There are a ton of myths surrounding health, fitness, and longevity. From ‘Fit’ tea and fat-burners to meal frequency and dieting, finding what truly matters in the grand scheme of things can be challenging.
But, whether you’re looking to achieve peak fitness, live more, or simply feel better, three factors will play a more significant role than anything else. So, let’s talk about them.
1. Your Hormones
Hormones are the body’s chemical messengers. They determine when you’re hungry, sad, happy, full, frisky, sleepy, fully awake, etc. While many people believe their hormonal level balance is determined by genetics, other factors also play a significant role. Among these, we have:
Here are some practical examples of how one’s choices affect their hormones:
There are more than enough proposed tactics for optimizing hormone levels, from multivitamin and testosterone-boosting supplements to strange herbs and medications. Unfortunately, most tactics are not effective and don’t make a difference. We’ll discuss what works better below.
2. Your Muscular Development
Building muscle seems like a vain pursuit, only suitable for bodybuilders, professional athletes, and social media narcissists. But, despite the stigma surrounding it, muscle is valuable and tightly linked to our health, functionality, and well-being.
For one, having more muscle means you’re more functional, and everyday tasks like carrying groceries and walking up flights of stairs become easier. The benefit might not seem all that important for young people, but having more muscle and being more functional beyond a certain age means you can maintain your independence and not become a burden to others.
Second, building muscle means you’re improving your bone mineral density because the two go hand-in-hand. For example, squats are beneficial for your quadriceps, but the activity also strengthens the bones that support that large muscle group. You reduce the risk of developing osteoporosis later in life and lower your risk of fractures and other bone-related issues.
The third benefit of having more muscle is that it improves your health on several fronts. First, muscle is metabolically costly tissue. The more you have of it, the healthier your metabolism is, and the more calories you burn each day. As a result, you can consume slightly more food without worrying about unwanted weight gain. Second, developing and training your muscles improves insulin sensitivity–-a measure of how sensitive your cells are to the hormone. Your pancreas has to produce and release less insulin for you to control your blood sugar levels.
3. How You Handle Stress
Stress is difficult to understand, and many people see it as the worst thing we can experience. However, hear me out:
While stress can be harmful to our health, how we respond to it matters much more to our bottom line.
In a famous TED talk from 2013, Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University discussed an observational study and made some interesting arguments. In her talk, she talks about a paper that tracked 30,000 Americans over eight years. The experiment began by asking participants two simple questions:
The findings were interesting and not that surprising. People who reported experiencing more stress had a 43 percent higher chance of dying early. Interestingly, that was only the case for the individuals who believed that stress was harming their health. People who didn’t hold that belief but experienced more stress weren’t more likely to die than individuals with relatively little stress in their lives. In fact, these people were at the lowest risk of death among all the subjects in the study.
In other words, the way you perceive stress impacts how it affects your health. The problem is that we are taught to avoid, manage, or find ways to minimize stress. But what if, instead of seeing it as this Boogeyman, we learn to embrace stress and see it as something that makes us better?
For example, weight training is a stressor, but most people don’t see it that way. Despite it being challenging, we see it as something good for us. The first time you enter the gym, you can’t lift much weight or last very long. But, as you keep going back and exposing your body to this physical stress, it adapts by building muscle and getting stronger. As a result, your capacity to tolerate that stress improves, leading to better workouts and health benefits. The same can be true for all types of stress we face, but we first have to change how we perceive difficulties in life.
The Three Habits That Influence Each Of The Factors We Discussed Today
I know what you might be thinking:
“The above sounds clear enough, but I probably have to do a dozen things to influence all three factors, right?”
The good news is that you don’t. You have to focus on just three things to influence your hormones, develop muscle mass, and improve your ability to deal with stress. These are:
Sleep is at the core of our health and influences our physiology, mental health, mood, and everything else. Resistance training brings numerous health benefits, builds our muscles, and teaches us to stand up to stress and not let it buckle us. Protein is an essential nutrient that promotes muscle gain and plays a crucial role in producing hormones, enzymes, neurotransmitters, antibodies, and much more.
Coach Michael
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