Find out how and why you should use physical exercise flows in mental fitness training. We discuss the difference between eustress and distress and highlight how an acute stress response from exercising can be utilized for functional mental training.
Intro
All right, we’re back! Welcome to another 2Mynds podcast. Today, we wanted to take a moment to break down what you should maybe understand about the why and the how of we set up our body flows. Yep. So even though we’re a mental fitness-focused company, really we, we do incorporate full body fitness, your mental and your physical body. Today, we wanna really pull back a little bit and let you know what to expect when you do our physical workouts. So, what do we do? .. it’s important that you understand that we use our body flows or our physical fitness to create stress for our mental exercises so that we, we like to call it, we like to progress to stress, and we want to give you a little bit of information on how we do that with our physical exercises.
What is physiological stress?
Totally. But to bring it back, first you have to know what is physiological stress? What is, what is stress? We’ve all felt it, it’s this overwhelming cloud that sometimes doesn’t quite have a definition. But physiologically, there’s stress, but there’s also eu-stress. The e-u stress. Me stress? Not the you-stress, but the e-u-stress. So, stress can be either beneficial or it can be harmful. And basically for something to be stressful, it has to be taxing or overloading. Your system cannot take it anymore. It’s bringing you to the brink. And then whether it’s actually harmful, if it’s harmful to you, it’s stress, or whether it’s beneficial, that taxing overload is building you up stronger, then you’re finding you stress. And it’s also really cool and valuable to note that that could be a perceived threat, or it can be an actual threat. That’s a whole other rabbit hole of a podcast. Sure. But, you know, events can be real, which is what we work on here. It’s our real stress with our body flows. Or it can be perceived. Perceived. In the mind, it could be anxiety about something that causes stress and, and that something may not be there. It’s… you’re anticipating it. Right, right, right. And by the way, since we’re not typing this out, we’re saying it when she, that’s why I made a silly joke about mistress, but eustress, you write it E-U Right. Not you. Uh, and it’s actually, it’s from Greek and it means good. So, Can You spell that all the way out for me? Can you, so it’s E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S. Just in case people at home wanna look that up. Uh, it’s not a funny word that we created, even though me and Leon do create lots of funny words. But, so when I’m having a physiologically stressful event, There’s a couple things that you’ve most definitely experienced, we all have, that can be anywhere from a headache. It could be something with a change in your appetite. It could be a loss of sleep. But it could also be generalized fatigue. It could be your heart rate goes up, your respiratory rate goes up, you get a flush in your face. And of all of those symptoms, that’s just to name a few, there’s so many of ’em. And each of those responses are a little bit unique to you as an individual. Uh, Leon, can you tell me a little bit more about what physiological stress responses we deal With?
Acute stress versus chronic stress
So when Shannon mentioned how you might experience stress… it’s important to distinguish acute stress from chronic stress. Totally. First of all, acute stress is about stress that, uh, is, there’s some kind of trigger that causes what we call a stress reaction and immediately after the trigger. We call that acute stress. And, your body will react by creating epinephrine, norepinephrine. And often we refer to that as adrenaline. Right. And that, and that sets a whole up a whole cascade of stress reactions in our body. Right. And after some period of time, uh, the, the hormones change slightly, and there’s relatively more cortisol that comes into play. And, some other reactions that we refer to as a chronic stress response. Right. And when it, when it come, when we, if we come back to like eustress, then both types of like the, there’s a place for acute stress responses. And chronic stress responses. There’s, there’s a reason why we have it. The problem nowadays that we often see is that the, there are too many acute stress responses. Right. We one after another. And then we also don’t moderate our lives typically well enough for the chronic stress response to, to go down. We’re, we’re supposed to have that a little bit, and then the cortisol is supposed to be eliminated from our system or to some extent, and then we’re fine again. But then, before it gets eliminated, we get another acute stress response, and we get another one. And now our cortisol remains up. And, you know, our overall, our body is in a state that is too alert.
