woman training

Check out the last post on cortisol and muscle gain at:
cortisol and muscle gain

In order to take advantage of the cortisol wave, you need to prime your body to best utilize the rise in androgen hormones (anabolic phase) with the ups and downs of cortisol while exercising.

You first do a warm up, then an all out body exhausting set or sprints for a few minutes. We’ll call this a primer set.

Then you immediately jump into your main exercise and do this as a superset (2 back to back exercises without stopping to rest).

Next take a 30 second rest and do a second superset.

Continue with your workout of supersets and short rest periods.

The ideal is to take advantage of the cortisol spike from your primer set. This primer set spikes your cortisol and as you have seen, with cortisol, the levels will come down again.

These levels will stay lower as long as you keep the rest period short. If the rest periods drag out to 60-90-120 seconds the cortisol will rise back up.

Then you have to start over to prime your body again. By keeping the rest levels short, your cortisol levels stay within a narrower and lower range as you do your exercise session.

This is what you want. One big spike, and big decrease followed by less peaks on the cortisol wave.

The other point to remember is to keep your workouts short. The overall time – including warmups – should be less than 45 minutes.

Sometimes the actual time I exercise is only 20 minutes.

You can also vary this by resting shorter times, like 10 seconds. Or just try to do your supersets back to back to back to back until you need to stop.

As you keep doing this you will find that you are getting stronger, your fitness levels improve and you will burn more fat more quickly.

The one caveat is to not try this routine 7 days a week. You will get into an overtrained state fairly quickly.

This is intense exercise and your body needs time to recover. So faf you have seen how cortisol can help with muscle gain.

Next post will talk about how to manipulate your diet to affect cortisol.

Woman Training

Hi,

Last post we talked about exercise protocols.  Now the best way to use these are to relate them to your fitness goals. 

If you really need to build some muscle then you should know by now that long term low to moderate intensity aerobics aren’t going to help you. 

And as you found out the aerobics aren’t really going to help you much with fat loss either.

What if you do need to lose some body fat, but you don’t want to lose any muscle either?

Then you might try some sprints.  Remember though you have to build up to sprinting. 

People that just go out and start sprinting keep the chiropractors busy. 

So build up to it and as you get better you will find that you burn fat very easily and efficiently.  Only a few sprints will keep your metabolism burning like crazy for hours afterwards. 

Maybe you need to work on specific areas of the body.  If your arms are lagging you don’t want to just do arm exercises. 

The way to build up is to lift heavier on your back and chest exercises. 

For example, by doing heavier cable rows, you will also be working your biceps heavier.  This means your biceps will be getting stronger also.

By going a little heavier on chest presses your triceps will be getting stronger also.

Stronger will lead to a more defined and in most cases a little bigger muscle. 

So don’t be afraid to lift heavier.  Your arms are not going to balloon up to 22 inches in 3 days. 

They will get stronger and more defined.  And “a little” bit bigger.  Which is probably all you need.

Try lifting a little heavier for a cycle and see what happens.

Make your fitness goals a part of your routine and you will start to see amazing progress.