These are the top 2 underrated factors killing your gains

Chapters:

00:00 Stress

02:56 Coping strategies

04:17 My Online PT Certification Course

04:41 Mindfulness training

05:41 ‘Work hard, play hard’

07:07 Expose yourself to nature

07:50 Sleep

10:07 Conclusion

Transcript:

A study by Hollander et al. found that students experiencing high academic stress experienced less than half the gains on the leg press as students experiencing low academic stress, during the 16 week training program. Highly stressed students also lost a little bit of size on their legs while increasing their body fat percentage, whereas students with low stress experienced a decrease in their body fat percentage while increasing the size of their legs. In terms of their body composition, the mental level of stress they experienced literally made the difference between progression and regression. These findings echo another similar study finding that high academic stress in students significantly reduces strength development. In this study, thigh circumference was not significantly changed, but the trends was similar as before, showing that high stress impaired gains in leg size. A significant limitation of both of these studies is that body composition measurements were conducted via circumference measurements and skin folds, but the trend makes sense. If we look at mechanistic research – stress, even if it’s mental stress, is very bad for our recovery capacity. For example, one study found that it took highly stressed individuals approximately twice as long to recover from a given workout as lowly stress individuals.

We also have research on football players experiencing approximately double the injury rates when they experience high stress, compared to when they experience low stress. I think many lifters and athletes overlook the negative effects of stress because it seems to be a mental thing. And how would that affect your body physically? Well, there is actually a very strong link between our minds and our body in this case. Stress effectively functions as an off switch for reproduction, digestion, repair, and growth. Stress puts your body in sympathetic dominance in fight or flight mode, and that shuts off parasympathetic dominance, which is rest and digest mode. Stress energizes your body to be active now. In evolutionary times, if you see a bear coming at you, you get a stress response, you start running and your body is energized and mobilized to perform those tasks so you will not bleed out as easily, you have an easier time producing energy, your muscles immediately get warm. There are a lot of positive effects that help you run away from a bear, but these effects are decidedly negative when they turn into chronic stress, which often happens in our current lives. And in this case, you are permanently suppressing repair, growth and digestion, which, of course are all vital for muscular recovery as well. And there’s probably also some stigma from male lifters that think stress management is gay or whatever. But even if you don’t want to care about stress, your body clearly does. Stress also has a lot of negative effects on the ease of sticking to your diet and fat loss.

Chronic stress increases your appetite and decreases your energy expenditure. It has negative effects on the thermic effect of food, anabolic hormone production, and in some cases, even basal metabolic rate. Moreover, stress can increase the likelihood of self-medicating on comfort foods. So let’s go into some evidence based stress management strategies. One of the most influential factors in research that determines how much stress and negative effect you experience from any given stressor is your coping strategy. Many people spend their lives mostly using what are called passive coping strategies: seeking out alcohol, watching TV, procrastinating, talking to friends, moaning about the problem…

All of these things are passive coping strategies, and they’re very tempting because they’re easy, but research consistently finds that active coping strategies are much more effective. Now, in active coping strategies, they are problem or emotion focused, and you commonly hear people emphasize emotion focused coping strategies. While these are active in the sense that you’re actively considering what emotion you are experiencing and you’re trying to reduce that emotion, like seeking responsibility or trying to eliminate the emotion that you have, it is much, much more important to actually deal with the problem. This is called problem focused active coping in research, and unsurprisingly, if you really think about it, it’s by far the most successful strategy to deal with stress. This is literally what stress wants you to do. It energizes you to solve a current problem in your environment. So if you have a problem with somebody, talk to them. This is what the stress energizes you to do.

So you want to take advantage of that fight or flight mode? Seek out what the root cause of your problem is, what it is that is giving you stress, and then tackle the problem head on. There is one emotion focused coping strategy that is quite effective though, and that is mindfulness training. The most common form of that is meditation. And no, this doesn’t have to be spiritual, you can literally sit on a chair and think about chairs or anything that doesn’t evoke an emotion for a couple of minutes, and it can be highly effective. The reason that intense focus on something neutral is so effective to reduce stress, is because it effectively clears your mind cache. If you think of the analogy of a browser, you have all of these open windows and your work memory is highly loaded, what meditation does is it just wipes all of that out. And humans cannot do this actively.

