woman training

The last two posts have talked about cortisol and muscle gain and how to manipulate the cortisol wave with the type of exercise you do.

Today we will look at how diet plays a role in this.

But, first a quick clarification. I mentioned that you shouldn’t exercise for more than 45 minutes – and preferably less – in order to maximize your anabolic hormones.

After 45 minutes the anabolic hormones have peaked and start to decline pretty rapidly. So any exercise after that is not productive and might be counter productive.

Unless… yes, there always seems to be an exception to everything. Part of that is because our understanding of the human body changes as we learn more.

Okay, so if you prime your body by eating at the proper times, you can indeed continue exercising for longer periods of time.

This is a very individual thing and depends on what you are eating, how much you currently weigh, what kind of shape you are in and your individual metabolism.

It is very easy to fall into an overtrained state. It took me awhile but I figured out that I was in an overtrained state or close to it by checking my heart rate.

On my intense cardio days my heart rate will usually fall almost 20 beats per minute during recovery. If it only falls 10-12 beats in a minute I know I am in an overtrained state.

Then I take a few days off to recover. If I try to push I almost always will get sick or feel run down.

Okay, back to diet. A cycle of undereating balanced by a period of overeating will affect your cortisol levels also. Undereating actually raises your levels of cortisol and androgens.

Problem is that constant undereating will weakon your body and keep your cortisol levels high. This will cause muscle weakness, and an overall energy loss which will keep you tired all of the time.

Not something you want. And another reason why diets are so hard to stay on.

So you need to balance your undereating and intense exercise with relaxing and overeating. This is similar to how our cavemen and cavewomen ancestors ate and lived.

And they didn’t have much in the way of body fat. Of course they didn’t have stores, cars or the internet back then either.

But, you can still follow some of their living style by eating more naturally and exercising in bursts of high intensity.

Gradually incorporate more of this into your lifestyle and training and you will find that cortisol is your ally in muscle gains.

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

One of the things I mentioned before was that cortisol was important for muscle gain.

Now almost everyone associates muscle loss with cortisol, however – as you have found out – when dealing with hormones, it is not quite that simple.

When the body is under stress, and this can be from exercise, your cortisol levels don’t just rise. They actually rise and fall in a repetitive manner, sort of like a wave.

The idea then is to use this cortisol wave to help with your muscle gains.

Your anabolic hormones (androgens) and cortisol work together in a synergistic and antagonistic way. This depends upon the type of exercise you do, the amount of time you spend exercising and the foods you eat.

Get all of those right and your muscle gains will improve and your fat loss will increase.

Cortisol levels do rise as stress increases, but it only goes so high – otherwise it would be destructive. Your body has a negative feedback loop which keeps the levels of cortisol from rising uncontrollably.

Both cortisol and androgen hormones rise with exercise. The trick is to take advantage of the up and down nature of cortisol so that the androgens “win”.

The best way to take advantage of this cortisol wave is to use intervals in a specific way. That is a period of intense exercise with supersets.

The idea is to cause a spike upward in cortisol so that as it comes back down you are exercising in a way to take advantage of the higher levels of androgens combined with the lower levels of cortisol.

So here is what you can do. You need to prime your body to raise your cortisol levels. You can do this by – after you warm up – doing a few minutes of sprints or other overall exhausting body exercise.

My favorite is to find a chinup bar that is high enough that I have to jump up to reach it. I squat, jump up and do a pullup or chinup while pulling my knees to my chest.

Do that as many times as you can and you will be thoroughly ready for the next phase.

You will have primed your body to use cortisol for muscle gain.

What to do next follows in the next post.