Squat Every Day, page 12
Thus we have PNI, the intersection of psychology, neurology, and immunology. Mind is brain is immune response, and it makes little sense to speak of their function in separate terms.
When you get sick, even elementary school biology teaches that the immune system kicks in to fight off whatever bug has invaded your body. You’ve heard the story about how the white blood cells act as sentries, roving our bodies for troublemakers and shooting antibodies at invading microbes before digesting them.
The circulating immune system, including those T-cell and B-cell lymphocytes, is another evolutionary newcomer. The immune system has a much older set of defenses, found even in insects, meant to handle damage and infection at a local level. An infected cut, or a second-degree burn, or a twisted ankle will all turn red, swell up, and get hot to varying degrees, a process called inflammation.
That’s the innate immune system at work. Unlike the circulating white cells, the innate response happens in the damaged tissue itself, using a first-aid kit of growth factors, specialized clean-up cells, and inflammatory signals called cytokines. When you get that burn or twist your ankle during a run, all that machinery kicks in and starts running damage control.
Cytokines really set off the process. Almost every cell in your body is capable of producing them in response to trauma, broadcasting a signal that says “hey, something’s wrong here!” and bringing backup in the form of macrophages and other clean-up cells.
When the problem stays small, just a cut or mild burn, you won’t notice much else. The area might stay tender for a few days, but it heals soon enough and that’s the end of it. In cases of more severe trauma or infection, however, it’s not so simple, and the inflammation process can itself become lethal in extreme instances.
Think what it’s like when you catch a nasty cold. You feel warm all over, more sensitive to pain, maybe stiff and sore, and you’re so tired you don’t want to get off the couch. Regardless of what kind of bug you catch, you always experience the same set of symptoms. Even though a case of the flu might leave you in bed, it’s still the same symptoms, only worse.
Inflammation-signaling cytokines not only attract immune cells for clean-up duty, but they also act on the brain through various channels. Those signals tell the brain that some major fighting and clean-up is going on, so the brain responds with a coping strategy. It wants you to stop moving and wasting energy so it can use those resources for recuperation, and to make that happen it triggers that set of physical symptoms. Dantzer calls this sickness behavior.
“Coping strategy” should ring a bell. Cytokines work on the hypothalamus, which you’ll recall as being involved in the stress-response, and as you might expect from that, sickness behavior evokes roughly the same set of stress-coping responses.
That isn’t too surprising if you think about it. “Squat flu” and similar terms are often used to describe how we feel the day after a beating in the gym, and for good reason: those sensations work through the same mechanisms.
What’s more, that mechanism holds some unsettling connections with the biology of depression. Serotonin, a neurotransmitters which you’ll recall as having a role in central fatigue, works in parts of the brain responsible for, among other things, mood and the formation of memories. When serotonin transmission is low, you feel down in the dumps and can have trouble learning and remembering, and this state-of-being is thought to have a connection with major depression, anxiety disorders, and other assorted emotional problems.
Brain scans show that the majorly depressed have marked differences in the size of these serotonin-using regions compared to healthy people, leading some psychologists to hypothesize that the chronically-elevated glucocorticoids under prolonged stress can actually prune back the serotonin neurons. This leads to higher anxiety, deeper depression and, perversely, even higher corticoid levels, kicking off a self-sustaining death-spiral.
The similarities between “squat flu” and depression run deep. The inability to trigger voluntary movement is a pronounced symptom of depression. Patients literally cannot summon the will to move, a condition that mirrors the (admittedly less-pronounced) loss of motivation in both the sick and the overtrained. This is probably not a coincidence; I think it’s likely that all three work through similar (through probably not identical) mechanisms.50
Exercise scientist Lucille Smith first suggested the connection between the immune response and overtraining symptoms back in the 1990s. Smith found that elevated levels of a cytokine called interleukin 1-beta (IL-1b) correlated with “feeling bad” symptoms of tissue-damaging exercise. It was later discovered that IL-1b acts directly on the brain, not only signaling inflammation in muscles and other tissues, but activating sickness behavior.51
When you feel sore, achy, warm in the day or two after a hard workout, that’s the immune system telling you that you’re coping with the stress, what Smith called the cytokine hypothesis of overtraining. The overtraining symptoms experienced by athletes really are like being sick.
As with earlier “mental” phenomena associated with fatigue, the problem is not limited to your mood. Research is finding that the sickness state can, like other forms of stress, directly trigger muscle atrophy by activating the HPA. I’ll spoil the surprise: it’s IL-1b again. Inflammation signals the brain, signaling the HPA to increase glucocorticoid levels, and that triggers the catabolic atrophy effect in muscle tissue.
Now, most everyone you’ll talk to in the fitness industry will get mad and shake a fist at poor cortisol, but notice that the inflammatory cytokine, and the overall state of being inflamed and sick, is the real culprit here. Catabolic states are coordinated in the brain, and signaled by the immune system’s response. If you want to blame something, blame the brain. The hormone is just doing its job.52
What we have here is a reasonable explanation. Lots of exercise – especially unaccustomed exercise – triggers the inflammation response in your muscles and connective tissues, leading to mood-altering changes in your brain state as well as elevation of stress hormones. High volumes of tissue-damaging exercise can, like infections and trauma, trigger a feeling almost like a mild form of depression.
