FFB #36 - Stress and its toll on you

In todays Friday Fat Black Pete and I discuss stress and it's impacts on your body, especially when it comes to adrenal fatigue (something that I've been dealing with as a post issue of celiac diagnosis last year and something I'm writing about that will inevitably help you because for me it was the 'perfect storm'). What we forget or don't acknowledge is that stress is a stress is a stress and what I mean here is that the more stress we pile on from our lifestyles means the less training stress we can tolerate.

We also go into using HRV (heart rate variability) as a way to track our stress responses in real time. The kicker here is that you might not even feel stressed but your sympathetic nervous (fight-or-flight) system is actually on overdrive and using the tracking apps and devices we link to below can help you become aware of this and create ways to minimise the SNS activity which when chronic will lead to break down and potentially adrenal fatigue.

And finally we jump into one of the biggest stressors we load onto ourselves and this is sleep debt.

Enjoy and as we said in the podcast ... let us know in the comments what you want us to discuss and we will randomly choose a winner to give some cool TriSpecific and Trigger Point swag.

What we cover:

• The NUMBER ONE saboteur of your performance
• The major difference in a pro endurance athlete and you the AG endurance athlete is the...
• Adrenal Fatigue
• Mind-body Connection
• Heart Rate Variability specifically LF/HF values
• Breathing and how it effects both your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems
• Sleep debt
• and more

Links:

Stress and performance:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3108174

Stress and HRV:
http://www.sweetwaterhrv.com/documentation/stressandhrv.pdf

SweatBeat App:
http://www.sweetwaterhrv.com/SweetBeatLife/SweetBeatLife_Features.shtml

Heart Rate Strap to use with SweetBeatLife:

Wahoo Fitness Tickr or Tickr Run

Understanding HRV:
http://www.sweetwaterhrv.com

How to switch off and relax:
http://www.heartmathstore.com

Sleep and performnace:
http://jamesclear.com/better-sleep
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12683469

Getting better sleep:

http://superhumanencoder.com/entrainer-acoustics/
Sunrise clocks