This book has little to do with training…..

and..

EVERYTHING to do with training.

Virtually every very successful person in my field (training, exercise, paid for push-ups) lists this as one of the best/ most influential books to read.

Now i know why.

Why Zebras Don’t get Ulcers is about the stress response and how it affects our bodies.

Most of the book deals with chronic disease and how stress opens the door for disease to take hold.

The take home point of the book is that:

“the things we all find stressful– traffic jams, money, worries, overwork, the anxieties of relationships. Few of them are “real” in the sense that the zebra or lion would understand. In our privileged lives, we are uniquely smart enough to have invented these stressors and uniquely foolish enough to have let them, too often, dominate our lives.”

We make things stressful…

Soooooooooooooo, what the hell does that have to do with exercise?

Exercise is stress…..working out triggers the stress response.

Wouldn’t that be a bad thing?…..Maybe not….

The details are in the dose: both frequency and intensity.

“organisms will eventually habituate to a stressor if it is applied over and over, it may knock physiological allostasis equally out of balance the umpteenth time that it happens, but it is a familiar, predictable stressor by then, and a smaller stress- response is triggered.”

This is the essence of properly planned training;

Managing the allostatic/ homeostatic load on the organism to achieve a desired response.

Giving just enough stress to, “knock physiological allostasis out of balance” and force an adaptive response in preparation for  greater levels of stress in the future but not so much that the body struggles, and hence has to deplete itself,  just to regain allostasis (normalcy).

Some interesting take a ways from the book and my thoughts:

“the diseases that plague us now are ones of slow accumulation of damage- heart disease, cancer, cerebrovascular disorders”

Plain and simple, neglect. As a sedentary society we’ve come to neglect our bodies and over time they begin to wear down and break from never receiving the signal to rebuild.

“stress-related disease emerges, predominately, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships and promotions”

Prolonged stress depletes the current adaptive resources (CAR) leaving none available to recover and rebuild for actual stressors.

“regardless of the stressor- injured, starving, too hot, too cold, or psychologically stressed- you turn on the same stress- response”

Stress is cumulative and non-differentiated…it’s all the same and interconnected.

“It is not so much that the stress-response runs out, but rather, with sufficient activation, that the stress-response can become more damaging than the stressor itself, especially when the stress is purely psychological.”

The point at which the body runs out of adaptive reserves is when long-term damage accumulates.

“having left ventricular hypertrophy is the single best predictor of cardiac risk”

Stress-response= increased heart rate.

Out of shape? Faster beats= stronger/ thicker left ventricle.

In shape? Larger beats= Larger (stretchy) left ventricle.

“abdominal fat is one route for trying to tone down that overactive stress-response”

Hormones matter, they decide where energy consumed goes for the body to use it most effectively.

“Males who do extreme amounts of exercise, such as professional soccer players and runners who cover more than 40 or 50 miles a week, have less LHRH, LH, and testosterone in their circulation, smaller testes, less functional sperm. They also have higher levels of glucocorticoids in their bloodstreams, even in the absence of stress”

More isn’t better, better is. If you can’t recover, you can’t improve.

“Pain is useful to the extent that it motivates us to modify our behaviors in order to reduce whatever insult is causing the pain, because invariably that insult is damaging our tissues.”

If it hurts….STOP doing it.

“Acupuncture stimulates the release of large quantities of endogenous opiods for reasons no one really understands.”

Maybe it’s not VooDoo afterall.

“the stress-response doesn’t become depleted; instead, one gets sick because the stress-response itself eventually becomes damaging”

Again, the point at which the body runs out of adaptive reserves is when long-term damage accumulates

“Short-term stressors of mild to moderate severity enhance cognition, while major or prolonged stressors are disruptive.”

This is why you can’t “kill it” in the gym everyday. Eventually, you disrupt the body (allostasis) too much and can’t recover.

“sleep deeply, and you turn off glucocorticoid secretion.”

“At some point recovery becomes a training modality”- Buddy Morris.

NOTHING is better for recovery than sleep, take ZMA your sleep quality will improve.

“Two identical stressors with the same extent of allostatic disruption can be perceived, can be appraised differently, and the whole show changes from there.”

Don’t assume things are equal. Try to prepare and more importantly appropriately respond to the actual result of stressors.

“The stress- response is about preparing your body for an explosive burst of energy consumption right now; psychological stress is about doing all the same things to your body for no physical reason whatsoever. Exercise finally provides your body for the outlet that it was preparing for.”

We’re built for movement and exercise…without it we literally degrade and perish.

“Exercise can be a great stress reducer, but only so long as it is something that seems even remotely desirable.”

Do what you find enjoyable….find something…. anything….but move, EVERYDAY…..

“Those who cope with stress successfully tend to seek control in the face of present stressors but do not try to control things that have already come to pass. They do not try to control future events that are uncontrollable and do not try to fix things that are not broken or that are broken beyond repair.”

* The quoted sections of the book are in order but not cited because I read it on my Kindle and highlighted as I went but when I pulled them from the clippings there was no page number…sorry, now go read the book for yourself.

Get your copy here: