Stress Management and Training Adaptation

How does the body adapt to the stimuli right And I often talk about this reality where if your training isn your biggest stress then you just can respond to the training right So you have to look at like what are the interventions to start gaining control of your psychological perception to the stresses of your life? And if you're someone who's aiming to improve your physique and have a great physique, you have to create a life that ultimately allows training to be the greatest stressor and that's in my eyes the only way you're ever going to adapt um because you know i'm sure you get people who come in and they've got all these other things going on and they just don't respond as well and you're like well that that has to be an expectation that gets managed like you know i have clients who i work with they're like i'm not responding really well but they've got this and this and this and this that are that are probably greater stresses physiologically to their body so no matter what type of strength training stress you're subjecting them to their body just isn't prioritizing responding to that and adapting to that it's prioritizing these other things and I think that's a huge thing to think about when it comes to periodization that most people don't consider is like, what is the biggest stressor in your life? Right. Is it finance? Is it relationships? Is it whatever? You know, COVID. It could be a lot of things. Yeah, I like that. I like training should be the biggest stress in your life. That's a that's actually a really good way of putting it. Like if you want results, then you're going to have to be stressed in the gym, but you need to be relaxed everywhere else. Yeah, it's not getting the most out of it. Yeah, it's two hours of sympathetic and 22 of parasympathetic. And that's maybe like ideal, but I think that's the way you got to contextualize it. It's like, you're not going to grow. I mean, bodybuilders grow because they take excessive amounts of anabolics. It's, you know, I call it the ultimate autonomic override, right? It's just like, no matter how much sympathetic arousal you've got, you're still going to grow. So that's why bodybuilders are able to grow. And people always throw that back. They're like, oh, bodybuilders grow and they're always stressed. Yeah, but they're taking more gear than most people should ever look at in their life. But if you don't have that lever, you have to look at, well, what are all these mechanisms and interventions I could use to ultimately regulate the autonomic nervous system? I think people don't understand as well the bodybuilders is they're taking also things you've never even heard of and you won't hear for another 20 years. Unnecessarily most of the time. Yeah. I mean, I lived that world for a long time. Like I would meet guys and like, I'm taking this and this and this. I'm like, what the fuck is that? And you know how they train, right? That's always the funny thing. It becomes, it always seems like those guys, and this could be an overgeneralization, but those guys are the lower level bodybuilders. It's not usually the high level pros and the Olympic guys. It's the guys who aren't quite good enough or the high level nationals or, you know, the local bodybuilders who are taking exponentially more than everybody else. And they think that you got to take this much to get to the high level. They don't put any emphasis on training. I don't put any emphasis on nutrition. I don't put any emphasis on recovery modalities or someone at my level. Like I was OCD about that stuff, man. Like I was neurotic about all these things. I was absolutely obsessed with what's my recovery look like? What's my nutrition look like? What's my training look like? And then this other thing was just an augment. And I don't say I was innocent. I wasn't an angel, but it certainly wasn't to the extent that I hear some of these other guys just just abusing substances. Yeah, I never understood that because, I mean, I trained for 13 or 14 years before I ever took a steroid. And the first thing I took was Bravo T200 from Mexico, which was underdosed. You know, you get eight mils in a 10 mil bottle. You didn't know what you were taking. It would cause massive bloat. And we're taking Reforbit B and we're going to Mexico and getting all this stuff. And, you know, then we started getting into the point where you had really high quality stuff coming out of Mexico. They got smart. They said, oh, these people want, well, they want steroids. We'll give them really high quality stuff. So they started doing that. And I was never a big cycle person, even when I was 270 pounds. It was like, you know, I took the minimal effective dose to get as big as I could. And then when that didn't work, I said, well, I'll just try more stuff. And all it did was give me more side effects. Yeah.