How we use acute (eu)stress
You know, I think that’s a, uh, great point. Leon is like all of those responses that I had kind of named off, you get a headache, you lose your appetite, you can’t sleep, your heart rate’s going up, you’re like shaky. All of those are like the stress response and the attention grabbers that we have. But there’s a whole hormonal cascade that’s happening underneath that. Again, Leon and I are wordy people, and we love to nerd out about these things. But that could be a whole other thing that, like, we don’t even, I don’t even think the science fully knows the implications of all the underlying mechanisms that are happening under that. When a stressful event is happening and how it becomes stress and eustress. And that’s something that makes 2Mynds really freaking cool, is we have figured out how to create only eustress. How do you make your life only filled with eustress? Starting with our body flows, we do that in our workouts. So, which of those physiological stress responses do we focus on? Like, is it the heart rate, is it the tremor?
So, so first of all, we focus, we focus on the acute stress response. Right. And, uh, under an acute stress response, and everybody will recognize this as well, your, your heart rate will go up typically. Your blood pressure will go up. you will, most people will start sweating a little bit. Your mouth will be a little dry, get a little drier. And most of us will not be thinking very straight, typically. Under an acute stress response. Right. And, uh, that’s right. That’s different from the, what you mentioned in terms of like chronic stress responses. Like, oh, I feel fatigued, or I feel tired, or I feel fuzzy in my head. Or, uh, I, my pain isn’t going away. Those, those are things that are more associated with a chronic stress response. Especially if that chronic stress response lasts too long. Right. So we really focus on the acute, uh, stress response, and we do that through physical motion. And, uh, then there we play with kind of different ways to stress your body. And so that is, uh, we either create a burn. So that is, what we call, let me take a step back. So first of all, we can create muscular stress and then we can create cardiopulmonary stress. Okay. And so muscular stress is about your, your, your muscles. Somehow your muscles are being brought to the point where they start fatiguing or failing. And I’ll come back to that. And then cardiopulmonary stress is you’re running outta breath. And both are a little bit stressful. But they’re also responses that, go up and then immediately go down. Right. Right. So it’s pretty easy to modulate or moderate it. Uh, and so that’s what we do in our workouts. And we build them up. Uh, but it’s also, the nice thing about generating stress like this through movement is that, uh, as you move more, you tend to become aware of how your body works. Totally. Right. And, and, so, so it’s, you, you can feel, okay, this is the point where I start to fatigue. This is the point where I start to fail. And so, uh, the three things that we focus on within, like cardiopulmonary and muscular, is cardiopulmonary, and we simply get you to go out of breath. Right. Uh, and, uh, and, and you feel that immediately. And then muscularly. So, So what Leon, uh, if you don’t mind me interrupting with cardio palm, it would be like you’re on the elliptical or like you’re doing Oh, Well, that’s kind of what, if you’re, you can’t quite equate the workouts that we do to that. But if you’re thinking about physiologically what’s going on with their heart rate and your respiratory rate, it would be like we have a workout, a body flow designed towards fatiguing you as if you were on a treadmill. Cyclical movements, high repetitions.
