Stress, Cortisol, and Sympathetic Overdrive

that's pretty good so i wrote that down and then after after my tenure at pollocking group where i was teaching you know charles had i taught for them for a long time as an assistant charles left i came in and started teaching a lot of the stuff he was teaching with biosig and with the picp stuff started getting um mentored under dr james laval and his big thing was all cortisol right cortisol managing stress and he and i would have these arguments which was stupid because he He's a hell of a lot more brilliant than I am. I'd argue with him. You know, no, it's all about insulin and insulin resistance because that, you know, that's what I had learned. And then after I left, I started really looking into it, looking at the biochemistry, bioenergetics and things like that. And I went, man, he's right. I said, it's not really about the cortisol. It's about the stress. It's about having chronic, unmitigated stress. And cortisol is not the main thing you're looking at. It's just the one thing that people can measure because it has a long half-life. So the real problem is sympathetic overdrive and adrenaline, because adrenaline acts like an allosteric effector of your metabolism. And the sympathetic system is really, we're not that different than we were 100,000 years ago. I mean, I'm sure we can get into an argument on that, but let's just say 2,000 years ago. Our genetics have not evolved that much in the last couple of thousand years. What's evolved is and rapidly is our environment. So some of these systems we have that are supposed to protect us in nature aren't or they're very acute. They're not supposed to be ramped up all the time. And so I started looking at, you know, what I was teaching at Polycon Group, which is basically how to train people for the Olympics. and then I would go and I would train people like normal people like normal Karen and Joe and realize that man these are great techniques and all the stuff I'm learning but they can't actually do it what's what's the difference between them why can they not do it but other people can and I went man it's just a stress thing so we started getting into that looking at some of Joel Jameson's work and then we kind of created this system of the and the antithesis of beast mode, which is least mode. So it's more along the lines of really taking an assessment of what's going on outside of the gym. Like you have all of these different stimuluses and stressors that if you not recovering then you probably don need to be beasting yourself in the gym