Check Your Fear Factor: 3 questions to turn any workout into stress relief
BOO!
Have you ever had someone jump out at you as a joke? Ever been startled by the sudden appearance of a spider? Have you felt the instantaneous contraction of every muscle in your body? You hold your breath in that instant. When the moment passes your senses slowly come back online. Heart rate comes down, maybe you climb down off the counter. Perhaps you notice the tingling in your skin as circulation returns, your breathing slows and slowly you feel all your muscles start to relax.
For me, fear is a full body experience. It doesn’t matter if it’s a little thing or a big thing, a real threat, a joke or entertainment, the reaction is the same. You will never catch me at a Halloween Haunted House or watching horror movies. Not only is it physically, mentally and emotionally excruciating in the moment but I have a hard time getting the images out of my head for a long time afterward. So the experience isn’t over when it’s over. It just continues to reverberate in my primitive brain..
But I do get the appeal. High intensity experiences like haunted houses, roller coasters, jumping out an airplane can be a serious adrenaline rush and then after all the endorphins take over and it feels like a high. After all they hit all the dopamine receptors in the brain and can be as addictive as opioids. They make regular everyday life feel kind of dull.
Screaming suffer fest exercise classes like Boot Camp and HIIT trigger the same response.
Now stay with me. I’m not saying that HIIT and Boot camp can’t be a great workout. There is definitely a time and a place for intentional high intensity, peak performance training. As someone who spent years teaching these kinds of classes, I see the draw. They can make you feel strong and powerful and there’s no doubt they burn calories and sculpt the body. But working out at high intensity every day won’t give you a peak, it’ll give you a plateau and in the right circumstances it can trigger some serious problems.
So I want to give you 3 questions to check you fear factor of your workouts and help you determine whether your exercise intensity is helping or hurting your stress level.
Question # 1: On a scale of 1- 10. 1 being absolutely no stress at all and 10 being you want to tear your hair out and run screaming from the room. How would you describe your normal, everyday level of stress? Taking into account that everyday isn’t the same, include your family, relationships and work interactions and perhaps your personal history and how you've dealt with stress in the past.
What the fitness industry has failed to communicate effectively is an understanding of the importance of rest for the body and mind and how over training can actually cause, trigger and exacerbate chronic stress injuries. Fitness professionals embraced the “exercise lowers stress” mantra without qualification or a full understanding of how the body links to the nervous system.
I can’t tell you how many times I saw clients show up to the highest intensity classes every single day, proudly complaining about still being sore from a workout seven days ago. Even when there were options for less intense movement, there seemed to be this underlying fear that taking a day off or going easy could derail their fitness goals to the point of failure. Instead they simply power through, ignoring all the ways the body whispers.
How does it whisper?
Random heart palpitations, anxiety, irritability, insomnia, IBS, TMJ, high blood pressure, blood sugar issues, depression, fatigue, hormone dysregulation, mood swings, chronic pain & inflammation and more.
None of these things are normal. Common, yes, but not normal. All of them are symptoms of an overwhelmed nervous system. The nervous system doesn’t care about burning calories. It doesn't care about what you look like in a bathing suit. It’s only job is keeping you alive and it thinks your favorite boot camp is trying to kill you. (You may even agree) It also might think your boss is trying to kill you, and your commute, and maybe your in-laws and your bills...You get the picture? It’s never just about one thing.
Knowing where you are on your own personal stress scale can help you determine what kind of exercise intensity would best serve you. Physical stress in exercise is how you build strength, mobility and flexibility but it will also trigger the same nervous system response that you get when you’re under threat. Where you are on that scale matters and it can change every day. So if you find yourself high on your stress scale the way to communicate to the nervous system that you’re safe is to give yourself ways to move at lower intensities.
Question # 2: Maybe you have very specific fitness goals and enjoy extreme challenges. Maybe you need to turn your brain off and just like the social interaction of the gym. Maybe your workout is the only thing you do for yourself. Maybe your workout lets you indulge in your diet. What is it that draws you to the types of exercise that you normally choose?
Driven individuals with demanding, high stress lifestyles tend to gravitate toward challenging, high intensity types of exercise. Especially if you don’t have a lot of time to spare. Fitness professionals who offer these kinds of classes or training want to “make it worth your time.” So we do the hardest things. We push ourselves to the absolute limit. After all we can rest when we’re dead.
The problem with this Rocky Horror Fitness Show is that while it may burn calories, it also triggers frightening responses in the nervous system, that without attention can lead to long term physical dysfunctions.
For many of the people who fall into this category,(and I’ll admit to being one of them) this is the only thing that feels good to them and it feels good because it’s their normal. They don’t mind the hard pounding, chest thumping music and the screaming instructor because it keeps them from having to think. They don’t mind burning out to total muscle failure because they don’t really want to feel it anyway. Anything less than 100% seems like a waste of time.
The same physiological reactions that occur in the body when you experience a threat, like a ghost popping out in a haunted house, are the same ones that are triggered on a chronic level with deadlines at work or a conflict with your boss. And the same cascade of stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, etc. are released when you’re angry about being stuck in traffic as when you’re kicking ass in that boxing boot camp. Your high intensity exercise habit floods your system with a classic fight flight response and because it also triggers endorphins and a dopamine high you don’t feel it as any kind of negative.
For folks like these, higher intensity feels better because they don’t take into account their answers to question #1. They haven’t checked in on their baseline. Their “normal” stress level may be so high that they need the highest intensity possible to feel less stressed in their normal everyday life.