Implementing our Flow 255 workouts
And then We go into, and we can do that on a mat. Right? Right. And you can, so you can do all of what we do. You can do at home, you, and you don’t need that elliptical, but, Or a lot of equipment. And then you’ve got muscular endurance. The, the, so the creating some form of stress for your muscular system. We either, make sure you, you burn. Right. So you fatigue But it’s not as if you’re outta breath. It’s, it’s really like burning. And then so often people say, oh yeah, you got like lactic acid. Right. Like, build up. so that means that, that, that is kind of like a gradual, what we call gradual overload. Right. So we’re overloading, uh, your muscular system to some extent, but not super fast. And it’s not super slow because if it’s kind of slow for the muscular system, it tends to become a cardiopulmonary kind of workout. Right. but when it comes to the failure part, so we have burn failure and cardiopulmonary. So, so like the burn would be more of a low load over a long duration. So you’re lifting a low load with your muscles For a long time. So by the end of that time, you’re gassed. And you have a stress Response. So if we, like, we, we often do, exercise sections of two minutes. Well, actually Shannon does that. And uh, if, let’s say an example of the burn would be that you’re doing a pushup, but you do the pushup maybe on your knees or somehow assisted or maybe not a big range of motion. So you can do maybe like one minute or 30 seconds just pushups, but at the end of those 30 seconds you’re burning. Right. Right. That would be an example. whereas the failure type. Would be we, well, Shannon could even do it. Well, I have Shannon do a handstand. We’re not gonna ask that of you, but, but we could, for example, do stick with a pushup. Right. We’re doing a pushup maybe in a position where your head is down and you have a lot of load. Right. Maybe we can, maybe I, in my case, maybe I can do four or five, but that’s A four on five, like handstand pushups or, or like a clapping pushup. You’re not gonna do a minute of a clapping pushup. And so we go like to failure Rather than to the fatigue part. And in the end of the fatigue, you fail as well, but it’s maybe after 20 reps, Right. Or less, maybe it’s three reps of an MVC, which is a maximum voluntary contraction. So you’re, you’re doing your max contraction, you’re exploding off the ground in a pushup, and you can only do that three times. And then you take a break three times and take a break, and you’re doing that for say, a two minute stretch. And then after that you’re gassed. Yeah, you’re gassed. So in, in the same way with all three of those workouts that Leon described, the cardiovascular, the muscular endurance and the muscle power, you’re gassing out, you’re getting your physiological response, but you’re also, so again, the, our end goal with these workouts is to train your mind. So we want that physiological response here at 2Mynds. But we are also as a physical therapist, as a physical therapist, And as scientists, we created a method for how we do that. So you’re also getting a good body workout.
Maximum voluntary contraction (MVC)
Maybe before I come back to that, can you explain a little bit more? Because I think it’s valuable for people. What is an MVC? So MVC, maximum voluntary contraction, it’s how much can you voluntarily contract your muscle? How much are load are you moving? So if you’re doing something for muscular endurance, maybe you’re doing a sub max voluntary contraction over a long duration, so, or your maximum voluntary contraction, what is the max you can do? If you hand me a dumbbell and Leon a dumbbell, what is the max weight that we can do one rep, and that is our one rep max, that’s our maximum voluntary contraction. So we use that principle and play with it to figure out how to take you to your breaking point. And you know, like we said, we wanna create eustress though. We don’t want it to be distress. So in that way, throughout the workouts, I will constantly be queuing you on safe body mechanics. On how to listen to your body if you’re, you know, above 18 or even younger, this is such a valuable lesson. And I see this in the, the clinic as a PT to learn how to listen to your body. How do you know when you’re doing too much or when you’re not doing enough. And that’s also something here at 2Mynds, when we focus on the body, we really focus on teaching you how to listen to your body, how to be safe and how to train through these principles.
The natural progression in Flow 255 body flows
And so there’s, there’s a buildup in our workouts. We, we try to vary it. Uh, as much as possible, but there’s also a buildup and in terms of, you know, learning, getting to know your body. Uh, it’s, it’s better to start, for example, with the, uh, fatiguing workout rather than, uh, the the failure workout. Right. You, you start with a burn because you will gradually get to the point where you might not be able to do another one. Right. Whereas if you’re in the range of, I can do two or three of these. So you’re working on muscle power is what Muscle, muscle power. Right. Two or three. Well, the difference between two and three is much bigger than the difference between Right. 