The Work IN to move out of stress, tension & anxiety
The Work IN to move out of stress, tension & anxiety
Stressing Exercise
Exercise is a classic lever to reduce stress. That’s what they tell us anyway. But rarely is there any guidance given about how or why it works let alone how to make it work for you. That’s what our Work IN is today. I will be giving you a more practical understanding of the mind body connection to exercise for stress reduction and how to harness different intensities to build long lasting buffers to stress triggers.
As a part of my mission to bring a legacy of resilience through movement, each month you can join me for a hike on the bike trail followed by a free trauma informed vinyasa class back at the studio on Main Street. Go to savagegracecoaching.com to see the calendar and join my newsletter, Yoga Life on Main Street, to stay up to date on all the latest studio news, events and gossip. And now… on to this week’s episode.
It’s time to stop working out and start working IN. You found the Work IN podcast for fit-preneurs and their health conscious clients. This podcast is for resilient wellness professionals who want to expand their professional credibility, shake off stress and thrive in a burnout-proof career with conversations on the fitness industry, movement, nutrition, sleep, mindset, nervous system health, yoga, business and so much more.
I’m your host Ericka Thomas. I'm a resilience coach and fit-preneur offering an authentic, actionable realistic approach to personal and professional balance for coaches in any format.
The Work IN is brought to you by savage grace coaching, bringing resilience through movement, action and accountability. Private sessions, small groups and corporate presentations are open now. Visit savagegracecoaching.com to schedule a call and get all the details.
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Episode 217
Stressing Exercise
Exercise is a classic lever to reduce stress. That’s what they tell us anyway. But rarely is there any guidance given about how or why it works let alone how to make it work for you. That’s what our Work IN is today. I will be giving you a more practical understanding of the mind body connection to exercise for stress reduction and how to harness different intensities to build long lasting buffers to stress triggers.
Intensity
I use trauma release principles in all my work with clients and students whether they know it or not. Don’t get your feathers ruffled here. I’m not trying to be sneaky, I bill myself as trauma informed and once you have that training it comes through everywhere. It’s rare that I meet someone who wants to get healthier and not address their stress levels.
For a long time there was this idea that you could train the body only, and you should refer students to a therapist for anything else. That’s like showing up to a session with your ears plugged and blinders on. No one does that. And if you’re a personal trainer or health coach you know everything you’re doing is behavior change so you better believe you’re working with the mind too.
All physical exercise has some kind of intensity. Usually we use a scale of 1-10. Our mental and emotional state also has an intensity to it. We rarely talk about that or ever notice how it is related to sensations in the body. We can use that same scale of 1-10 here as well. This intensity scale is probably the hardest thing to teach, especially beyond the physical. So many of us live in some kind of override where we can no longer feel any change or difference between those numbers. It’s all or nothing. A 1 or 10 with nothing in between. At least not at first.
Exercise triggers the sympathetic nervous system. It’s a giant ON switch. That’s part of why it feels so good to move when you’re stressed out. The body through the nervous system is asking for action. Exercise is action. Positive charge meeting a positive charge. Directing our awareness during exercise, incorporating recovery and using that 1-10 scale beyond the physical is a way to practice feeling that charge in the nervous system and replacing it in real time in a controlled environment.
We can use ANY kind of exercise to lower our stress reactions in the real world. It doesn't matter what the intensity of that exercise is. What matters is that we are paying attention to that discomfort (not dissociating from it), that we are present and noticing, feeling, and making choices. Those 3 things are key to turning exercise for physical fitness into exercise for mental resilience.
Notice Feel Choose
Let’s break those down.
NOTICE
What is going on in the body and in your head.
Where is the effort? Where is there ease? Where is the pain? Where is the strength, mobility, stability, or lack of it? Scan the body with curiosity. Then NOTICE the story (stories) that come up in your head about all of those things. There will be at least one, probably many. Just noticing that you have stories about your body is a breakthrough. You don’t have to do anything but notice them at first. Remember this isn't therapy.
Now…
FEEL
Typically we move away from discomfort of any kind. Anything that makes us uncomfortable or seems painful or intense, the mind will convince you to stop. But this is a time to practice feeling. Is that really painful or is it new? Is it uncertainty? Is that physical pain or is it danger?
Is there emotional feeling along with the physical? Fun fact: all pain is accompanied by some emotion. Often that’s fear or anger. Could be something else as well. What is it for you?
Now CHOOSE
What are you going to do with all of that information? What are your options? That depends on what you find. The choice you make is how we start to rewire those trigger reactions. The choices are how we discharge that stress energy and teach the nervous system that not everything in the modern world is a tiger ready to eat us for dinner.
So let’s look at what some of those choices are and how we can apply them to real world situations in different kinds of exercise.
