Stress Less to Lift More

You wake-up abruptly to the sound of your alarm clock. You press snooze, and then jolt up about 5 minutes later. Then, you scramble to find clothes to wear, brush your hair, brush your teeth and race out of the house to the car. While you're driving to work, you are constantly checking the time, getting exasperated by every stop light, ever car that's going too slow on the highway, and all of the detours that send you off route. When you finally make it to your job, just on time, you gasp a sigh of relief. Now you can begin to attack your "to-do list," which seems to be never-ending. Overwhelmed, you sit at your desk and take a big sip of coffee and get to work.

Does your day closely mirror the scenario I've described above?

No, I'm not a psychic, and I haven't been watching you on a hidden camera. So many of us, regrettably, spend our days on auto-pilot. Our heart rates rise along with our blood pressure, and we constantly complain that there aren't enough hours in the day.

Impending deadlines, hectic work schedules, familial responsibilities, and other stressors, can make it hard to allow yourself to relax and just let go of all of the craziness for a bit. With a little bit of meditation, however, you'll find that your workouts will improve, you will recover faster, and your daily life might just be a bit more manageable.

To understand recovery and stress, you need a little bit of background about the central nervous system. The chart above illuminates the hierarchy of the nervous system, but for the scope of this article, I'm going to talk about the divisions of the autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.

The parasympathetic nervous system allows us to "rest and digest." When you are relaxing or meditating, your heart rate decreases. The PNS promotes recovery from stress and healing. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the sympathetic nervous system. The SNS is known for the "fight or flight" state. If you trip on the stairs, you're going to enter the sympathetic nervous system. Your heart rate elevates, your blood pressure increases, and your breath may become shallow and infrequent.

Many of us are quite familiar with the sympathetic nervous system, as we spend our days in frequent bouts of stress and anxiety.

Now what does all of this have to do with exercise? Well, as you know, exercise will do quite a number on your body. Your connective tissues take a beating, and they need time to repair so that you can attack your subsequent workouts. If we stay in the SNS, then, you're just not going recover optimally, if at all. In fact, you may even enter a state of catabolism (breakdown of muscle proteins). There's no sense in busting your butt in the gym if you're ultimately gonna stress away all your hard work, is there?

The diagram on the left talks a bit about Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome. There are three stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion. Without adequate rest after repeated bouts of stress, one may reach the exhaustion stage, in which their performance regresses and they experience frequent injury. The body needs adequate rest in order to continue to train hard.

Here's an interesting study on high school swimmers: Jiang and colleagues had the athletes use meditation for recovery from intense training sessions. "Mood states, anxiety, and heart rate measures served as the dependent variables." They found that "meditation training as a mental warm down combined with a physical warm down are more effective to facilitate acute and long-term heart rate recovery, lower mood disturbance scores, decrease cognitive anxiety compared to just taking a rest after vigorous training and during the recovery period." Furthermore, "the experimental group demonstrated significantly lower scores than the control group in fatigue, depression, and anger." The meditating students had a more regulated mood, and they were recovering better from practices!

Another study, with Stults-Kolehmainen et. al. found that "in all analyses, higher stress was associated with worse recovery. Stress, whether assessed as life event stress or perceived stress, moderated the recovery trajectories of muscular function and somatic sensations in a 96-hour period after strenuous resistance exercise."

When considering the stresses felt by our body in exercise, we must also remember all of the other factors at play. If you're regularly working 70+ hour work weeks, or leading a lifestyle of stress, that will undoubtedly affect your workout recovery time. Every stressor accumulates a greater demand for recovery on the central nervous system, and dictates more time to return back to your baseline.

In my experience, meditation is a wonderful practice that can help you wind down after a tough day. Even 10-15 minutes a day will help you maintain your equilibrium and channel your inner Dalai Lama. Different types of meditation work for different people, but I prefer to just lay on my back, taking big, diaphragmatic breaths, and thinking positive thoughts. I let all of the negativity escape my mind, and remind myself not to let trivial things consume me.

Find a way to allow your brain to unwind after a tough day or tough week, and you may find yourself to be more at peace, less injured, and performing at an all time high. Allow your body to recover from all of the demands you have placed on it, so that you can get back to working out in half the amount of time!

As my father always says "don't write checks that your body can't cash!"

Mind and Body Awareness

It is amazing to me how out of touch we have become with our own bodies. The phrase "somatic intelligence" refers to our sense of mind and body, and how they connect with one another. We are so overwhelmed by other trivial day-to-day tasks, that those two elements are completely disconnected. In my opinion, your body is (or should be) your number one priority no matter what.

A few cues I give a lot are "squeeze your butt" or "keep your core tight." They sound pretty simple and straight forward, right? You'd be surprised at how many people either don't understand those cues, or are simply unable to execute them properly. In an ideal world, I shouldn't have to remind someone to squeeze his butt during a lift—it should be automatic. Unfortunately, we live in a world today where we are almost always sitting, frequently stressing, and barely focusing. For many of us, we are more concerned with errands, work-related tasks and our social lives that we literally forget how to move our own butts.

Look at any gymnast or dancer: he or she has an amazing sense of control. Every single movement and contraction is intentional. Gymnasts understand how to "stay tight" when they need to, and dancers know how to absorb force when they land on their toes, while the overwhelming majority of people I've met do not. I watch people walk with lead feet on the ground, stomping up the stairs, and I see athletes who deadlift heavy weights without a properly braced midline.

What does all of this mean? Our minds and are bodies are now more disconnected than ever. I believe that many injuries or aches have to do with our lack of awareness. I can show you what a proper squat should look like, but the trickier part is to make you understand how a proper squat should feel. My goal is to make you aware of what parts of your bodies are working and when.

For someone who is still new to the gym (and even for experienced gym-goers), learning how to create that kind of tension is difficult. When we are seated at a desk, our shoulders are rounded forward, are necks are looking down, are glutes are turned off and our cores are on vacation. Take that person into a gym and they're going to carryover those same habits to their lifts, unless someone teaches them how to engage their muscles properly.

I believe that, at least for a while, everyone should have a coach or a trainer. I don't care if you've been working out for 10 years, it's always important to have someone else watching you. I sure as hell have other people to critique me, and it's extremely helpful. We can't always watch ourselves, even if there is a mirror in front of us. Just like you would have an editor proofread your article before submitting it into a local newspaper, you should make sure someone is watching you lift weights. If you want to avoid injury and see results, you need someone else's help. If a coach is too expensive, you should, at the very least take a video of yourself; I can guarantee you'll see some things on video you didn't notice beforehand.

The most important thing, however, is to be aware. The next time you do any movement, whether it's a lunge or a clean, take notice. What is contracting? Where do you feel the burn? Is there any pain with that movement? Are you breathing? Pay attention to these things and you'll be surprised of what your body will tell you.