A Set-point for Stress
What catches my eye here, relative to this particular feedback loop, is the relationship between this axis of sickness behavior and the mechanism thought to underlie major depression. I’d like to return to this for a moment.
Research in the field of positive psychology, the psychology of happiness, has given us the idea of a “hedonic set-point” (“hedonic” is a fancy word for happiness). First proposed by Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell back in the 1970s, the hedonic set-point is much like running on a treadmill: no matter how hard you work to be happier, you never really get anywhere. Win the lottery, get the girl, wake up to that Christmas present you’ve wanted for six months, these things can all make us happier, but only briefly.
The idea is that our mood, or our range of moods, is neurochemical in origin. Being that our bodies, and our brains, like to seek out equilibrium, we’ll always return to our pre-wired baseline of happiness. Some people, so this theory says, are naturally prone to being depressive. Their brains are literally built to be susceptible to that vicious cycle between the stress-response and the serotonin neurons governing it.
Since major depression and related anxiety disorders almost always run in families, psychologists have suggested the happiness set-point is probably inherited. Even if the genes aren’t carrying it, families tend to behave the same ways ― which might mean there’s a cause found in early development, like elevated stress hormones in an anxious mother-to-be or a neurotic household.
While I have to offer the disclaimer that any research of this nature remains speculative, it is another piece of the “responder” puzzle as raised in the last chapter. Indeed, it is the high reactor who seems most susceptible to the depressive death-spiral, and those underlying neurobiological differences may be part of an explanation for the variation in sensitivity to high-intensity workouts.
Sensitive, easily disturbed brains are going to freak out and experience all the negative symptoms of any stressful episode, whereas a more resilient brain may not even notice.
You do experience a physical reaction to exercise, which isn’t too different from being sick. But, just as we saw with the perception of effort and fatigue, there is a strong mental component: your tendency to freak out about minor details can, itself, be a huge contributor to that state-of-recovery. You aren’t necessarily overtraining, and you certainly haven’t even “fatigued your CNS” in any meaningful sense. What you’ve done is create the problem, or at least make it substantially worse, by adopting a particular emotional state.
From personal experience, I will say that this state can affect your lifting. When you feel well and truly cooked, like you’re “swimming in cytokines” as I’ve often put it, you won’t have the motivation to load up your body with PR weights. You feel tired, but it’s a specific kind of mental exhaustion where even warm-up weights feel heavy and you never really get the cylinders to fire. This is paired with a physical exhaustion that feels “deep down in the bones”, so to speak, rather than the kind of superficial tiredness you’d feel after eight hours of working in the garden.
What’s interesting is how this state of sickness seems uncoupled from performance. You can feel awful and still hit records, so it’s clear to me that however we classify this condition, it’s not right to call it “overtraining” or “CNS fatigue” or any of that. It’s not a good place to be, don’t get me wrong, but it isn’t the crippling “need to rest” that we’re told, either.
The view that makes sense to me right now: sickness behavior is the equivalent of muscle soreness for your entire body. “Squat flu” is your brain’s way of making you aware that Something Big happened, and it’s trying to make sure you aren’t in danger (recall allostatic load from Chapter 3). You’re experiencing a tantrum of the emotional brain percolating up into conscious awareness and creating a genuine feeling of illness, your brain gently nudging you away from more squats.
Much like muscle soreness, the physical symptom doesn’t mean that your body is incapable of handling the stress, only that it was unprepared for it. Muscles stop getting sore if you keep training them, and I think that your “CNS” will act the same way ― by which I mean that your entire system can become accustomed to stressful efforts, provided you give it a reason.
How that affects you, or doesn’t, depends (in part) on how you’re wired, but also on what you do and what you have done. Shifting set-points is one of the cool things that exercise does, and it’s very possible that, say, the mood-boosting effects of exercise can cause long-term changes to at least some degree.
A prepared body can handle more than an unprepared body, differences in reactivity and constitution aside.
Taming Fight or Flight
I’ve outlined exactly why I think people recoil at the thought of squatting six days a week. To them, weight training is a battle, a blood-pressure raising, tooth-gritting, heart-pounding battle between you and the weights. There’s no graded effort, no thought given to training hard without the mental wind-up. Thanks to mainstream fitness culture, most people don’t even realize that it’s possible to train productively without physical self-destruction and psychological exhaustion.
Likewise, we’re also given a limited and naive view of recovery. The “feel bad” and the wacky hormones and HRV measurements aren’t, by themselves, any indication that you’ve overtrained. You need to see when these symptoms happen and how long they last. They might go away. They might persist through your entire training cycle and then vanish after recovery during a deloading week.
