 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Guikey, and today I want to talk about stress and how it negatively impacts your ability to reach your training or even life goals and aspirations. So hopefully a lesson that I teach all of my clients already, but here here's more for completeness, is that all stress is just stress. Stress is very general. So if I, you know, if I stay awake for 48 hours, my back might start to hurt. And even though I didn't do deadlifts the wrong way or anything, I might still have some general manifestation of a problem, probably a problem that I've had before and that is familiar to me. I might have, you know, I have a lot of clients who are coming out of physical therapy and going back into fitness and they might have back pain, but you might have nausea in the morning or you might have headaches later in the day, something like that. All of these problems can be traced back to an accumulation of stressors. Now sometimes it's, you know, I have a disease and that disease needs to be fixed, so make sure you keep an eye out for stuff like that. But in general, if we want healthy living, we want to maximize our positive stressors, like exercise and being awake and living a fulfilled life, doing a job that we love to do. And we want to minimize our negative stressors, like worrying about things that we have no control over. Or performing workouts that aren't really well suited to your body. So today I'm going to walk you through my graph, my little storytelling thing that I try to do to explain this scenario to my clients. We're going to start by plotting stress over time. In vision, this green line is our accumulating stress and this dotted red line is what we're going to call our threshold for symptoms. So if our stress passes that threshold, then we're going to have something come up, some sort of pain problem or body malfunction. We start our graph coming off a long night of restful sleep, and so stress levels are nice and low. Then the alarm clock goes off, takes us a while to wake up, and our stress levels are climbing there, but it's fine. We're awake. We want to be awake. We got stuff to do. That's fine. Then we go do our normal morning routine, which feels great. Stress levels climb down a bit. Then we have our coffee, coffee sets in. We go for a light run, not too stressful, but still stuff to do. Then we go in the shower, plenty of time to think. Then we go cook a healthy breakfast, feels really good on the tummy. Stress levels are like all time low right now. Things are looking good. Then we drive to work and then we check our email and then we realize everything has gone down. We've got a fire that needs to be put out and we are the fire truck. So we are going to nose to the grindstone for an hour, hour and a half, finish what we need to do, and hey, thankfully we were able to put out that fire. All is good. Then we check our calendar and our boss, put a meeting on your schedule at 7 p.m. last night. Oh my God, they must be upset. Do you think they're going to fire me? The panic sets in. So you can't get anything done for the next half hour until your meeting and then you go in the meeting and things are fine. You were making mountains out of molehills, right? Everything's good. So boss loves you, loves your work. Just wanted to say thank you. Perfect. All right. So well, you're a little bit derailed and didn't bring lunch, so you're going to go get lunch and you're going to go get some fried chicken and fried food is bad for you. So stress levels shoot up as your tummy doesn't know what to do because it's being destroyed. You finish the rest of the workday with, you know, relatively uneventful actions and then you're done. And when you're done, you get this little dip and you think, okay, it's 5 p.m. It's time to go. I feel great. Then you drive home in traffic, which sucks. And you get angry. And then you go train and it's time for an intense training session. So you attest your max bench press and your shoulder hurts. You think, man, I had that crick in my neck earlier, but I should have seen this coming. I shouldn't have tested one RM today. So you stop your workout, stress levels decline. Then you get home and you don't have any food. So you go to the grocery store, I've got more stuff to do. You get back and you're just exhausted. You just order pizza because you need dinner. You got to figure it out. And then after your pizza and that GI distress, you spend all night on your phone, which doesn't really promote much restfulness, just kind of keeps your stress levels pretty high. You hop back in that shower and then you go to bed, you lay down. Everything is looking up, but you can't fall asleep. And you start to get stressed about how you can't fall asleep. Now eventually you're able to go to sleep and it's not very restful. It's a very light sleep. And so you almost cross underneath that threshold line. And then you have sleep apnea waves of sleep apnea, then you have to get up because all that sleep apnea is making you get rid of all your water. And now you got to go to the bathroom and then you go back to sleep. And then you have more sleep apnea. And finally, around four in the morning, you're totally resting kind of, but only for a little bit. And then you got to wake up at five to restart your day. You go back into your morning routine, but you're noticing you're feeling really groggy. You still got some shoulder pain. Your neck still feels really tight, but you grab your cup of coffee anyway and repeat. Now, this is just an example day, but hopefully it gives you some idea on what kinds of things raise your stress levels and what kinds of things lower your stress levels. This is why it's so important to eat really well, get a full eight hours of sleep, and train appropriately. Hopefully, training is the biggest stressor that you have during your day. And hopefully when something kind of stressful happens at your job, you understand which pieces you have control over and which pieces you shouldn't spend time worrying about. That's going to be it for me. If you learned something, hit the like button and subscribe to be notified when I release new videos. If you need something else to watch, well, I've got two things that will help lower your stress levels. One is like a mobility circuit. My limber up with Lance total body flexibility. One is a great place to start. And then the other idea is just doing some sort of cardio circuit, a variety of exercises that are good for core activation, looseness in the hips and in the shoulders and in the torso. And all of this promotes restfulness and helps you recover so that you can reach whatever other goals you have. You know, keeping stress levels lower or putting on muscle or reaching fat loss targets. All of that stuff works really well when you throw in some recovery work out. So check out one of those videos.