Recovery is highly under-emphasized when it comes to making changes to ones body.

Once your level of stress and specific hormone production (stress hormones) hit a critical level,  your body halts all progress. We work extremely hard adding and creating different stress producing variables (listed below) to stimulate the positive effects (hypertrophy, body fat loss, body comp changes, etc). This type of stress hormone production through extreme adrenal gland stimulation is beneficial, however, if we produce too much, we leave our optimal hormone zone and instead create a detrimental condition called adrenal fatigue.

As we increase the variables of stress, we need to make sure we bring ourselves back down into the recovery zone. We push ourselves through that extremely hard workout to get the benefit from it, so we then need to take the necessary steps to decrease the level of hormone production and let our central nervous system (CNS) recover. If we never let our bodies decompress and recover, we will literally never get back down into the optimal range of hormone production and CNS recovery.

As we workout and diet, we create stress but don’t go over the threshold. We then add in stressors we can control (listed below). For example, If we don’t get optimal sleep, stress level continues to rise rather than decrease, so instead of CNS stimulation dropping back to the recovery base line, it continues to go upward producing even more stress hormones. Then we add in some life stressors – for example, we all have jobs, kids to take care of – simply things we cannot control but need to make sure get done. This adds to why we don’t sleep properly, why we don’t time our nutrients correctly. Now we get back on the scale and no changes happened or even worse, it went up. So now we stress even more, causing zero chance of our body ever getting back to baseline recovery and never getting into the zone of positive body changes.

So now it’s the next day and it’s time to work out again, but our stressor line is still way above the zone of positive body changes let alone back down to baseline recovery. What do we do though? We have to go workout and diet harder because obviously more is better. And it’s been beaten into us – if you do more and eat less you will lose weight! WRONG. We rest. We need to rest and get back down to stress-free (or stress-limited) homeostasis.

Stressors induced from program:

• Weight training
• Cardio
• Caloric deficit from nutrition intake and energy expenditure

Specific stressors we are in control of:

• Sleep schedule
• Optimal nutrition
• Worrying about why you’re not losing weight

Life, uncontrollable stressors:

• Previous dieting history and health history (most important)
• Job
• Kids
• Significant other
• Dog
• Other variables we just have no control over and have to take care of

To compound the issue – not only does stress inhibit weight loss, but its side effects are directly correlated to weight gain.

So now after days, months – and for most of you women – years of this cycle, you are not anywhere near baseline recovery. We are just adding to the horrible situation of stress hormone production. So how do we fix this? Everyone is different. The longer the dieting history of someone, along with genetics, play a role. Some people can recover quickly by taking a week off from everything and NOT CARING about your diet. Others who have severe long dieting histories, past eating disorders, and poor genetic make up in terms of glucose disposable, insulin sensitivity, and ability to burn body fat can seriously take months or even years. No matter what, when damage is done, it’s done. It’s cumulative and if I have a client who has been in a caloric deficit, running themselves into the ground for years on end we almost have created an irreversible situation. No matter what, it’s going to be a long tough road of dieting to see minimal weight loss, however this is not everyone as most just need a few weeks of eating more food, taking a break from the gym and relaxing.

Let’s look at this in a bit more detail: