The Health benefits of stress

How many times do you hear ‘experts’ blame any random health problem on stress?

You have a skin rash? It’s because of stress! How about your aunt’s depression? That is because of stress too! 

Really?

So, how exactly is the skin rash caused by stress?

‘Well, stress is constricting the circulation and…bla bla bla..’

Stress is like the word Energy. Let me stress that point. Stress is a neutral word. Regarding activity or experience in life, stress is neutral. It is all relative.

Even if your favorite doctor told you that Negative Stress is the cause of the skin rash, that would still be meaningless. Is there any activity in life that somebody somewhere doesn’t find stressful?

How about eating cake? Is that stressful to you? No? Well how about someone who is trying to gain weight? If you need to get in 6000 calories per day, and you start eating cake and ice cream to reach your caloric needs, believe me, even the thought of eating ice cream could stress you out!

You don’t believe me? Go and speak to any professional bodybuilder who has tried to add 20 pounds of muscle.

How about walking? Is that a stressful activity? I love taking a walk in the woods with my dog, where the river is flowing and the sun is going down. Nevertheless, where I live, I have had to walk every day for 20 minutes to catch public transport to work. Now that is stressful when you’re late in the morning! And that isn’t because of the pace. There are people who take up fast walking as an exercise, in order to get fit.

So, that is enough about stress as any cause of illness. If any activity is causing you to experience the so called stress that the doctors are talking about, here’s the fact. It is all psychological. The mental stress is created in your mind. You are telling yourself, ‘This is not supposed to be happening to me’. 

Now, I am going to tell you of the positive side of stress, and how stress can make you younger.

First of all, when you go jogging, or bike riding every day, you become fit, and when you are fit, your level of handling physical stress increases. Your energy level goes up. This is common knowledge (Unless you go climb Mount Everest every day… this case you are overdoing it a little). 

Second, and now we come to the main point of this article. 

High intensity weight training 

Regular high intensity weight training causes your body to release growth hormone naturally. Growth hormone is released when you sleep, and through another few activities such as fasting etc.

Have you heard about the concept of the beauty sleep? You take a small nap every afternoon. This nap raises your growth hormone level. So both activities have a similar effect.

Growth hormone declines as we get older, but through activities like regular high intensity training, you can slow down the aging process significantly. 

For the last 20 years I have been striving to add more muscle in the gym. I always trained with high intensity. Now, I am 43 years old, and people around me started noticing something. Maybe I didn’t reach my goal in muscularity, but I look very young for my age. People never believe me when I tell them my age. Maybe its time for me to move to another town..the people are becoming suspicious!

Here are some tips I can give you from my own experience, as someone who has trained with weights for more than 20 years.

• Make sure you eat enough protein every day. I recommend plant protein now, since I have turned to a plant based diet some time ago.
• Consistency. You can’t train with high intensity every day of the week, but whatever you do, if it’s 3 times per week, every muscle group twice per week – keep at it.
• Keep workout sessions 30 minutes or less.
• Training at home is the best. The gym contains a lot of distractions. With all that
  
  people and equipment, people get tempted to stay in the gym for hours on end. When you train at home, you can be to-the-point. For years I was doing high intensity calisthenics, pushups between chairs, dips, pull-ups etc. Gradually build up your collection of free weights at home. Soon you will love the serenity of training on your own.

Growth hormone isn’t the only gift high intensity weight training will give you. If you are enjoying your exercise sessions, it means you are releasing some other hormones such as endorphins and dopamine which make you feel exhilarated and happy, and keep you young too.

So, the next time someone asks me why I look so young, I will respond:

It’s all the stress!