let's talk about the relationship between stress and your muscles when you go through chronic
stress which creates an elevation of cortisol various things happen to different parts of
your body but today we're going to focus more on the skeletal muscles and it's not necessarily
just excessive stress it could be excess amount of cortisol another name for that
would be glucocorticoids or as an external source if you're on prednisone for example
you're getting a lot of that cortisol and that can create the same effect there's two primary
effects that happen with the muscles number one you have this increased catabolic effect
okay catabolic means a breakdown of something so we're getting a breakdown of muscle protein
okay and number two you have this decrease of the anabolic effect of the muscles so this means
you're not going to build the muscles back up you're not going to make new muscles so if we look
at the chain of events we have increased amount of stress or prednisone or an increased amount
of cortisol from another reason maybe you had a tumor on your adrenal or whatever so there are
other reasons why your cortisol might go up but what happens it targets the muscle and you start
getting atrophy of the muscle and what's happening is we're getting this muscle that's turning into
amino acids and the amino acids are there as a precursor to make new glucose okay in the liver
and that's called gluconeogenesis neo meaning new genesis meaning the creation of so we're making
new glucose from non-carbohydrate sources and in the process of breaking down this muscle protein
there's going to be two main muscle groups that are going to be involved primarily it could be
other muscles too but primarily it's going to be your thigh muscles okay the quadricep and the
glute muscles your glutamas maximus apparently those are two muscles that we have in abundance so
that's what the body is going to go after and this is all a survival mechanism and what the body is
trying to do is it's trying to preserve glucose to support the fuel in your brain now normally
protein is not used for fuel but during certain survival mechanisms the body has this plan b where
it starts tapping into the protein to increase glucose to actually help us survive and so the
brain cannot exclusively live on ketones it has to use glucose too and if you're not feeding it sugar
it's going to then make it from various sources so you have the stress primarily chronic stress
over a period of time that then starts breaking down your muscles turns them into amino acids
and in the liver that's converted into glucose we also have several other things going on we have
the suppression of glucose uptake of the cells for the preservation of glucose for the brain we also
have suppression of the utilization of glucose and we have the suppression of glycogen synthesis so
in other words your body's not going to focus on storing glucose it wants to keep it high in the
blood so the brain can take what it needs so this is what chronic stress does to your muscles okay
and it's all a survival mechanism to help you survive and feed the brain which is the one of
the most important organs during survival so what can you do to counter some of this of course you
want to isolate the source of your stress and do whatever you can to reduce that stress number two
vitamin b1 and vitamin b5 is essential you can get that from nutritional yeast that will greatly help
counter the effects of cortisol and the third thing is vitamin d3 which can also help you
naturally reduce cortisol now there's many many other things you can do for stress but
these are probably three of the top most important things to focus on all right thanks for watching
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