This is often known as “the pink elephant paradox”, where if I tell you – don’t think about a pink elephant – that is exactly what you think about. The human mind is fundamentally incapable of not thinking about something, so the best way to achieve that is to think about something else. And that’s essentially what meditation does. Anecdotally though, many types of personalities have a lot of difficulty implementing meditation successfully and especially sustaining it. So if that’s you, you might prefer tip number 3: “Work hard, play hard.” Stress has evolved to be episodic. Stress is very effective and even positive in many cases, as long as it is acute and transient. So you experience a stressful events like running away from a bear and then afterwards you feel better. You might feel extra relieved and extra happy, in fact, and enjoy your life more in that moment. However, when stress becomes chronic, and of low grade stress that just lingers on as part of our lives, this type of chronic low grade stress can be very damaging for the body even when it is not severe. That’s because, as I mentioned earlier, what stress does is effectively put a damper on reproduction, growth, repair, and digestion.

Research on animals and athletes shows that episodic stress, even if it’s very severe, is a lot less damaging than chronic stress that is not episodic, stress that lingers. So you can significantly reduce the impact of stress by making it episodic, which entails making sure that there are periods in your life when you can fully relax. And this might mean being disconnected. It’s not always a good idea if people can reach you at any point in time, if you see or work emails pop up first thing in the morning and late at night when you’re trying to relax. You need to have these phases in your life when you’re really completely de-stressed, and it shouldn’t be merely a two week holiday after six months of chronic stress. You need to have regular occurrences, preferably in every single day, where you have at least some periods where you can completely relax.

A period of complete relaxation is particularly beneficial right before you go to bed, as it helps you unwind and thereby improve sleep quality. A particularly effective environment for de-stressing is any natural environment. Nature is very de-stressing, and research is very clear that exposure to nature, even if it’s simply an indoor plant, can significantly reduce stress. We seem to be biologically hardwired to be at ease in natural surroundings and our current concrete jungle type surroundings in most cities are not relaxing. We’re constantly exposed to noises, lights, and other stressors that make it impossible for us to fully relax. So try to get some exposure to nature, even if that means just getting some more plants in your apartment. I bet you never expected this channel to recommend exposure to nature and meditation for better gains. Chilling for better gains, though, is evidence based, and I go where the research leads, no matter where it goes.

Aside from stress, the second major underrated factor that influences your gains is sleep. Yes, yes, yes. You know that sleep is important, but you probably don’t realize just how important it is. Just like stress, sleep can make a two fold difference in your gains. And we have direct research showing this. Research shows that sleep deprivation directly reduces muscle protein synthesis, including myofibrillar protein synthesis. We also have multiple studies showing worse body composition outcomes in people that sleep less, even when it’s only a few hours per night. In one study, sleeping 5 instead of 7.5 hours per night had an over 50% reduction in the proportion of weight lost as fat and an over 50% increase in the proportion of weight loss that was fat free mass, namely muscle growth. So even moderate sleep deprivation had a huge negative effect on nutrient partitioning in this weight loss study.

A subsequent study found an even more extreme effect. Sleeping 40 minutes less during the mid-week increased the proportion of weight loss that was fat free mass from 20%, which is normal during weight loss diet, to 80%. However, there are some statistical issues with this paper, and I’ve contacted the authors and they’ve been unable to completely explain to me how these numbers add up. Still, though, it’s clear that there was a clear, very negative effect. So as a lifter optimizing your sleep quality can directly improve your gains and in particular improve nutrient partitioning. This is indeed exactly what a study by Jåbekk at all found. Over the course of ten weeks, lifters that focused on optimizing their sleep quality gained more muscle mass and lost a significantly greater amount of fat compared to a group that didn’t focus on optimizing their sleep quality. Concretely, the group that optimized their sleep lost 1.8kg of fat while gaining 1.7kg of lean body mass, basically achieving perfect body recomposition, and the group that didn’t have the sleep optimization intervention gained 0.8kg of fat, so gaining some fat instead of losing fat, and they gained less fat free mass: 1.3 instead of 1.7kg, although, the difference in muscle growth did not reach statistical significance. On top of worse gains, sleep deprivation also has negative effects on your anabolic hormone levels, your energy expenditure, your appetite, your stress sensitivity… Sleep deprivation is basically bad for everything. You just function as a shadow of your potential self.

So just like stress management, sleep optimization should not be something at the bottom of the things that you do that are like “maybe, kind of important” but you don’t really pay attention to. It should be one of the things that you paid one of the most attention to. Sleep and stress are up there with counting your macros, getting your protein in, doing a good lifting program. They’re not down there with supplements that maybe are slightly beneficial. No. Lifestyle factors like stress management and sleep quality are huge determinants of your long term success. Since sleep quality is so important for your gains I’ve created a free guide for you with evidence based tips on how to improve your sleep. The guide has eight concrete tips backed by scientific research that make your sleep better. The link to your free guide is in the description. I hope you’ll enjoy it. And if you like this type of evidence based content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.