Adrenal fatigue symptoms and signs in bodybuilding

Posted by: Ron

Adrenal fatigue can be called the plague of the 21st century, except it slowly creeps up and tends to go on unnoticed.

Listen to your body and heed its signals

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, your body knows best and it constantly gives you signals. All you need to do is listen to it and trust it.

What are your adrenal glands and what do they do?

Your adrenal glands are little triangular shaped glands sitting on top of your kidneys. You have 2 of them. They make and release hormones to deal with stress. The more “perceived” stress you have in your life, the more hormones they produce and release, to the limit of their capacity. The key word is “perceived”. To you climbing up a mountain and looking down seeing the beautiful view might be fun. For someone else, looking down maybe frightening. This is why I put “perceived” in quotation marks. The stimulus is the same, the reaction is different.

So, for the person afraid of heights, climbing up the mountain is scary and his/her adrenal glands will produce more stress hormones (cortisol) than yours would who’s comfortable with heights.

The problem happens when you’re exposed to more stress than your adrenal glands can safely handle. There are ways you can override the optimal limit and “force” your adrenals to make more stress hormones, except you can only do that for so long. Prolonged periods of stress (chronic stress) will leave your tank empty.

Short bursts of cortisol are helpful in sticky situations like when your car skids in the snow and you need to make quick decisions or when you need to jump out of the way of a car speeding towards you. Adrenal fatigue happens when you deal with continuous stresses day in and day out. There are also a long list of things that can lead to adrenal fatigue. Luckily most of them are within your control:

Stress within a relationship (family, friends, loved ones, co-workers…)
Financial stress
Work stress
Dysglycemia
Lack of quality and quantity of sleep
Gastrointestinal stress (food sensitivities)
Training stress (overtraining)
Dehydration
Anxiety

Much of the things I’ve written about previously.

When it comes to adrenal fatigue, symptoms and signs are fuzzy. They could be mistaken for something else.

What are some general adrenal fatigue symptoms?

Symptoms are numerous as well:
Back pain
Anxiety (could be a cause and a symptom)
Exhaustion
Headaches
Constipation
Diarrhea (digestion related as the above)
Fatigue
Brain fog
Shortness of breath
Upset stomach
Insomnia (disturbed sleep)
Stiff neck
Weight gain (inability to get lean)
Weight loss (impossible to build muscle)
Low libido (loss of sexual desire)
Depression

Besides the ability of your adrenal glands to produce stress hormones, stress depletes vitamins and minerals from your body. That leaves you with the inability to produce ample hydrochloric acid and other digestive enzymes. Which inhibits your body from absorbing the vitamins and minerals from your food, no matter how high quality food you eat. It leaves you with the above symptoms.

Here’s a summary of steps you can take to begin recovering from adrenal fatigue:

Improve your breathing (regularly perform breathing exercises)
Make an effort to go to bed earlier until you’re sleeping by 10:00pm.
Hydrate yourself
Meditate
Remove soy, grains, nuts, legumes from your diet
Experiment with removing dairy and eggs from your diet
Supplement with additional vitamins and minerals, especially vitamin B, vitamin C, zinc and magnesium
Take digestive enzymes
Perform energy building exercises like Qi Gong and Tai Chi
Take restorative yoga classes
Focus on positive things and things you’re grateful for
Avoid stimulants like coffee, artificial energy drinks and white sugar
Cut back on your training time and volume if you’re training too much

To get more detail on most of these steps, read through my past posts on this site.

Can you identify with any of the above adrenal fatigue symptoms? If only a few, you have a better chance of bouncing back.

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