STRESS INDICATORS (PART 1) — GAS, Overreaching and Under Recovering

STRESS INDICATORS (PART 1) —GAS, Overreaching and Under Recovering
By Shane Robert

Training is a stressful process. Quite literally. By definition, to foster change and make progress, a stressor has to be imposed on the body. The severity of that stressor can vary with the person and their level of experience (and end goal), but it is a stressor nonetheless. It is considered “good stress,” aka eustress, in this instance, since the stress leads to positive adaptations, namely increased stress, lean tissue and health. Bad stress, aka distress, is everything else that we normally associate with stress — work, finances, relationships, food, etc. — and leads to negative outcomes, whether mental, emotional, physical or all of the above, as is often the case.

Much of how we understand stress comes from Hans Selye’s 1936 general adaptation syndrome (GAS). GAS describes how an organism adapts when it is exposed to an “acute, damaging” stimulus. Damaging agents include things like cold shock, sub-lethal drug doses (adrenaline, morphine, etc.), or most relevant to our discussion, excessive muscular exercise. GAS has three stages:

1. Alarm: occurs six to 48 hours after initial injury and is marked by rapid decreases in thymus size and muscle tone
2. Resistance: occurs 48 hours post-injury and is marked by enlarged adrenals and the dissipation of edema that developed in the alarm stage
3. Exhaustion: occurs after an exhaustive, chronic period of stimulation and is marked by a loss of resistance to damaging stimuli and redevelop symptoms observed in the alarm stage

These three stages, so the theory goes, occur in response to any damaging stimulus, which includes, remember, exercise. Selye’s work showed that if small doses of damaging stimuli persist, in the case of training this would be added load or volume, the organism would build up a resistance to the stimulus, and their organs' (thymus, adrenals, muscles, etc.) appearance and function would return to normal. This resistance phase is what allows us to make what scientists call “gainz.”

For a normal person who is simply interested in living longer and looking a little better naked, the damaging agent known as exercise is low enough stress that the resistance phase can go on for a long, long time. They can keep plugging along, doing their training, adding a small amount of stimulus, and not need to worry (too) much about “recovery.” I have written about these kinds of programs in the past, but the most famous and influential of this style of training is Easy Strength by Pavel Tsatsouline and Dan John. At no point do these trainees push so hard that they need more than a day or, at most, two to recover from their hardest session.

Those who are really trying to achieve dramatic change in physique or strength are in a different situation. Every workout, or at least most workouts, creates a new alarm stage and causes a greater demand in the resistance phase. If the ratio of damaging stimulus to rest or lowered stimulus isn’t balanced properly, it is very easy for their cup to runneth over. This is made more difficult by the fact that our organism and organs don’t differentiate stressors. If you have a hard week of training that happens to coincide with unexpected financial problems, fighting with your partner, late nights at the office to finish a project, etc., the combination of the exercises and the distress of life may just be too much, even if the training would have been fine in isolation. 

There are two additional phases, between resistance and exhaustion, that Selye didn’t include in his work because, frankly, they are kind of made up, at least in a scientific sense. To my knowledge, they have not been officially studied in stress science. However, they have long been recognized within exercise science and sports performance. They are:

1. Overreaching 
2. Under Recovering
   

Overreaching is fatigue above and beyond what you typically experience when you don’t sufficiently recover between workouts. Overreaching happens after consecutive days or weeks of temporarily increasing the load, volume, or intensity of your training. It canbe used as a short-term strategy to improve performance once the increase in stimulus is pulled back and the body recovers. In strength training, overreaching is a key component of the peaking process.

If the overreaching phase continues for too long (which will be somewhat individual), you roll into under-recovery. This is something that typically happens over weeks or many training blocks and not simply from one or two hard workouts. Though many factors contribute to under-recovery, such as sleep and nutritional status, it all comes back to too much work done for too long. Despite how it sounds, you can still make progress when under-recovered, which is part of what makes it so perilous. But it takes a much greater toll on your body and requires much greater effort, than in a recovered state. It’s a bit like sprinting in knee-deep water. You can still do it, but the effort is significantly greater. 

When an athlete ignores the signs of under-recovery and continues to train, we roll into the true exhaustion phase, also known as “overtraining.” This breaks the body down even further and a person will start to regress, getting weaker, losing lean mass and other terrible things. Full recovery from overtraining is difficult and can require weeks or months of time off from working out entirely, not merely adjusting the stimulus. This should be avoided at all costs.

Many signs may indicate a person is pushing too hard and overreaching or under-recovering. It’s difficult, from a coaching perspective, to separate many of them from general life issues. Being tired, for example, may be due to under-recovery or, as is more often the case, people simply don’t sleep enough. There are four indicators of recovery to watch closely throughout a training cycle. They are:

1. Skin health
2. Grip 
3. Sleep disruption 
4. Appetite
   

Next week I will outline what to look for in these categories and how I use them with my clients and my own training (hint: I’m much better with my clients than myself).