Looking for Exercises for Stress Management?

"But are there specific exercises that are best for stress management?"

Indeed there are ...

However you won’t read about them in the “job stress” flyer your Human Resources person passes out at the office, and you sure won’t learn them from the latest self-help “guru”.

When it comes to exercises for stress management, all exercise is not created equal!

It’s true that regular exercise of any kind will help to raise your stress threshold, the key here being regular. In fact irregular exercise can actually worsen stress, as your body struggles to cope with the erratic demands made on it.

But I am not content with merely raising your stress threshold a little bit. Our goal is HARDCORE Stress Management™ – we need powerful results and we need them now!

How do we achieve the fastest results from exercises for stress? I’ll let you in on a little secret:

The key to using exercises for stress management is to choose movements which require the maximum use of your body’s nervous system.

Why is that?

Your nervous system is the network that transfers information from your senses to your body and mind. If that network is not in good shape, it’s easy for it to get overloaded.

An easily overloaded nervous system makes for an easily and often extremely stressed-out person.

Simple enough?

I looking at exercises for stress we want to focus not only on exercising our muscles, but our nervous system which communicates with our muscles and everything else in our bodies.

What kind of exercises require maximum use of your body’s nervous system?

The best exercises for stress, the exercises which make maximum use of our body’s nervous system, are exercises involving compound movements.

What’s a compound movement? In exercise terms, a compound movement is the opposite of an isolated movement.

An isolated movement is an exercise which focuses on the muscles involved in moving the body in the context of a single joint.

For example, a bicep curl is the classic example of an isolated movement. It focuses solely on exercising the muscles which involve flexing the arm at a single joint, the elbow joint.

Isolation exercises (exercises consisting of isolated movements) and the meat and potatoes of the body-building exercise routine. This is because they allow the body-builder to focus on a single muscles or small group of muscles at a time.

Compound movements, on the other hand, are the cornerstone of the athlete’s exercise program - and the best exercises for stress.

Some of you are well aware of the profound differences in training philosophy and results between the body-building world and the athletics / functional strength world, and some of you are not.

A discussion of those differences is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that bodybuilders, the folks you see on the front of the glossy “muscle-mags”, focus on “show” muscle while athletes focus on “go” muscle.

Get it? Got it? Good!

From the perspective of stress management compound exercises, exercises which involve multiple muscle groups and movement through multiple joints simultaneously, are much more taxing on your nervous system.

The simple reason for this is that it requires significantly more neurological coordination for your body to accomplish these compound movements.

As a result, when you train compound movements, you are also giving your nervous system a much better workout than if you spent the same amount of time and energy training with isolation exercises.

So what are some good examples of compound movements?

The below are a few favorites that I’ve chosen that will be more than enough to get you started. I have specifically chosen bodyweight excercises, movements which require no additional weight except that of your own body, for a number of reasons ...

First of all, I want to remove as many barriers to entry for you as possible. So many use lack of weights or lack of a gym membership as another excuse to keep from exercising. You no longer have that excuse!

At the end of the day, your body is all the gym you should ever need.

And secondly, compound movements are difficult. Difficult enough that in the beginning you don’t need to add a lot of weight.

You need to focus on learning the movements correctly and perfecting your form. That’s easier to do without the weights.

So let’s get started! Here’s a few ideas to get you on your way:

• Push-ups
• Bodyweight Squats
• Lunges
• Crunches / Sit-ups
• Pull-ups / Chin-ups
• Swimming
• Running

“But Grady, why isn’t [insert your favorite exercise here] on the list?!?”

Please try to keep in mind that this is only a partial list of suggestions. The exercises above meet a number of my criteria, one of which being that most of us learned how to do some version of them in gym class at elementary school – in other words, you have no excuse not to know how to do them.

Will such simple exercises really work? You better believe it.

How about bodyweight squats? Think they’re pointless?? Get up from your computer right now and give me 20 bodyweight squats in a row – all the way down till your butt touches your calves and back up.

I mean it – right now!

Ok … how are you breathing now? Could you do all 20? Still think that these simple exercises for stress are silly??

Of all three of the above exercises for stress, swimming may be the king. Not only is your entire body involved in working against in a low-impact environment, but the breath is trained as well.

How often should you exercise?

Every day.

From a stress management perspective, 10 minutes of exercise 5 days a week is 1000 times better than 50 minutes of exercise once a week.

Do a little every day. Work your way up – and feel your stress threshold rise as you take your life back into your own hands.

And remember, always check with your doctor (general practitioner) before embarking on any new exercise program.

PS - You may already be a very fit person, and looking truly HARDCORE exercises for stress. If so, I would direct you to the powerlifts (barbell squat & deadlift … avoid the bench press) and Olympic lifts.

These are movements that you should learn from a qualified instructor. Do not try them on your own!

I repeat – do NOT under any circumstances read up on these lifts on the Internet and then go to your home gym and try to do them. You WILL hurt yourself or worse.

If you really want to give the powerlifts or Olympic lifts a try, find a credible instructor and learn them the right way. Nothing would stress you (or me!) out more than spending a few weeks in the hospital because you thought you could teach yourself how to Clean & Jerk!

PPS - Get your copy of my HARDCORE Stress Management™ program today and start attacking your stress directly!