Heart Rate Based Training: Part Six: Bodybuilders, CEO’s and Other Stress Cases

CEO

Here is a graph of nearly five years of AM cortisol I will call “From CEO to Healing”. Right below the Cortisol graph is the Fasting Glucose graph for the same person and for exactly the same period of time. As you can see at various points his, this is a male I should have mentioned, at various points his blood tests would have led his physician to conclude that he was very nearly a diabetic when in fact he is, in every other way, at little risk of ever being a diabetic: no family history, lean, fit, fair to good diet.

Now the HRP of someone under such stress, he was not particularly aware of stress except to say “It comes with the territory”, the HRP would show a relatively to his baseline, note to HIS baseline, relatively high resting heart rate and a blunted response to exercise because he was already living in a hormonal and neurological environment of elevated adrenalin and sympathetic tone. In other words he was walking around with his foot on the accelerator already so stepping on the gas (Oh, and by the way his other foot was on the brake), working hard at his training, showed a reduced effect on his HRP.

Now the fun part of HRBT is that it allows you to tease out physiological signs of stress, or overtraining or many other things, and then to address them through training rather than through psychiatry, meds or drugs. It is a circle and can be interrupted at several points; the physical level as well as the psychological, spiritual and reluctantly but sometimes necessarily at the pharmacological level.

As you might guess the HRP looks very different when the cortisol and fasting glucose is high as opposed to when they are low. And, of course, vice versa.

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