Hedge Haigh Personal Training

Are you stressed because of poor gut health?

Most of us have experienced the sensation of having "stomach butterflies" when we feel nervous, so we know that the gut and the brain are connected, but is there a proven link between gut health and your stress levels? 🧠

Research in humans and animals suggests that the vagus nerve has a crucial role in passing messages between the gut and the brain, almost acting like a motorway passing information back and forth. 📧

The vagus nerve is associated with activity of the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest), which is why people who are chronically stressed are often found to have poor vagal tone.

It is thought that when there is a state of dysbiosis (too much bad bacteria, not enough good) the messages between the gut and the brain start to change and vagal tone is reduced - which leads to increased activity of the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) and an increase in stress hormones. 😤

When stress hormones are elevated this also creates an environment for bad bacteria to thrive, the pathogenic species crowd out the good bacteria leading to more imbalance, which can create a viscous cycle of more stress and more bad bacteria! ❌

Eating nutrient-dense high fibre vegetables & berries that will nourish the good bacteria (as well as reducing sugar and processed food)
is an effective way to start to break this cycle and reset your gut health whilst reducing stress, improving your mood and getting rid of the brain fog ✅

🤸🏾You understand the importance of getting some sort of movement every day.⁣⁠⁣⁠
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If you exercise regularly, you probably know that kickass workouts can leave you feeling like a million bucks 🥊 🥊⁣⁠⁣⁠
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Here are just a few reasons *why* getting full-body movement in every day has us feeling like this 🤗⁣⁣⁠⁣⁠
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🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏽‍♂️ Hands up if regular exercise has positively impacted your health (mental, physical, or emotional).

Why is strength training a must for sustainable fat loss?

I'm sure many trainers can relate to the surprised reactions during an initial conversation about the best methods to lose body fat. Clients are often surprised when I explain that, for the vast majority of people, a calories in calories out focus is ineffective - and that training for calorie expenditure (usually through steady state or endurance cardio) within a session is likely to cause plateaus in your progress due to the fact that adaptations to a cardio based programme tend to shift towards efficiency I.e. using the same amount of calories to run further or for longer, rather then actually increasing metabolic rate in the same way that resistance training does. That's why cardio programmes can often show some results in the short term, but then progress is likely to stall after the first 6-12 weeks when your body has made adaptations to the stimulus.

So now that you are burning less calories to run 10k, the only way to further increase calorie expenditure for more fat loss is to run further/for longer or to train more frequently. Eventually there are no more hours in the day, body and immune system is weakened from overtraining or you simply can't stand to spend even more time in the gym. I have known people who fall into this trap and find themselves exercising for 4-6 hours per day, which is ok if you have no job or if you are a professional athlete but for the average person this is simply not possible.

So wait, "working hard" being out of breath and sweating doesn't burn fat? Stated simply, no. Whilst training intensity is an important variable, sweat is not "fat crying". In fact there is very little correlation between sweating and burning body fat, sweating is simply a means of thermoregulation when temperature is too high. So that's not the best way to measure the effectiveness of a particular programme or workout.

Strength and conditioning based workouts offer a much more effective method for achieving long term fat loss and health goals. Not only are they associated with better functional capacity as we age, they also tend to preserve joint integrity which is important for injury prevention.

How does strength training burn fat?

* Strength training builds or preserves lean tissue and increases your metabolic rate so that you burn more calories throughout the day and night
* Increases levels of catecholamine hormones that burn fat
* Improves insulin sensitivity which means you store less fat after meals, this has an effect on blood glucose control which can lead to being more full between meals and less likely to crave junk food
* Increases enzymes involved in fat burning

Another key point is that when someone loses weight through calorie restriction or cardiovascular activity, quite often a significant percentage of that will be lean tissue resulting in a lower metabolic rate and being more likely to put the weight back on. A strength training program is much more likely to preserve/build lean tissue and increase metabolic rate, so that further down the line you can be more relaxed with what you eat. Endurance cardio is also know to have a catabolic (losing muscle) effect on the body which can also affect your metabolic rate.

Interval cardio training can help to increase your metabolic rate through the "Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption" , a period of 24-48 hours of elevated metabolism following an intense interval session. However, for most it will be less beneficial then regular strength training for fat loss, so I encourage people to add in interval/HIIT training once they have hit their quota for strength workouts in any given week.

Keep the strength exercises multi joint compound movements for maximum effectiveness, set rest times to a minute and do at least 3 sets of 12 on each exercise, maintain a high protein intake and train to technical failure. Following an approach similar to this rather than pounding the miles away on a treadmill can really be the difference between seeing no significant changes in your body or actually surpassing those all important goals. Sometimes we just have to train smarter, not harder.

If you could change just one thing about your health what would it be?