6 ways to avoid overstressing the body

6 ways to avoid overstressing the body

Disrupted sleep, sudden high pulse, training doesn’t feel good or feels forced, constant illness, or losing your temper because of small things? These could all be symptoms of overstress or
overtraining. You might be thinking that overtraining doesn’t concern you because you’re not an athlete. But in reality, overstress, or chronic fatigue can be a problem for anyone from athletes to those maintaining their basic fitness levels.

Overstress isn’t only caused by excessive training, but the whole consisting of exercise, nutrition, stress, and recovery. A very common cause for overstress among people who train is too little rest and recovery combined with excessive activity and stress. In this situation, the overall stress from life grows too large compared to what we can recover from; during overstress, the body and mind can’t recover optimally from the stress they are being subjected to, and the body starts to show symptoms.

It’s good to remember that busy life, pressure at work, possible problems in relationships, and any other everyday matters cause stress for the body. If there are a lot of things that cause stress in your life and we combine this with high-intensity exercise (physical stress) and won’t allow for sufficient recovery, the capacity of the body to cope with stress is slowly used up.

You might think of the ability to cope with stress as a cup of coffee, in which we’re pouring liquid (stress factors) to the point that the cup is full and the liquid starts to overflow. If our reserves are not able to handle stress and recover from stress, we will suffer from overstress, or a state where the liquid is flowing over and problems start. What can we do then, to avoid overstress? Next, we will talk about six different ways that can help you to avoid overstressing the body.

Adjusting training

When we use 70% intensity in exercise, it is aerobic, where all the energy production is done using oxygen. When the intensity of training goes above the aerobic threshold (>70%), the body starts to form acids.

This type of training stresses the body.

To avoid overstress and to get the best health benefits, you should adjust the intensity of training so that most of the exercise takes place at 70% intensity. Of course, we also need to train harder, which is included in the remaining 30%.

It’s important to remember that we can’t always do everything at high intensity. Otherwise, the body can’t recover efficiently, and the risk of overstress increases. If you don’t use a heartbeat monitor, which allows you to keep track of your heartbeat, you can use the following rule: you must be able to talk without being out of breath. As soon as you notice that you’re out of breath, you have gone above the basic fitness level and the 70% threshold. 

When planning the training program, it is important to take into account the overall stress from everyday life and adjust the exercise accordingly. If you’re going through a particularly stressful period in your life, it’s not sensible to stress the body with heavy training; otherwise we will cause long term stress, which increases the risk of overstress. 

Use a suitable mix of performance exercises and stability and mobility exercises. Adjust the relationships so that you can recover well. Remember, that rest allows you to develop!

Active recovery

Like I mentioned before, development takes place during rest. Recovery can be divided between active and passive recovery. Active recovery includes some light physical activity (walking, light yoga, stretching, foam rolling for recovery etc) whereas sleep and nutrition are passive.

Let’s see in more detail how you can increase active recovery in your life.

A good foam roller can allow us to help our body to recover better. But when foam rolling for
recovery, it’s good to note a couple of things, so you don’t use the wrong technique and cause
negative effects. To move fluids in the body, we need maximum painless pressure. A strong painful pressure equals training hard and has nothing to do with recovery. When the aim is to move fluids in the body with foam rolling, the roller needs to move with a slow brushing motion using maximum painless pressure.
By doing this, you can get the fluids to move and create a relaxed state. You can test how effective the foam rolling is by doing a test exercise (for example a forward bend) before the foam rolling and compare to see if there is any improvement afterwards. If the mobility in the test exercise has decreased, you know the pressure you used was too hard. 

Another way is to adjust the intensity of training. When we adjust the intensity of the training to be low, we can complete the exercises, for example, the ones in Anatomic Functional Training, in a way that they function as active recovery. For example, use the warm up and warm down in AFT as a very slow-paced exercise, where we just move the body and don’t really even stretch. This kind of light training can be done on a daily basis without any fear that it will burden the body. 
Warm up and warm down are excellent opportunities to add active recovery to the training itself. Do dynamic stretches and fast, light foam rolling before the training session. Remember light stretches and foam rolling for recovery after the training.
This will prepare your body for theupcoming training and return it back from the training state. You will help your body to recover even better from the stress caused by the training session.

The last tip for active recovery is actually not related to exercise, but something completely else. Book time from your calendar for the things that you enjoy doing, like meeting friends or going to movies or the theatre. Something that you enjoy!

Seasonal planning

Fitness consists of many different areas, and sometimes we can be greedy and try to fit many
different types into one week of training. We can’t, however, train all qualities at once. We have to make the training more sensible through segmenting the training.

For example, you can choose one month when your goal is to strengthen the muscles that support the body and improve mobility and when other areas (like basic fitness, speed endurance, and muscle strength) play a smaller role. 

During the next segment, you can focus on basic fitness, and the one after that can be about muscle strength. By segmenting the different areas, we can make progress in overall fitness, avoid overstress when the intensity and amount of training stays within reasonable limits, and you will be left with time for other things like spending time with friends and family.

Burning adrenaline

I’m sure you know that the stress hormones increase in the body when we are stressed. If the stress is caused by psychological stress like being busy, we have to burn that spike of stress hormone out of the body.
Most people who are experiencing psychological overstress choose to lie down on the sofa and watch television after they come home from work, some might also meditate for a moment. 

These activities are not enough to burn the stress hormones from our body.

So that we can burn the adrenaline from our body, we need a short (10-20s) intensive exercise, followed by a 10-minute relaxation exercise. If you have time, you can go for a 10-minute walk afterwards. Note that you can’t use this method if you’re already experiencing overstress.

Treating the problem

There are several different adaptogens available for the treatment of stress. They are plants that can help our bodies cope through stressful situations. Even if we can use different plants or meditation exercises to calm down our nervous system momentarily, it doesn’t remove the cause of stress. These different tricks can, of course, help, but if we aren’t able to remove the cause of stress from our lives, the stress levels will not be reduced, and the body starts to react.

Next, think about what you need to do to recover, why are you in this situation, and what lifestyle choices have led to the current situation? Sometimes we have to make radical choices for our own wellbeing, otherwise, we won’t be able to change anything so significantly that it would help.

An excellent example of this is the Finnish hurdler Nooralotta Neziri, who a few years ago experienced overstress and had to cut the season short. For an athlete, not competing until the end of the season is always a tough decision, but it was the only option, for Nooralotta to recover properly. Reacting early enough helped Nooralotta recover, and she was able to return to hurdling during the next season.

Measuring overall stress

One of the long term treatments is to pay attention to the overall stress in life. It’s good to use both a subjective and objective measurement to tell if you are drifting towards overstress.

If you are training with a goal, a training diary will help you. Follow the weights you are able to use for strength training or the distance you can run at a certain speed. If you notice your performance is stuck at a certain level, you know something isn’t right. You should hear the alarm bells at least when the performance starts to get worse. In this situation, adjust your training intensity and add active recovery.

If you don’t use a training diary, it’s good sometimes to stop and listen to the signs the body is giving you about where you are. You can use, for example, mobility exercises to measure overall stress. If you notice stiffness or tightness, you know things are going in the wrong direction.

You can also ask yourself questions: how well do I sleep, am I energetic? If you notice the answers have a negative sound to them, react, and change things! When you respond early on, you can stop overstress from ever developing.

Check Anatomic Functional Training FREE PROGRAMS