Stress continues to be a persistent and omnipresent part of
life. The way I deal with stress is to avoid it – avoid thinking about what is
weighing on me, avoid writing an essay about stress, etc. In no way am I
advocating avoiding stress because that is impossible, especially since our
bodies will eventually always show the receipts. At one point in my early 20s,
my stomach was severely impacted by my efforts to avoid stress. Debilitated by
pain, like glass shards in my stomach, it was hard to deny that something was
affecting me but my first impulse was to avoid connecting my pain to my stress
levels.
Every individual has patterns for deliberate or unconscious
responses to stress. How I respond to stress and hold it in my body is
ultimately up to me. Unpacking the effects of stress on my body seems scary,
but it’s even scarier to know that avoiding stress can make me very ill. There
are systemic and bodily dangers to overexposure to stressors, clearly; however,
as I’m learning, benefits can be derived from deliberate contact to stress. Exercising with heavy weight in slow, measured movements is
called Super Slow High Intensity Training and is a type of strength
training that exposes your body to stress in a safe and controlled
setting.
My basketball coach (and probably yours too) used to say
“Leave it all on the court.” That’s what a good work out can feel like. But it
can also be so much more than a stress release. Strength training is a means of
engaging with the complexity of stress in our daily lives – not only do you get
a mental break while working out but the intentional time can be used to observe what your body
does when it’s feeling threatened. Bodies react to stress as a stimuli regardless of the source. Thus strength training can function as a form of emotional
conditioning to understand how your body responds to stress in the moment such as
a clenched jaw, raised shoulders, or tight fists.
The ultimate goal
of the Super Slow Method is to control motion and momentum under the stress of
weight loads. The training is high intensity because you’re lifting the most
weight that you can safely control. Throughout the exercises your muscles
fatigue, then the ranges of motion decrease, and eventually your muscles can no
longer perform at all. This is called failure and it’s exactly what you want your
body to do in response to this type of stress. Failure is your body’s way of
letting you know that it’s done all that it can for now!
Challenging your body in this way prompts a cascade of
muscular, hormonal, and biological responses. Throughout this ‘high stress’
situation, the body is forced into a fight or flight scenario where reaction patterns
begin to show – i.e. the shoulders raise, the jaw clenches, etc. Increasing
your body awareness and tuning into yourself while working out has the
potential to increase your understanding of how you react to stress while
outside the gym walls and away from that controlled environment.
Deliberate exposure to stress in the form of strength
training helps me develop a relationship with my stress levels. It has by
no means ‘cured’ my first impulse to avoid stress (especially since its taken
me over three months to write this essay!). However, Super Slow High Intensity Training is conditioning me to be more aware of where I am
holding stress and how my body reacts when I’m in a stressful situation. Stress
is - and will always be - a part of my life. After five years of consistent training though, I’m finding
that my capacity to be aware of my stress levels is changing
in positive ways and I no longer have soul crushing stomach aches!