23 and 24. Right. So we, we, you know, Shannon, when she takes you through the workouts, uh, and when we create, what I’ll come back to when we create our playlists for you, where we build up your exercises over a period of weeks, we take care of that part. Right. So, so what Leon’s saying is the muscular, and correct me if I’m wrong, muscular endurance and cardiovascular workouts are over here, but then if you go into muscle power, you know, your risk goes up. So in our body workouts at 2Mynds, we also want you to be safe. You know, we want you to use good biomechanics. And if you’re trying, if you’re new to 2Mynds, if you’re new to working out, if you’re new to this type of training, even if you’re, if a high performing athlete, you may wanna start over here with the muscle endurance And the cardiovascular stuff before you go to potentially high impact. Definitely high power workouts. And we do that for you with playlists that we design, and we teach you not how to only let us do it for you, but how to do it yourself, because that’s an invaluable lesson. Yep. And kind of segues into, uh, where we wrap up with That’s a lot of information. Again, feel free to check out our platform…
Why our mind needs training under stress
One more thing. She wants to wrap up, but I got one more thing. So I think it’s valuable, uh, even though this, so this podcast is really about the, the, the, the, the body. What is it really about? The body flows? It’s about, it’s about the body, the body flows that we do in our workouts, right? So the, the physical exercises. Right. but why we do that, I, I wanna just address briefly, right. So why, why, why do we progress to stress and how does that help our, the mental exercises that we do? And so the function of that is that, uh, your mind is capable of certain things under a little bit of stress. It’s capable of different things under more stress, and it’s capable of yet other things under a lot of stress. And the opposite is also true. So you, you may be able to do something under low stress, but you won’t be able to execute that under high stress. And when it comes to what we’re trying to help people with, which is thrive at life, right? We wanna help you thrive at life. Thrive, I’m under pressure And in particular under pressure. And our brain, it was not designed to be under pressure, to be delicate, to be precise, to be calculating. Right. We weren’t designed to do that. Our acute stress response is fight, flight, or freeze. That’s what it was designed for. Right. We, we either run away, we fight what we’re, what we’re encountering or we hide. Right? Right. And, and so, that obviously doesn’t help athletes. If you’re under stress, you don’t want to be like all tense and stressed up, and you don’t want to be, uh, short on, diagnosing what’s happening, or, and you want, you want to make good analysis, good decisions. Well, we weren’t really designed to do that under a lot of stress. Right. So the purpose of what we do is we want to gradually progress the stress, Right. Under which we give you these mental exercises. And, and, and we’re doing that systematically through physical exercises. And, you know, this podcast is not about the mental part, but so the physical exercises, the reason why we’re talking about stress, and the reason why we’re talking about our movements is to explain to you, you know, how, how that helps the mental exercises that we do. Right. Why even do a physical workout with a mental exercise? Why not just flip on head space? Why not just flip on whatever and do a meditation? Thank you. Why? You know, and then you could go into why not just jump into a cold body of water and freak your whole nervous system out? And then do, uh, you know, a, a meditation or whatever you wanna do, or, you know, is, is meditation even a progressive thing that you can do to train the mind? Like It rarely gets progressed, Rarely gets progressed. So we have a whole methodology That we can take you through to show.
Get started with a plan!
And, and you know, that’s a whole interesting point too, of like, often, especially in the us, we focus on just like, okay, I wanna get more fit, or I wanna be stronger at my sport. I’m just gonna get a gym membership. And then I guess just like, if you’re smart, you don’t just walk in the door of the gym and be like, okay, I bought the membership, so that means I’m gonna get bigger, better, faster, stronger. You go in with a trainer, or you yourself do research and you create a plan, because from a PT perspective, you’re gonna hurt yourself if you don’t know what you’re doing. And also, uh, if you don’t know what you’re doing or you don’t have a plan, life will create one for you. So that may not be the plan that you want or the way you wanna go, but if you don’t first sit back and pause and jump into the contemplative mindset Figure out a plan, then you can’t just go straight into operative and do You know, often I think we trip over our toes just wanting to, to just get started. We wanna go and, and we want, we feel like we’re helping ourselves, but unless you first think about it, but why not let us think about it for You. So, so to finish up, I think Shan’s quote was really, really good. If it, if you don’t make a plan, life will make a plan for you. Uh, but you know, rest assured, if you don’t make a plan, we will make a plan for you. Uh, so in the system, everything that we explain to you in, in this podcast, hopefully it’ll be informative and it’ll help you, it help you, it will help you recognize what we are already doing for you in the system with our playlist and our programs. So that part is, uh, life may make a plan for you, but we will also make a plan for you. And that is the why and the how behind the design, the intelligent design, if I say so myself :).