Natures EMDR
A walk outside is nature's EMDR. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy treatment that is designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories.
What’s going on here? The brain (the mind too) is a meaning maker and it likes patterns and predictions. When stressful things happen it looks for past events that match to know how to respond. That response can include all the emotions and thoughts that were present at that time. The mind brings them forward as if they’re happening again in real time. EMDR works by disrupting that automatic patterned response and replacing it with something new. Something chosen.
Enter the lowly walk.
A walk is generally a low intensity exercise for the most part. The whole body is moving and it requires the eyes to move as well. You are seeing a changing view. You have choices. How fast or slow to move. Where to go, where to turn, what to look at, what to NOTICE. You can do the same walk you always do over and over and choose to stay in your head or notice new things every time.
The beauty of a walk is that you are actively in a zone 2 heart rate which is a fat burning zone, giving the body some kind of action to take that can also serve as recovery and engaging the mind, assuming you’re paying attention to what’s around you, in a way that can cause it to drop old stories and replace them with new ones.
The choices available for you to make on a walk are pretty much limitless. I would argue that reconnecting with choice is one of the most powerful levers we have to build resilience.
Lier, lier, legs on fire.
150 minutes of moderate intensity cardio exercise per week is the current recommendation. What is moderate exercise? It’s a question for the ages. If you were raised in the no pain no gain era of exercise like I was, you may have no idea what this actually means. Fitness providers are no help because everything is named High Intensity these days. And all those HIIT classes, cardio circuits, boot camps and even spin classes feel very intense. No one warns you about overuse with that kind of exercise. I’m talking about overuse of the heart. They all claim High intensity. People love to suffer because exhaustion can sometimes be mistaken for rest. The truth is only the first interval, the first sprint, the first burpee is High intensity. After that the body backs off, whether you want to believe or not. There is never enough rest and recovery between intervals to give 100% in every one. That is a safety mechanism for the heart. And it makes all those so-called high intensity work outs moderate.
Having said that, people under a lot of stress love these kinds of classes because it’s a big charge. The trick is finding a way out of that charge after the workout. That’s the part that’s often missing. You come in, you kill it and then you go right back into the stress of your day. Nothing has changed and you’ve just reinforced the sympathetic with a shower of cortisol and adrenaline.
But you can use them to lower stress. First noticing your physical, mental and emotional state on your scale of 1-10 can help you choose how you show up in those workouts. And that will help you choose how to recover. If you’re in a class without built in recovery then you can get it with 5-10 minutes at the end of the workout. Cool down and then be still and do some either coherent breathing or box breathing for 5-10 minutes. It shifts sympathetic into parasympathetic.
(I’m giving you permission to rest even if there isn’t rest. Group classes are notorious for overriding, but you can choose to be more present for yourself)
You can also choose intentional crosstraining with active rest. Playing. Walking on off days. Or choosing some other type of movement that challenges your workout habits.
It’s not about making yourself sore. It’s about remembering why you are exercising in the first place and there are always more than one reason. You can work out to maintain a body size and because you want to be strong and stabilize joints and have less pain and lower your stress, etc. It can all be true if we’re intentional about it.
The Calm in the Chaos
True high intensity exercise has built in stress reduction. Most people don’t even realize it. Resistance training and sprint training when done correctly is a great way to both build muscle and bone AND provide a pathway for the nervous system to practice regulating itself. Why? Because in true resistance training, where your intention is to build muscle, you are challenging the body and mind right up to the edge of what they can do and giving appropriate rest. This of course means we need to understand our intensity scale both on the way up and on the way down.
In building resilience, repairing stress injury, it’s the delta, the change and shift between activation and rest that is the work. The nervous system is practicing coming back out of that activated state over and over again.
The idea being that when body and mind are activated again outside of the gym they already know how to come back down.
Exercise of any intensity gives us all kinds of choices. We can make those choices from a mindless place that is misinformed by a lack of self awareness, denying, ignoring or overriding the physical, mental and emotional sensations of the body and the mind. OR we can choose to notice and feel what is going on inside us with curiosity and then make informed intentional decisions. The great thing about movement, activity and exercise is that it always works for us. Even if we think we’re doing wrong, it still works. It doesn’t take much to make it work even better. Really just a simple shift understanding and practicing the keys: Notice, feel and choose. Harness the recovery from whatever exercise you choose and watch you amazing body and mind realign in resilience.
Thanks for listening!
Until next time, stop working out and start working in
Connecting the dots for your personal health and professional wellness can be daunting. You don’t have to go it alone. Head over to savagegracecoaching.com/theworkin you’ll find all the show notes for this and other episodes plus lots of free resources including a link to book a 30 min fitness strategy call with me. And of course I’d be ever so grateful if you would take a moment to like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re listening.