induces hormones which work against looking like a movie star, fact

The first part detailed how focusing on specific strength goals, along with a nutritional plan, are necessary to more easily accomplish any body composition (aka ‘fat loss’) goal. This article is going to focus more on that last part.

 

Stress free lifestyle

Nobody leads a stress free lifestyle. In fact I think if we did then we’d all become too slovenly to actually do anything. We need moderate amounts of stress to make us more productive and to do things. Who would do their tax return if there wasn’t an April deadline (and a fine)?

When you are feeling stressed, your body releases the hormone cortisol. Now, cortisol gets a bad rep in the health and fitness community. It eats away your muscle and makes you fat, but this is only half the story.

Let’s pretend that some cranky old man, annoyed at everyone’s lack of situation awareness in the city centre, finally genetically re-engineers Sabretooth tigers and releases them into population centres [Note: I have never thought about doing this… honestly]. You damn well want your cortisol (along with adrenaline) to start pumping through your system!

 

 

What cortisol does, is to shut down non-essential functions and allow your body to focus all of it’s energies on the stressor at hand. In normal life, this means that when you wake up your cortisol levels rise, the cortisol does some magic mojo with regards to your blood sugar levels and you get ‘pepped up’. By about 3-4 am your cortisol is at it’s lowest levels which is one of the reasons being woken up at this time really sucks.

In our Sabretooth example, cortisol helps shut down all non-essential functions such as reproduction and immune response so that your body can focus solely on running for your life.

So cortisol is good in short bursts, but too high a level for too long can be very bad. Your immune system becomes suppressed, your body doesn’t want to build ‘high cost’ muscle tissue but wants to horde ‘low cost’ bodyfat. You start to become weak, tired, ill and fat.

Cortisol is a part of our physical response to our surroundings. It makes brilliant sense from a physical threat perspective, but not from a ‘this paperwork has to be done by midday and you’re selling your house and you’re getting married and have to go to parents evening too’ perspective.

Whenever people come to me, they are often surprised that one of the first things I do is to run a ‘stress assessment’ on their lifestyle. Your life can basically be broken into four quarters using an idea popularised by Strength Coach Dan John:

Work – Paid work and things you may be involved with in your community

Rest – Sleep and the time between ‘stressor activities’ such as work, ‘life’ and physical activity

Play – The things you do to have fun

Pray – Not necessarily a religious thing, could be chill out/alone time

We work through these quadrants of your life and assign a stress value. Before we start loading you up with more physical demands via a training programme, I want to know whether you have the ability to withstand that physical activity without becoming ill. More is not necessarily better, sometimes less is better.

If we find that some of your quadrants are stacked with stress, for the majority of clients our time is better spent working at how to reduce or mitigate these stresses. If a quadrant, say work, is high stress and unchangeable then we look at how to make you ‘rest harder’ to balance out your life. Only when we’re happy that we’ve gotten enough rest, play and pray/chill out into your life do we start loading up your programme.

 

 

It should also be noted though, that physical activity has been shown to help reduce non-physically induced stress. So in some cases the judicious application of physical training can help redress the balance. Often, leaving your phone on your desk and going for a quiet walk at lunchtime can be enough to help reduce feelings of stress.

A not uncommon example of a stress assessment goes like this:

Me: What time do you go to sleep?

Client: 1000pm

Me: That’s good. What TV shows do you watch?

Client: Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Orange is the New Black… that kind of thing.

Me: Oh cool, do you watch them on catch up?

Client: Oh no, I can’t risk getting spoilered.

Me: You know Walking Dead finishes at 1100pm…..

Client: Oh that’s only on Tuesdays… uh, ok. Maybe I go to bed at 11.

Me: So you go straight to sleep? Don’t brush your teeth? Check the doors? Have a poop?

and so on…..

People are the biggest liars to themselves. The client thinks they’re getting enough sleep, generally assumed to be 7-8hrs/night, but they’re actually getting closer to 6 hours. For many of my (to be honest mostly male) clients we have been able to increase rest and decrease stress by removing TV shows that they watch purely out of habit and don’t even really like any more. As catch up/Netflix/Amazon Prime/streaming services, etc. are very on-demand now it’s quite easy to move your show to a more sensible viewing slot in the week.

We need to spend more time identifying the stressors in our lives and finding ways to either eliminate, reduce or mitigate them.

 

 

Eliminate – Pretty clear. If you smoke, stop doing it. Sorted. Same with Pop Tarts for breakfast, stop it.

Reduce – If you get stressed out shopping for food every day, get more organised. Draw up lists, plan your meals and only go shopping once/twice a week (this also opens up more time!).

Mitigate – Not sleeping well because of light or noise? Blackout blinds and ear plugs are an option, potentially moving your bedroom to the other side of the house is one too?

The real trouble I find is in identifying stressors that can be easily dealt with. These are things that just become habits in our lives, or things we have learned ‘to live with’. Like the door in your house that you need to kind of pull up on to get it shut, rather than resetting it and tightening the screws. The ‘correct’ response takes a little bit of planning and a little bit more time, but saves way more time and effort in the long term.

So once you’ve finished reading this, I want you to go away, find a quiet corner and in your mind just ‘walk through’ your standard working day. Try to identify those small things that stress you out a little bit: like finding the correct change for buses or parking; making time to have lunch; always being late for work, etc.

Once you’ve identified a couple, decide which are the easiest to tackle and make a plan to deal with them using eliminate, reduce or mitigate. Once you’ve practiced this skill on smaller stressors, start moving up into the bigger ones.

Drop me an email at colin@mindful to let me know how you got on.

Be fit, be strong, be happy.