Reduce your Stress to Increase your Muscle

Have you been stressed?  I have…sorry for the break in the action.  Hopefully I can start posting with some more regularity but we’ll see!

Did you know that it’s a bad thing to be stressed?  Sure you did, but why?  When you get stressed your body releases a hormone called cortisol.  This hormone breaks down material in your body to release energy—so as to aid your fight or flight response.  Cortisol needs to be controlled so that it doesn’t go crazy releasing energy in your body, because muscle is the source of that energy.  If you’re interested in building muscle, you need to keep cortisol in check.  To start that you need to reduce your stress level.  So here’s some ways to bring down your stress level:

• Plan: uncertainty causes stress in most people’s life.  The less you have to decide in the heat of the moment the lower your stress levels are.
• Eat regularly: eating spikes your insulin which is the opposing hormone to cortisol.  So eating regularly keeps your body busy processing food and cortisol is less active.
• Relax: Make sure you plan in down time during your day.  Having a packed schedule will not do you good in the long run.  Do everything you can to keep this time margin in your life.

I mentioned insulin above, we’ll talk about that tomorrow…