Cortisol Makes Your Workouts Better!

Cortisol makes your workouts better

There is no hormone in the human body that’s sole purpose is to tear down the body and destroy it. And that includes cortisol. We use cortisol everyday to help us get up in the morning and prepare us for the day. Which is why cortisol levels are typically highest in the morning.

Cortisol also spikes when we workout. And this is what we are going to talk about today. Why it spikes with intense exercise? how it benefits us? What else is happening in the body to keep these cortisol spikes under control? And if our cortisol levels are out of control is it because of intense exercise?

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Cortisol makes your workouts better
Cortisol is considered to be a stress hormone and nobody likes stress. Which is why I would rather look at it as a readiness hormone. It helps us get up and ready for the day. As well as get us ready for our workouts. In an emergency it gets us ready by improving our focus and heightens our bodies senses. Increasing our heart rate, the flow of blood to our muscles and it boosts our strength. Cortisol does all of this by releasing adrenaline.

Improved focus, and blood flow to our muscles along with increased strength all seem like good things for our workouts, but it does even more. It is responsible for mobilizing stored energy and it does this from all available sources in our bodies, including the muscles, liver and body fat. Burning excess body fat is something a lot of us want to do. This is what happens when cortisol is released acutely not chronically.

I should mention here that while cortisol is being released it is using the amino acids from our muscles for energy as well as body fat, putting us in a catabolic state during the time we are training and while this scares some, this is the whole point of weight training to tear the muscles down so they can be rebuilt bigger and stronger than before.

While the cortisol release that comes with intense exercise is much the same as when we are in a stressful situation it has one major difference and that is, with intense exercise the body releases endorphins helping us feel good and relaxed after a hard workout. Aiding to lower our cortisol levels back to normal.

When we are training we’re okay with an acute cortisol spike, but we want these levels to drop back down again after we finish training. And under normal circumstances this is what happens. They did a study on a group of men. The first group was older with the average age of 62 and the other group younger with the average age of 30. These were active healthy men, but had never weight trained before and they put them on a 10 week program to test their hormone responses to resistance training.

What they found was that over the course of the 10 weeks the test subjects all had improved their resting cortisol levels. Having lower day to day levels than when they began and over the course of the training program their bodies also adapted to the training stress having a lower cortisol response to the workouts.

So consistent regular training can in fact lower your overall cortisol levels leaving you in a much more anabolic state to build muscle.

Chronically high cortisol levels is a very different thing. When it is chronically high it affects other hormones like insulin and thyroxine or T4 having a negative affect on metabolism. Now instead of helping you burn fat it is helping you store fat.

If you are constantly in a heightened state of stress. Exercise can help, but at first you may not want to train quite as intensely and you’ll require more time for recovery. The heavier you train the lower the amount of overall volume you should do. You’ll want to keep your overall training intensity a little more moderate until you have your stress levels back in check.

This along with improving the quality of the foods you eat. Avoiding refined sugars and lifestyle changes like taking more time to relax. Whether it be with friends or a new hobby. Take some time to laugh and have fun. And do not neglect your sleep that way you can keep working out while having fun.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5988244/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228160384_Cortisol_and_physical_exercise

https://physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jappl.1999.87.3.982

https://www.t-nation.com/training/the-best-damn-cortisol-article-ever