Too busy for stress
Today I’d like to talk about intermittency and stress. I always thought Art DeVany’s ideas about fitness were spot on. I still do, in fact. I had trouble enacting the random workout side of things. This frustrated me for several years. In fairness to the Evolutionary Fitness protocols he laid out, I was too stressed out to be able to stick with them.
I don’t think my story is really all that different than most people in this regard. My learning lately has been to something I didn’t really find on his blog going all the way back to 2006, but I found in his recorded seminar back in 2008 (I think).
I watched it in the fall for the first time even though I bought it when it came out. Hmm, let’s start there with the stressed out example. Here was a wonderful DVD set with tons of great, direct thinking from someone I think really figured out a lot and communicates it so I can understand it. So there it sat unopened for years. Well, in the intervening time work stress and the addition of children into my life really didn’t leave me sufficient time to sit and watch the DVDs. I always had higher priorities placed in front of it. And so the story goes for sticking with a randomized regiment of working out.
The stressed-out condition has been far more pervasive and sinister toward my health.
The stressed-out condition has been far more pervasive and sinister toward my health.
The stressed out condition has been far more pervasive and sinister toward my health. DeVany discusses this in that seminar. The hormonal cascade I experienced motivated me to eat poorly and I wasn’t metabolizing the stress hormones effectively. As the hormones continued to float around in my blood for several years, my insulin resistance went up (as witnessed in abdominal belly fat) and further compounded things.
Also the chronic nature of those hormones running around in me was a persistent fatigue and that undermined my motivation to workout or do physical things. I tried to do the least possible whenever I could to recover. The aggressive workouts, especially CrossFit, I dropped. It turns out that listening to my body was correct in this regard. I could not recover from the overall stress load on my body. I couldn’t workout hard enough to tip the hormone balance back to something healthy. I had crossed into an unbalanced and unhealthy regime.
Back in 2012 I had this notion to work on my stress and unhappiness rather than continue somatic (for me Qigong) or workout routines to maintain health. I worked on the source of that chronic hormonal chain. So it has taken several years, but I recently felt capable of starting up again into something that I absolute loved and benefitted from during the span from 2005-2008. I started up again but this time I have a long term mindset that I have changed my life pattern in a broader sense than before. I also am far more mindful and respecting of the signals my body is sending regarding my level of effort and amount of recovery.
