Gender Differences in Training and Blood Pressure

and it's the same thing on the on the side of the women whenever you whenever a woman comes in they're typically typically and i'm being i'm saying all this in a very generalized manner most guys that come in are going to be hyper tense and most girls are going to be hypotense and a lot of it has to do with what they've done before they've come to see you whenever most men want to change the way their physique looks what modality do they usually choose piling food in and lifting weights that's it right exactly right so here's a thing. I'm piling food. Hypertrophy work and overeating is inherently insulin resistance promoting and it's inherently inflammatory promoting. And that's not a bad thing if it's balanced out. But most guys will go on a nine month bulk to try to put weight on and they don't realize it's maybe it's wintertime and you're wearing a lot of heavy clothing and you're not really looking at yourself naked and you look really good in clothes. And then you get your spring hits and you're going to start your summer shred and you kind of take a an assessment of yourself in the in the mirror and you go oh my god i took that bulk a little too far so then what do they end up doing they then they super diet and they go the extreme the opposite direction so most of the guys that that we see they probably need to do more conditioning initially and a little bit less weight training not no weight training but a little bit less emphasis on that and a little bit more emphasis on the conditioning side Most women probably need to do a little less conditioning and a little bit more actual weight training Because you get a girl that comes in and, again, for anybody listening to this, I know I'm being very – I'm not trying to be misogynistic. I'm just speaking from experience. Most girls will come in and you'll say, okay, look, you're borderline very hypotense. um you tell me whenever you stand up you're getting postural hypo hypotension you're you're seeing spots and you're getting really uh you're starting to feel faint you have cold hands and feet what we're going to work on is we're probably going to work on a lot of strength training initially and not as much conditioning and then it's almost always they go oh i do strength training and you go oh cool what do you do they go oh i do body pump you're like no no no no that's no no no that's not what i mean is like uncomfortable lifting where you actually strained and you feel like you're going to poop out your spleen. Like that's, that's what I'm talking about. Because that's, what's going to raise your blood pressure back up. And for the guy and for the guys, it's like, Hey man, your blood pressure is really high. You got stage two hypertension. I need to get that down. You're not going to be able to lift that away. We're probably going to have to do some just standard aerobic interval training or Tabata's or whatever you've been steady state, cardio lifts, whatever you might need to do that for a little bit of time. And then the guy looks at you and goes, Oh no, I'm going to lose all my gains. I'm like, well, you know, if you have a heart attack, you're going to lose your gains anyways. If you get diabetic, you're going to lose them anyways. So you might as well spend a good six to eight weeks getting in shape. And then we can reassess and start working on your strength and hypertrophy at that point. Yeah, super interesting. And that's exactly it. That is a lot of the time what you see, isn't it? It's one needing to go one way and then maybe needing to be pulled back a little bit. um we i want to touch on the nervous system but i've got some questions from people that kind of submitted some questions and i think we'll kind of touch on some of the things within those questions that that the nervous system's having an impact on that we might not actually understand you know or we might not realize that our kind of unmanaged nervous system is having an impact on um this is one that i well i'll ask you the question and then you can kind of make it or let us know about it but um someone's uh messaged in and kind of said that they have been told that they've got a gluten intolerance so a food intolerance um they've done their own research and there's a bit of a split you know some people are saying gluten is this kind of toxic substance different farming techniques nowadays causing this you know um intolerance or widespread intolerance to gluten other people so not necessarily celiac but just intolerance other people are saying this doesn't exist like you know this is this is bullshit um yeah but the person is saying that they've had a positive response in terms of cutting gluten out of their diet that they don't but they're not sure they kind of think well maybe gluten isn't the problem but i am seeing a positive response in terms of cutting gluten out of my diet do you have any thoughts about what might be causing that reaction to gluten and why that might be occurring well okay so you can get you can get intolerant to pretty much almost anything food wise right whether that's intolerance to dairy or whether it's intolerance to a certain vegetable or whatever so when you're under an extreme amount of chronic stress or stress for a long time we realize that the master controller for this is your hypothalamus. So if you think this hypothalamus, a little gland in your brain, and it's, it's kind of like looking around at the rest of everybody else and it's saying, okay, I, I, here, I go back, I'll teach it the way I usually do. Cause I think about it as a business. Think about the hypothalamus as like the CEO of a company, right? So what does the CEO do? He looks at financial reports and predictions and he looks at history and he looks at all this stuff and he makes decisions on what everybody else needs to be doing. So then if he's looking around and he's seeing that, you know, you're stressed out and you have all these issues going on, he's going to then talk to other glands in the body. One of the main ones is the pituitary gland. And that you think about him, he's kind of like the general manager of the company. So he's getting advice from the CEO. He's then going to go tell all the other departments what they need to do. Okay. So then the, the pituitary will talk to the adrenals and the thyroid and the testes and all these other areas and they'll tell the workers what to do and the workers are your little hormones and that type of thing so depending on what's been going on things like trauma early childhood trauma adult trauma chronic stress not sleeping enough chronically dieting yo-yo dieting overeating all these things are stressors trainings are stress like everything's a stressor your brain is going to mount a response to that through a chemical signal through adrenal output of things things like cortisol And it gonna also have a nervous system component as well here the thing if i bathing in stress for a long time the nervous system can then accelerate intestinal permeability by increasing activation of mast cells and histamine which basically for lack of a better way of saying it punches holes in your intestines and allows for things to get into circulation that aren't supposed to be there high levels of cortisol leaky gut is that leaky gut syndrome what people have preferred yeah and you know depending on who you talk to if