This is the problem that periodization, or planning and organization of training, was meant to solve. By spacing out maximum efforts with less-stressful training, you aren’t running with the throttle wide-open all the time. That saves on wear and tear and, ideally, keeps progress moving along.
So there’s one solution: manage training stress so that you only occasionally go all-in. Periodization side-steps the problem in the first place, deliberately limiting the amount of “effortful” training. Since the reserves are finite, we should avoid tapping them and prolonging our recovery.
Scaling back the stress of heavy lifts by way of periodization is certainly one way to address recovery. That’s the preventative strategy: fix the problem by avoiding it in the first place. The only problem is, you miss out on a potentially crucial skill.
Say you increase your volume by 10%, and you notice all the symptoms of “overtraining” within a few days. You start second-guessing the program (your ego’s depleted a bit, so you’ve got extra uncertainty and more moodiness to deal with) and have to make a decision.
You could rest, yes. Cut your workload back and get more downtime. If you’re still a supercompensation card-holder, the answer is clear. You have to rest and let all the fatigue symptoms settle down before training again.
But what happens if you keep going?
Conventional wisdom says you don’t have long before you exhaust your body and collapse.
Since you’ve made it this far, I hope it’s clear that I’m not entirely on board with that point of view. We don’t have recovery hitpoints that drop as we train and recharge with rest power-ups. Exhaustion of mental energy, accumulated wear-and-tear of tissues, and the processes of adaptation are three related but different things happening on their own timetables.
It’s not that I disagree with periodization; far from it. Back in Chapter 3, I mentioned the “superadaptation” concept: the idea that the adaptive processes can, themselves, adapt. I think we should treat the psychological as we treat the muscular and neural, as another quality to train. The “fatigue” response isn’t the enemy but another target of our training.
So you keep training, and after another week you feel great. All the stress symptoms are gone and you’re stronger than ever. You experienced “adaptation sickness” which went away when you adapted. Had you listened to the stress indicators, you’d have stopped, rested, and never adapted to the new workload. Since you were consistent and trained through the symptoms, you adapted and it became your new normal. “Stressed out” is always a moving target.
Obviously if you spend endless months in that stressed-out mode you’ll suffer the consequences, but from day to day and week to week performance and stress-mode have little overlap. What I think needs to happen, and where monitoring comes in handy, is in seeing when and how the stress-mode happens. If you’ve just made a change in training, maybe hit a new PR or added more volume, and you get a blip of autonomic disruption, then it’s worth waiting to see what happens. If your lifestyle changes suddenly and you’re more focused throughout the day, getting less sleep, or whatever else, it’s worth waiting to see what happens.
You might not adapt and end up sitting in stress-mode until you collapse. You might not want to deal with the headaches of adaptation if your first child has just been born or if you’re enjoying other things in life. If so, it’s time to take a break and let everything settle down.
High reactors are of course more prone to falling apart. Getting anxious or psyched-up to train is going to have a large impact these people thanks to an aggravated autonomic response. More mellow types can train calm, leaving adrenaline in reserve or having a less-harsh response if they do get worked up, and cool down fast once the threat resolves. Cooler heads probably won’t feel so bad the day after a high-arousal workout, but they may not need to get worked up in the first place.
That’s a pretty clear advantage. We want to be like these people. But if you’re not, monitoring your autonomic responses over time helps you make sure that increased workloads are “adaptable”, and if not, that you take breaks to let everything settle down.
You’ll have days when it’s hard to separate excuses from legitimate bad days. You can be sore and stiff and feeling a little ill but still be just fine to train. Tracking these variables means that you can see if you are or aren’t adapting to any particular training. Just like the beginner’s ultra-sore muscles, however, I think that we need to learn to deal with a little system-wide discomfort in the pursuit of our goals.
We don’t want to train often because we don’t train often. We make up for it by grinding ourselves into paste, which makes us hurt and convinces us that we can’t train often. Inactivity feeds on itself.
You never get the opportunity to condition yourself.
Exercise is supposed to be uncomfortable. You might even say it’s supposed to hurt (though I’m hesitant to say that, as not all “hurt” is created equally. Injuring a joint or tearing a muscle is certainly not what I’m talking about). That’s what all the slogans and affirmations tell us: No pain, no gain. Go hard or go home. The virtues of self-improvement through self-destruction.
Nothing says you have to train to deliberately maximize the discomfort. Let’s be more progressive than mainstream feeling-chasers and train in a way that doesn’t leave us so wiped out. If you’re a type that needs a calm, low-arousal setting and the simple thought of squatting makes you nervous, then spend more time squatting so that you take the edge off.
Do it every day and sooner or later you’ll get over your fear.
Practicing Chill-Mode
Organizing your training by motivation and emotional output requires knowing when to let go and unleash the beast, when to keep a safe distance from gym-intensity, and it requires, most of all, that you practice these skills.
We need to challenge ourselves, but in measured drips of effort, not the crippling, soul-emptying exhaustion that defines most “go hard or go home” theories of exercise. We need focused, directed application of nervous energy, directed right into the bar or the tire or the stone.
