Daily Tip #21: Balance of Hormones and Strength Training
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VARSHA: [00:00:00] Normal hormonal labs, but you don't feel normal. Well it may be more about the balance of your hormones, not just the individual lab range. When your hormonal balance tips, you can feel it in every part of your life, from your mood to your energy, to your sleep. Think of your hormones like a seesaw that needs to stay balance.
It may not be the actual lab value, but it may be the balance between your hormones. For women, on one side is estrogen your growth hormone that builds tissue, but it also ramps up your nervous system. On the other side is progesterone, your calming hormone that soothes the nervous system and promotes deep sleep.
When estrogen is high beyond physiological levels compared to progesterone, even if both are technically normal, you get ~estrogen, ~estrogen dominance, where you may have heavy or prolonged periods, emotional ups and downs, bloating, sleep disturbances. It can even worsen conditions such as endometriosis and PCOS. For men, your testosterone is your building up hormone.
It builds up your [00:01:00] muscles, supports motivation, increases your energy. You also have estrogen as that's important in men too. But problems arise when testosterone gets converted to estrogen easily through a process called aromatization.
Then you're gonna have an imbalance between the amount of testosterone, the amount of estrogen.
This can lead to lower libido, fatigue, slower muscle recovery, increased belly fat, and sleep disruption.
So why do these hormones become imbalanced in the first place? ~Well, it's the same. Major. ~There are four main culprits that is the same for men and women.
Number one is chronic stress.
~Thus, it may offset, how am I trying to say that?~
In your hormonal pathway, progesterone is one of your precursors where it can either go down the the stress pathway to make cortisol or it can go towards making your testosterone and estrogens. So if you're chronically stressed, you're more likely to deplete your progesterone to go down through the cortisol pathway.
The second culprit are environmental estrogens. Yesterday's daily habit was about [00:02:00] plastics, so ~plastics, as I mentioned, can ~plastics, as I mentioned, has chemicals that mimic estrogen, so that can lead to estrogen dominance. But these chemicals can also be found in receipts and personal care products.
We call them xenoestrogens, then that can lead to higher levels of estrogen in both men and women leading to imbalance. The third way is through diet. Not getting enough protein and healthy fats and eating more processed foods that increase blood sugar or insulin can trigger inflammation and disrupt hormone signaling for everyone.
~Number four is poor sleep. Progesterone production may peak during the hours of 10 and two, and testosterone for men. Uh, let's leave out the ~number four is poor sleep. When you don't sleep well, you may not get full production of some of your hormones.
This leads me to today's daily habit challenge strength training. Strength training can address those four root causes.
Because it can be overwhelming if you're not already in a strength training program to suddenly begin one, I would just challenge you to start with two simple exercise. The two exercises are pushups and squats. The pushups will work your upper body, your core, and you can even do 'em against the [00:03:00] wall if you're not able to doo 'em on the floor. And if you are able to do 'em on the floor, you can do 'em in tabletop where your knees are a little bit closer to your hands, or you can move your knees backward where you're more in the modified pushup.
Or if you're strong enough, you could do a full body pushup, but I would aim for doing anywhere from 10 to 20 repetitions until you feel some sort of muscle fatigue in your upper body. You also wanna make sure you hold that core in when you do do the pushups, squats. Are a simple exercise that you can do.
You can even do it by just getting up and down off of a chair. That's kind of the basic level. And then you can do squats with a light set of dumbbells or just your body weight.
And then progressively increase your weight until you're doing about 10 to 12 repetitions, feeling the muscle fatigue. Now, you do wanna make sure you check with your doctor to make sure that you don't have any mobility conditions or any musculoskeletal conditions that affect your ability to do these two exercises,
As you incorporate [00:04:00] some of these simple movements through your day, just continue to add more and more strength training moves until you're doing a full body strength training workout about twice a week, whether that's consecutively in the gym or at home, or dispersing different exercises through your day.
I hope this was helpful and I hope you're enjoying these daily habit challenges. Don't forget to follow or subscribe so you don't miss out on future tips. Thanks for listening or watching and Have a Fantastic Day!~ ~