you say leaky gut syndrome they'll lose their minds you know to me it's all a matter of semantics leaky gut intestinal permeability whatever that basically your things are getting in the circulation aren't supposed to be there stress increases something called zonulin which then also creates leak years leak your cells and that type of thing so you start getting antigens or food particles that aren't digested totally in the body you start bacteria viruses all sorts of stuff that can get into circulation and then you mount it you mount an immune system response which increases inflammation and then the immune system starts to attack those foods so if it's somebody that maybe they've lived off of gluten for a long period of time and they've gone through some traumatic things and not sleeping a lot or maybe they were building their career and they basically ate a croissant for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch and a lasagna bake for dinner, and they've been over consuming gluten for a long time while they're under stress, there's a good chance that they could have an immune, immune modulated inflammatory response towards that food. So then every time they get it, they get a reaction. So yeah, that there can be that, you know, there's a lot of things about gluten that nobody knows about yet. There's a, we don't know that much about the body. Anyways, people try to talk like we know what the hell the body's doing. Nobody knows shit, right? It's, modern medicine has not been around that long and we're still finding things out all the time and testing and retesting. But if you get locked into that type of brain trauma, stress, chronic stress, whatever, and then you start getting an immune system response, if you pull gluten out, you're probably going to feel a bit better. If you put it back in, you're probably going to feel a bit worse. So in that case, if you feel better without the gluten, then just avoid gluten for a while, say like six to eight weeks, try to avoid it as much as you can, and then try eating it again. And if you don't get a response to it, then genetically, you probably don't have a problem. If you've been tested, if you're not celiac, if you don't have an IBD, IBS, whatever, gluten is probably not going to be a problem. But people need to understand that anytime you overeat anything, while you're under an enormous amount of stress, you are probably going to get intolerant to that, which is why people should probably try a lot of stress management and be good food variety okay so and so cutting so if someone does get to that point potentially pulling that out of the diet and starting to address some of those kind of chronic stresses and then maybe thinking about reintroducing it at a later date when stress is more manageable or building those tools to manage stress and potentially there could be some some reintroduction without the symptoms yeah absolutely and you know if you do a lot of reading into it nobody knows Is it gluten that's the problem or is it wheat that's the problem? Is corn the problem? There's all these things that can be causing inflammation. If you're overeating them, especially if your body can't recover from that, then that can cause a problem. Hell, training causes intestinal permeability. If you train in the heat, you become temporarily permeable in the intestines, especially if you're training at a high VO2 max like what you would be doing if you're rolling a lot and competing and doing jiu-jitsu or if you're an endurance athlete or you know if it's hot outside if like in Brisbane here it's hot most of the year and if you're training out my shed and it's 38 degrees outside and 80% humidity you are creating a situation where as your core body temperature goes up it does create a level of intestinal permeability and so you have to keep that in mind right so if I if I'm eating gluten breakfast lunch and dinner if I'm eating dairy and I have a dairy issue if I'm also training in the heat, if I'm not getting enough sleep, these are all contributing factors that would then quite possibly create an environment where you could become intolerant to a certain food. The thing to do is do a diet for a while and then try to add it back in. If you get another reaction, then guess what? Gluten's probably not for you. But I personally could not, I wouldn't, I don't have any issues with gluten. My issue is typically with dairy. When I get stressed out, I get dairy issues, but man, if I had to go the rest of my life without dairy or gluten, man, what's life's not worth living shit. Um, but it's just all three groups there, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, no, no pizza, no, you know, Greek yogurt and all this shit. Yeah. Like I feel, I feel sorry for a lot of my friends and a lot of my colleagues that do actually have real issues Like uh like my one of my trainers shane he uh he celiac like he can have it like um and i just looking at that like man i wish there was something i could do to snap my finger and fix that so that he could have foods that he doesn't you know can't does he can't have his partner does not have celiac but every time she adds in gluten it jacks her up my wife zoe every time she eats gluten it jacks her up right so if um even if you're tested and um you're shown that it's not an issue it could still potentially be an issue um and if it's bothering you that bad then just avoid it well we went on holiday to sicily for two weeks and the amount of cannolis and ice cream and pasta and pizza we ate If I couldn't go back there, I don't know what I'd do. It was the best time of the year. Well, you know, you hear a lot, too. You hear a lot. Guys, they'll go to Italy for a holiday, and they'll eat pizza and bread and all this, and they'll go, oh, I didn't have a single issue eating gluten and wheat and all that stuff in Italy. They must just have different wheat than we have here. But then they go to Sainsbury's or they go wherever, and they buy pasta that was in Italy, And they have a reaction to it. Like it probably has less to do with the pasta and the bread and all of that. It probably has more to do with the environment you're putting yourself into, which is I'm stressed out all the time. My tolerance to things are going to go down. If I go on holiday and the stress goes down, all of a sudden my tolerance goes up. Interesting. Yeah, super interesting, isn't it? Just that little example is amazing. Yeah. Stress, your brain controls everything. when I lived in Texas I would I would tell clients to go on holiday you'd have I'd have a business owner that hadn't had a holiday in 10 years and they're not they're getting zero results even though they're being great on everything I'm like listen I want you to take two weeks and I want you to go to Mexico and I want you to sit on the beach and I want you to drink beer and eat burritos I don't give a shit what you do I just I don't want you to diet or train and they would lose weight and they'd come back and they'd be like, okay, I got it. I just need to drink beer and eat Mexican food all day. That's the solution. It's like, no, the solution is to put your body in the environment that you had in Mexico, which is you need to start taking more time for yourself and de-stressing because that's ultimately what's controlling your digestive issues. So just on that, so looking at the gut, let's just go back to the gut health.