CHAPTER 7

TRAINING STRESS—

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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Stress affects many endurance athletes but not always in an identical fashion. I once had a patient named Bruce. After watching his girlfriend compete in a local bike race, Bruce got excited about the idea of training for duathlons and triathlons. A former college swimmer who was working out at the gym for fitness using weights and a stationary bike, Bruce started jogging outdoors and soon bought a road bike.

 

 

After several months, improvements were notable; Bruce was running about fifteen miles a week and riding twice that amount while maintaining his three-times-a-week weight sessions at the gym. The excitement maintained his enthusiasm. But an acute back problem brought him to my clinic.

Bruce’s personal history turned out to be the most important part of my evaluation. He was a single parent with two children. His busy job required a forty-five-minute commute each day that left less time for training than he wanted. So he got up an hour earlier each morning and went to bed an hour later than usual. Having virtually no leisure time was rapidly catching up to Bruce’s body and brain. His stress hormones were waking him at two in the morning each night. He drank more coffee in an attempt to overcome fatigue. Basically, Bruce was sacrificing his health for more fitness.

One of the secondary symptoms from all this stress was his worsening back pain. But before his back could improve, he first needed to reduce the rising level of stress in his life. Since little could be done with his work schedule and family life, attention was directed at his training schedule, along with his diet. By significantly reducing his training schedule, including eliminating weight training, and using a heart-rate monitor to train more effectively, Bruce quickly felt his energy return. In addition, within two weeks he felt no back pain. While he complained about the slower training pace, changing to time rather than distance provided a different perspective on working out. A month later, Bruce said his running and biking were noticeably faster at the same heart rate.

Improvements from training are, to a great degree, the result of stress. We apply sufficient physical, chemical, and mental stress to the body, and it develops endurance as a result, leading to better performance. This is an example of good stress. But apply a little more of those same stresses or combine them with other stress, and benefits can quickly disappear—an example of bad stress. In sports, bad or excess stress often leads to overtraining.

Excess stress is not only the most common problem I’ve seen in athletes, it’s also the problem most neglected and underestimated by them. If you want to reach your athletic potential and optimal health, a better understanding of stress is the first step.

Stress is such an incredibly powerful influence that even if you are doing everything right in terms of training, diet, and nutrition, it can still crush your fitness and health efforts. Enough excess stress can contribute significantly and directly to injury, reduced aerobic function, and poor performance. And it contributes to many health conditions, ranging from reduced quality of life to deadly diseases such as cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and others. It can also contribute to fatigue, bacterial and viral infections, inflammatory-related problems, blood-sugar problems, weight gain, intestinal distress, headaches, and most other disorders. Stress-related problems account for more than 75 percent of all visits to primarycare physicians and are responsible each day for millions of people needing to take time off work and school. So stress comes with a monetary price tag as well as a toll on your fitness and health.

Charles Darwin wrote not that it’s the fittest who survive, nor the most intelligent, but those who can best adapt to their environment. Proper adaptation to your training schedule is just one example of how stress can help you perform better.

It’s important to remember that stress is a normal part of fitness and health, and excess stress is not without a remedy. It’s a question of adapting to, or coping with, stress. The body has a great coping mechanism for stress—the brain and adrenal glands. However, when the adrenal glands are overworked, body-wide problems can result. And when the brain is overly stressed, you won’t achieve your endurance goals.

There are effective ways to help protect yourself from bad stress. So let’s begin by addressing the three main types of stress: physical, chemical, and mental-emotional. These types of stress generate many different effects throughout the brain and body. Moreover, each athlete responds differently to various combinations of these stresses.