Powerlifting and dealing with Stress

I have learnt some interesting lessons recently about the bodies capacity to deal with stress.

For the last 5-6 years I have worked in high pressure roles and while you learn to adapt it's important to understand your limits .

This year I took up a fantastic new role but with the pleasure came significantly more responsibility and a much larger time commitment. As is my nature I put my head down and got into the new role with plenty of gusto. However what I didn't count on was how the day to day new stresses of the role would impact me systemically.

Typically I use training as a great de-stress from day to day life: effectively a retreat that you can just focus on no matter how good or bad the day was. However this role has been different and it was quite insidious how the stress started to accumulate.

To be fair this has been a busy year training for me as well with my first States and backing up in 7 weeks to my first Nationals. So on all levels my body was under a fair bit of stress. Add to that that I didn't appreciate the impact of preparing for my first two big contests relatively close together and how beat up I would be afterwards.

As a consequence I hit the wall about 5 weeks ago feeling some really significant lethargy and a desire to just sleep constantly. The problem was when I hit the sack the mind was still racing so sleep wasn't delivering me the recovery time I needed.

So what do you do, man up and push through.....ahh..nooo that just puts you in a bigger world of pain. Simply sit back acknowledge what you are feeling and agree it's time for a break.

For me that involved a full panel of blood work to get some feedback on what was going on in the body, a break from training to give the body a little time to heal and changing the stress levels in the rest of my life.

Thankfully the blood work came back ok though cholestorol was up but that I believe is due to some shit diet habits in the heavy part of Nationals prep along with overall inflammation from the stress.

The point of this little story is that stress can sneak up on you. As powerlifters we can be very regimented and push through with training using it to deal with our stress. It is easy to get lost in the mental fog of a regimented routine.

Now maybe for some that works but remember sometimes a break is needed to reset get the head right. It worked for me.

Take some time out when you need it, your body and more importantly your mind will thank you.

Stay Strong
Thomo