When people hear the word “overtraining” most think of athletes who train at super-high intensities multiple times a day. While training regimes of this nature often do cause overtraining, what is missing from this picture is that overtraining is simply the breakdown state that occurs when one maintains an imbalance between these two factors:

Training Stress – vs – Adaptation

To put it simply, adaptation is everything that your body does to handle and repair from the stress of training. So if Training stress is greater than your body’s ability to adapt, it will break down. Stay in this state for long enough, and you have a plethora of issues that come as a result, ranging from a compromised immune system and injury, to chronic fatigue and depression. The point I am drawing with the balance of these two forces is that every body’s ability to adapt is totally unique, and changes in accordance to a large number of variables including sleep quality, career and family stresses, and nutrient intake.

When you break it down, these pressures lead to a measurable shift in hormone balance.

When the body is producing the stress hormone Cortisol, it is not producing the androgen Testosterone. If the body is under severe stress, or in the case with many people as they age, Testosterone may be bound up by SHBG and unavailable to your cells. For women, a lack of testosterone leads to a lack of the primary sex hormone, Estrogen. Thus, too much stress, and the body is thrown off-course in its ability to adapt on all levels: physically and emotionally. Add to that the fact that testosterone production declines with age 10-20%, based on stress, trauma, nutrition and genetics – so we push ourselves harder to fit training in while life demands more and our reserve for healthful adaptation slowly declines.

Due to this decline with age along with the many possible and ever-changing stress-factors we juggle at once, many people think they are trying to keep active by forcing in their workouts; a lot of the time what is really holding back their results is overtraining.

Take for example a mom of two kids who gets up an hour early to train, because she works a 9 to 5 and then comes home to 2 kids that need her attention. When they get to bed by 9pm, she cleans up the house and it’s now 10 O’clock. Put on a show, grabbing a snack because she is so hungry, and she is in bed at 11:30, only to wake up at 6am to do it again the next day. Have we stopped to consider that all it would take is one added stress factor from family, a bad day at work or an unknown exposure to a cold-virus and she is now doing more harm than good when she gets to her morning workout?

Do we stop to think that maybe her lack of results may be because her body’s adaptive systems are already maxed out with her day to day?

If we were to analyse this person’s blood profile consistently through the day, we would see that her adrenaline and cortisol levels spike and elevate through the day, and that her testosterone and estrogen levels suffer, and that the sex hormones she does have are bound by SHBG. For men, the biggest difference will be a drop in their testosterone.

So the answer would seem simple: cut back hours at the job, hire a nanny to help with the house and the kids, and prep meals in advance to make sure she is eating at the right time, and go to bed an hour earlier… but this is easier said than done.

While changes must be made in this cycle, there are things that can help her maintain better health and a stronger capacity for adaptation. With the help of time restricted feeding aka intermittent fasting, along with a daily meditation practice, individuals living in sustained stress lifestyles can maximize their body’s ability to handle the stresses and make positive adaptations, improving their bodies physically, mentally and emotionally. But these habits are especially difficult to implement once overtraining has taken root, and they may of themselves not be enough to outweigh the damage that is already done to hormone balance and as such to the body’s adaptive abilities.

As a trainer, I have seen this issue play out in my clients’ lives for over a decade – there is a real struggle to get onto more solid ground and handles the stresses of life such that we have the capacity to train, be active, and be happy.

It was through a client of mine that I discovered an herb that enables us to make a substantial, lasting improvement in our ability to handle stress, from the hormones, leading to improved energy both physically and mentally. We found it to be so successful with our clientele that my client set out to bring this south-east Asian herb into Canada and the United States. Over the course of 2 years and much sourcing, testing, and trials with our trainers and clients, we created a formulation with call Youngblood Energy Transfusion.

Youngblood frees bound hormones, allowing them to function properly. It then stokes your hormone production so that optimal balance can be achieved. 

We’ve found this to be very effective when improved capacity to adapt is needed; either under high training volume, or where a person’s life & workload and stresses are high, and they need an improved capacity to meet them with high mental and physical performance. Once hormone balance is restored, the body responds positively to the challenges it meets. The same is true of people who suffer from long-term burnout. As long as incremental lifestyle change is made along with supplementation, the baseline of energy and motivation is unlocked and the cycle of dread and weariness can be put to an end. It is because of this benefit that we find Youngblood to be a perfect match for our clients’ training programs, as well as a fit for anyone who is looking to increase their work capacity with no drawback. A number of studies have been done on the safety of this herb and in all cases subjects were found to have improved hormone levels along with improved immune function, less incidence of inflammation, improved outlook on life and improved mood and motivation.

While there are other brands that carry the Eurycoma Longifolia herb, very few are standardized, and none of them have the potency that Youngblood does, which is why we recommend it!

You can find out more about Youngblood by reading the Full Review, and you can order it by visiting their website, YoungbloodEnergy.com. Youngblood comes with our highest recommendation because of what it has done for us, and our clients.