The “why” of your choices matters. If you want your workouts to help you reach fitness goals, lower stress levels will play a big role. A body that’s flooded with stress hormones and stuck in fight, flight or freeze will struggle to lose weight, build muscle, sleep and absorb nutrients.
Sometimes simply changing the intention behind why you’re doing the kinds of exercise you’re doing is enough to take the pressure off. Instead of thinking “I have to take an extra kickboxing class today to make up for that double fudge brownie sundae last night.” maybe you choose something like “That kickboxing class is going to be great! I love the music, the instructor and I get to see my friends!”
Exercise should not feel like a punishment and trust me your body feels the difference.
Question # 3: What does your body feel like during & after your workouts? Think about whether or not you are able to stay mentally present and notice what your muscles are doing and feeling for the entire duration of the exercise.
Most of our modern culture takes us away from body awareness. Any discomfort whether it’s physical, mental or emotional, triggers numbing behaviors that have quickly become habits that may seem harmless. A numbing behavior is anything that removes you from the present moment. Doom scrolling social media, binging Netflix, adult coloring books, watching tv while you workout, are all examples. So this question may take some time to answer. High intensity workouts often push you to dissociate from the body and it becomes easier to avoid or ignore any and all sensation.
Let’s go back to that scale of 1- 10 from question # 1 and apply it to your physical exertion during a workout. Where 1 is you sitting here reading this and 10 is ”can’t talk, can’t breath, call 9-1-1” kind of effort. During your workouts, how high does that number need to go before you “feel” it? That scale of 1-10 is probably one of the most difficult things to teach clients. Not only because it’s completely subjective and changes day to day, but because most people, especially hard core exercisers, have lost connection with their bodies. For many people there is no scale of connected sensation through the muscle. There’s only pain or no pain, burn or no burn, nothing in between.
Here’s an experiment. Stand up (you can do this seated too) and place your hand on the wall for balance. Pick up one foot. Now, keeping your standing knee slightly bent, lift and lower the heel of your standing foot away from the floor. Can you feel your calf muscle contract and release? What is your effort level? How long would you have to do these heel raises to get to a 7 on your scale of 1-10? Shake out your leg and try the other side. Do you feel a difference?
That mind body connection is important because when the stress volume is always cranked up, whether it's from physical, mental or emotional sources, eventually you blow out the speakers. The body just stops communicating effectively with the nervous system. Leaving you physically disconnected, exhausted and shut down.
So what does that mean for exercise intensity?
If you are struggling with chronic stress symptoms you need to take a look at the intensity balance of your movement. You need to give your body a way to discharge chronic stress that doesn’t inadvertently add to your stress load. Your nervous system needs balance. It needs a way to turn itself down, to dim the intensity so it can rest. It’s not designed to stay on high alert all the time and neither are you.
Does this mean that you should give up all high intensity workouts? Never do a boot camp or HIIT class ever again?
Well, that depends… On you.
Opposites create balance and I believe in balance in all things. There is a time and a place for higher intensity exercise and we need to learn to be more intentional about how we take care of our body. Stronger resilience allows you to be physically, mentally and emotionally challenged and still come back, quickly and easily to a calm, safe and social state.
Resilience is a trainable skill and can be built by intentionally down regulating the nervous system. Practice asking your body to move into a place of sensation and then giving it a way to come out of that discomfort. This retrains the nervous system in a way that rebuilds internal trust. The body relearns that sensations of physical discomfort aren’t going to last and translates that to other mental and emotional sensations as well. Any workout that’s too much, too fast for too long can override your intention. This is why it’s important to keep your intensity low. On your 1-10 scale, we’re looking for no higher than a 5.
Here are some simple experiments that you can try that lower workout intensity:
Choose a more calming type of music - Music can trigger emotional responses (and stress responses) that we aren’t even aware of. Experiment with how different playlists can affect your mood and stress levels.
Reducing or eliminating the impact - There are a lot of weight bearing exercises that don’t require impact. Give your joints a break. Try exploring a different range of motion or focusing on increasing flexibility for the day.
Dropping the weights - Intentionally lowering the weights or moving with no added weight at all gives the muscles time to repair and come back stronger.
Giving yourself permission to rest - This might mean taking a day or 3 off but it could also be simply giving yourself more time between sets or moving slower.
Do something completely different - play a game, go for a walk in nature or with friends, try a guided meditation.
Skip the pain - If something hurts, stop. Pain isn’t weakness leaving the body. It’s your body telling you something is wrong. Pain also tells the body that you are in danger. Listen to it.
What kind of exercise could you include in your routine that would allow you to find an intensity level below a 5 physically, mentally and emotionally? Keep in mind there are a lot of things that are physically easy but mentally challenging. Choose something that you have permission to change in order to keep that intensity low. Why? Because you’re trying to communicate with your nervous system, in a way that it understands (through the body), that you’re safe and it can come out of fight & flight. It can rest. You can rest. Listen to the way your body whispers and try to move beyond what your eyes can see.
Kinetic Grace Yoga was created specifically with this in mind. This online membership offers a fusion of stress release + yoga + functional fitness in live and on demand video formats that easily fit into even the busiest schedules. Whether you have 5 minutes or 75 you can mix and match, strength, stretch and stress relief and balance out your grit with grace.
I’m Ericka Thomas, Certified TRE® Provider, Yoga instructor, Health coach & Nutrition Specialist. It only took me 20 years to figure out I needed to find a way to balance my own nervous system but better late than never!
If you're looking for a way to balance fitness fire & flow I’d love to work with you!
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