If your lifestyle is too stressful, you won't be able to push yourself in your training.
Finding recovery hard? Not making progress in the gym? Could it be your lifestyle and not your training?
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Coach Kevin Don here with your weekly dose of fitness facts! This week I want to expand on something I have touched upon before in my show: basic lifestyle guidelines. These are things that clients or even novice coaches may miss out on, but they have a huge impact on your ability to progress in your training.
As I have discussed on the show a few times now, we can see training as an adaptation to applied stress. Training is like a medical intervention—we have a specific prescription for a desired income. We know that when you are given a prescription from a healthcare provider, they check for drug interactions. One drug may interact with another in an undesirable way that negatively impacts your health, when we want the opposite!
So what could be contraindicative to training? The applied stress from training needs to be above the minimum effective dose and below the maximum tolerated dose to have a positive impact. Other forms of stress would be a contraindication—your maximum tolerated dose will be lower because your OVERALL stress is too high.
Here’s where my basic lifestyle guidelines come into play. There are many things that can cause stress: sleep, nutrition, personal relationships, workload, other sports, etc. So let’s have a look at the basic guidelines I give to my own clients to help reduce stress and increase the effectiveness of their training.
1. Lower intake of inflammatory foods. Now, this one can be tricky, because inflammatory responses are individual (like everything we cover in the show). But if a client tells me they feel bloated and gassy after eating quinoa, then I’d say that’s anecdotal but useful feedback. We all have those foods or drinks we consume and feel sluggish or downright awful afterwards. Perhaps we should steer clear of those, in the absence of blood work for inflammatory foods (which I would recommend to remove guesswork and anecdote). I usually find the most common triggers for inflammation across the general population are dairy and unfermented/soaked grains. Don’t even get me started on alcohol.
2. Vary protein intake. Now, I have talked on the show before about overall protein intake and creating a muscle protein synthesis overload event. That’s not what I mean here. Each protein type (chicken, fish, shellfish, beef) has a unique amino acid profile. Some are higher in some essential aminos than others and some have higher bioavailability. Eggs, for example, are the most bioavailable, but some people may find them inflammatory. Oysters have the highest levels of essential aminos, but you might not want to eat them every day. So, rotating your proteins is a great way to make sure you are exposing yourself to all the varying aminos.
3. Caffeine intake. We all know about that afternoon crash, irrespective of how many cups of joe we have when we wake up. But varying the timing of your first cup of coffee can help avoid that and keep you feeling energized for longer. We all have receptors for different chemicals. These are a bit like little hands or trees—as chemicals or hormones wash past them, they are caught by the receptors. Once a receptor is holding a molecule, it can’t hold another. It’s now blocked. When we first wake up, some of the receptors are still blocked, and so we should wait 90-120 minutes after waking for our bodies to clear the receptors. If you wait, the caffeine will have a greater desired effect. Likewise, anything we take in which affects the system has an elimination time to be excreted. We measure this as a “half-life” which is the time for a substance to reduce to half of its initial value. The half-life of caffeine is about 5 hours, so you would take about 10 hours to excrete caffeine from your system. All of a sudden that 3 p.m. coffee doesn’t look so smart when you can’t fall asleep at 9 p.m.
4. Blue light exposure. Light is a on an electromagnetic spectrum. It ranges from invisible gamma and UV rays, which we can't see, all the way through blue, green, orange, and red visible wavelengths to the other end of (also invisible) infrared and radio waves. Blue light is all around us and is emitted by the sun. Just like we have caffeine receptors, we have conical receptors in the eyes which release different hormones in response to the wavelengths of light hitting them. When the sun goes down, blue light diminishes and we produce melatonin, a hormone that induces sleep. However, the devices we use at home—our cellphones, laptops, tablets, and our television screens—all emit blue light, so our eyes aren’t telling our bodies to produce melatonin, affecting sleep. We can aid this natural process by limiting blue light with avoiding devices in the evening or wearing blue light-blocking glasses, though science still hasn’t confirmed if they really work. I personally wear them in the evening, because it's not possible to say to people, ok, no TV after 4 p.m.
5. Rhythm. The body loves rhythm—it regulates EVERYTHING. It's why shift work is so bad for us systemically. I encourage my clients to have a regular sleep-wake cycle and regular feeding times. This way your body is helped with its homeostasis (the natural state it wants to be in).It’s a stress on the body to have different events coming at it all the time which it has to respond to. The body thrives on regularity.
Remember that being healthy and fit has more about what you do with the 23 hours in the day you aren’t in the gym training. Of course, a training plan or style has an impact on your goals and outcome, but if you are in a downward spiral of accumulating stress, these basic lifestyle guidelines will steady the ship a lot faster than changing training or your coach will!