Flourish Featured Article: Stress vs Strain

This article is one that I wrote for the Flourish Newsletter (Found on the Life Time Fitness Weight Loss site found here).  It is about how exercise can be a good stress or a bad stress on the body and what you can do about it to maximize your results.

Our bodies are built for certain physical “stresses.” They evolved to handle to them, expect them, and thrive with them. In fact, when we don’t offer our bodies reasonable exertion within these natural stresses, our systems suffer to some degree. We, in effect, downgrade our own physical robustness. Good physical stress is the day to day (hopefully) movement that supports our bone, muscle, organ, hormone, and immune function. Strain, however, results when we push our bodies beyond reasonable exertion (for our present physical condition) or when we engage in exercise without adhering to proper form and periodization. 

The key to maximizing our fitness gains is to optimize our good physical stress without imposing unproductive strain on our bodies. Click here to read the rest of the article.

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