Intensity 4

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Intensity 4

The moral of the story is that intensity is the secret sauce. The secret is understanding what dose you need to get the results you want. Some days, lather up and bathe in intensity. Most days, a little dab will do ya. And every once in a while, slow it down and let the body recover.

There is an actual reason for intensity in your workouts, hormones. Hormones are chemicals released in our body, most of the time from our brain, that regulate literally everything. There are a zillion hormones in our body but we are only going to focus on three of them: Growth Hormone, Adrenaline, and Cortisol. All three of these work together to make you lean, strong, and healthy. But, if they are misunderstood or abused, they can turn on you and wreak havoc on your body. Please understand there are a ton of other factors that go into this discussion. This is the birds eye view of hormones as they pertain to training and intensity.

Growth Hormone – stimulates growth and cell regeneration in our body

Adrenaline (epinephrine) – released in times of stress to increase heart rate, blood flow, and carbohydrate metabolism.

Cortisol – The stress hormone. Too much of this and it can lead to high blood pressure, weight gain, and heart disease.

So, you get into the gym, get warmed up, and start feeling great. That warm up is firing up adrenaline. For the next hour, your body is operating on a high. Due to the nature and intensity of your workout, your body is is in state of stress and begins releasing these hormones.

When these hormones operate together, beautiful things happen. You get lean, build muscle, and your energy levels are through the roof.

Unfortunately, if we mismanage intensity and training, our system gets out of balance and can lead to large problems.

When humans were a part of nature, working out was part of life. You had to hunt, find a mate, fight a territorial battle, and face life and death a couple times a week. Now, since we go to the grocery store, Tinder, and have houses, we go to the gym to emulate these chemical responses our body needs to survive.

So if you are going super HAM five days a week, that’s basically like a never ending territorial battle. Sooner or later, your body is going to say, “screw this.” Naturally, your body releases cortisol to deal with the constant stress. That stress leads to increased cortisol production and all of a sudden you are increasing your cholesterol, body fat, and blood pressure by over-fitnessing (we will be talking a lot about overtraining in the futue).

If you do this enough, your body never recovers, never leans out, strength suffers, and you are actually doing more damage to your body every time you work out.

Listen to your body and stay balanced.

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Anders Varner

Anders Varner has focused on fitness and sport since he was able to walk. At the age of 14 he left home to pursue his dreams of playing ice hockey. While obtaining his business degree in undergrad at James Madison University, much of his attention was still focused on health and fitness.

In 2007 Anders was introduced to the CrossFit ...