Are public service announcements on television still a thing?
When I was a kid, you couldn’t avoid them.
On Saturday mornings they would come in the form of cartoons singing songs about how a bill becomes a law or how a noun is a person, place or thing.
On Saturday nights they reminded parents that it was 10 o’clock and they should probably know where their children are.
Sometimes they were 30 seconds long and put into commercial breaks hosted by stars of the day who would tell you about the risks of childhood obesity or encouraging parents to get involved in their child’s education.
Sometimes they came as ninety-minute long after school specials, dramatizing the risks of taking speed or the spread of teen pregnancy.
Admittedly, I don’t watch as much TV as I used to so maybe these things are still around but I doubt it. Gone are the days where you don’t have your kid’s location on lockdown at all hours and I have to imagine that it’s more cost effective to run yet another commercial trailer for yet another Marvel movie than it is to have Joey Lawrence talk about the importance of getting 8 hours of sleep.
But I am nothing if not a trendsetter. A reinvigorator. A bastion of history brought forth on this very blog to return things from the past and make them relevant once more.
And I will do just that today by bringing you my own public service announcement.
Cue the graphics package of a colorful star shooting across your computer screen along with a five note musical pneumonic you will not be able to get out of your head for the next 30 years.
If you haven’t already, you will soon hear from fitness influencers on the risks of cortisol escalation brought on by exercise and why this is the worst thing to happen since Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez got back together.
For those of you who don’t know, cortisol is an important hormone in your body most commonly associated with the stress response.
And the latest rhetoric around cortisol is that exercise spikes it and you want to avoid that at all costs.
So now, the very same people who, for the past 5 years, were telling you that high intensity interval training is the only way while they shared memes of roaring lions with the caption “only burpees can save you” are now telling you to take a walk rather than get your heart rate up.
Full disclosure: Walks are great. Meditation is fantastic. Low effort, “Zone 2”, aerobic work is valuable. Being in what we would call a parasympathetic state is not only important, it is essential to your ability to exist as a human.
So there is merit to low effort exercise and chilling out in general. Hell, sleep is at the top of the food chain when it comes to a single lifestyle factor that drives positive health outcomes in my opinion. And, unless you watched “Saw II” right before you shut your eyes, sleeping is about the most low output thing you can do.
However (and this is a BIG however) that doesn’t negate the need for challenging, stressful, cortisol-inducing strength training and conditioning. From everything I can see, those who are telling you differently are just wrong.
Much is made of physical homeostasis (the process of the body maintaining equilibrium within its internal environment even in the face of external changes) and these anti-cortisol advocates might argue that their methods are the best way to guarantee that your body maintains a constant, positive state.
Two problems with this argument.
First, they are missing the back-half of the definition. Homeostasis is only valuable if it can be maintained in the face of external changes. If you don’t prepare yourself (ie. train) to recover and come back to neutral after an external stimulus, you will be underprepared when challenge or danger approaches.
And it will approach.
Secondly, the efficacy of your entire organism relies on not only balance but also variation. A healthy heart beats in an unsteady rhythm. Androgens surge and retreat at certain times of day. Same goes for glucose levels and insulin based on your eating schedule.
Hell, the female reproductive cycle which is responsible for the proliferation of human life has a critical and (mostly) predictable cadence month over month but each week within that month is quite different.
Without these natural pushes and pulls you wouldn’t function optimally. Same should go for your approach to exercise, movement and fitness.
So just as being on “11” at all times isn’t great for training, neither is spending your day snoring as you lay in the grass (although that does sound lovely).
You need a balanced approach that consists of training various strength qualities and energy systems if you want to be a well-rounded, healthy human being. Even high level athletes who benefit the most from specificity take time to cross-train or perform varied, non-sport specific training in the off season in order to improve general fitness.
OK, here’s the TL;DR of my PSA: You need a variety of training intensities and ample recovery in your program. But being afraid of cortisol or exercises or programs that increase cortisol is a massive mistake. The vast majority of people actually under-index on training intensity and this advice is only going to make things worse for most.
I was going to add “fitness influencers suck” to that list, but in an effort to be less cranky I’ll just say you really need to vet out the information you receive and apply and find trusted sources.
The more you know.