Adrenal Fatigue and Exercise
Welcome to the SYNC Your Life podcast episode #14! On this podcast, we will be diving into all things women’s hormones to help you learn how to live in alignment with your female physiology. Too many women are living with their check engine lights flashing. You know you feel “off” but no matter what you do, you can’t seem to have the energy, or lose the weight, or feel your best. This podcast exists to shed light on the important topic of healthy hormones and cycle syncing, to help you gain maximum energy in your life.
In today’s episode, I’m diving into a question I receive often: Can I still exercise with adrenal fatigue? We talk all things adrenal health, its impact on fitness, and how to listen to your body.
If you feel like something is “off” with your hormones, check out the FREE hormone imbalance quiz at sync.jennyswisher.com.
To learn more about the SYNC Digital Course, check out jennyswisher.com.
Let’s be friends outside of the podcast! Send me a message or schedule a call so I can get to know you better. You can reach out at https://jennyswisher.com/
Enjoy the show!
Episode Webpage: jennyswisher.com/podcast
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Welcome to the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Swisher, certified personal trainer, nutritionist, hormone health expert and girl mom, I believe all women should be able to understand how our bodies are designed to feel. And I teach you how to sync your lifestyle to your cycle to reach maximum energy. You deserve to feel your best and this podcast is going to teach you how. Let’s dive in!
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This podcast is sponsored by the sink digital course, to take the free hormone imbalance quiz to see what your symptoms could mean about your health. Visit sync.jennyswisher.com. That’s sync s y n c dot Jenny swisher.com.
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Hey, everyone, it’s Jenny here. Welcome to this edition of the SYNC Your Life Podcast coming to you from my office on a three degree day. Here in Midwest Indiana. It is so cold outside, I have my LifeBoost coffee here with me sitting on my little warmer, and I am absolutely freezing. But I’m going to do my best to ramp up my brain power and talk to you guys today about a topic that is really near and dear to my heart. It’s something that I have struggled with myself, and I know a lot of other women have as well. And that is adrenal fatigue. We’re gonna dive into what is adrenal fatigue? What are the adrenal glands? What can this show up as? How can you you know, what are people feeling when they are dealing with this sort of fatigue? And really, what are the treatments for this? Like, how can we overcome this? So I want to make sure that we touch on this specifically, because I get a lot of questions about adrenal fatigue and exercise. For example, I get women who say things to me, like, my doctor has told me that I’m most likely dealing with adrenal fatigue, or my adrenals are very fragile and weak right now, should I still be exercising? And so we’re really gonna dive into that as well. Even though yes, it is very unique and different for every single woman, there are some things that we need to know. And so I want to make sure that we touch on all of that today. This is a really important topic, not only as we sort of, still find ourselves living in this pandemic atmosphere of high stress, high, you know, cortisol issues, whether it’s low or high. People are really just kind of struggling right now. And it’s something that we’ve touched on in other podcast episodes, but never really just specifically focused on adrenal fatigue. So that’s what I want to do today.
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So first and foremost, let’s talk about what exactly Adrenal Fatigue is, and what are the adrenal glands? Well, the adrenal glands are these teeny, tiny little triangular shaped glands that sit right on top of the kidneys. So they’re known specifically for cortisol production. And cortisol really is your stress hormone. So oftentimes women are, whether they’re, they think they’re stressed out or not, we can usually tell by, you know, a simple cortisol test, especially a cortisol saliva test, that is usually the most accurate way to look at your cortisol. So the adrenal glands produce hormones that help regulate your metabolism, your immune system, your blood pressure, and like I said, your cortisol and your response to stress. So if you are someone who keeps finding yourself really exhausted, especially toward that four or five o’clock time of day, you really feel like you’re reaching for a cup of coffee, or a pre workout drink, or some sort of energy to get you through the rest of the day, or you’re finding yourself crashing asleep on the couch at eight or nine o’clock at night. Or you’re really just struggling to get up in the morning and to get yourself moving. Or one symptom that I see a lot of women deal with is constant sickness. So they might get some sort of cold virus, followed by another cold virus, followed by another virus of some sort of some sort. And so when you start to see your body, really get rundown and not have that sort of amazing energy, whether it’s morning, afternoon, evening, or just constantly finding yourself feeling sick, it could be that the adrenals are at play.
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And so let’s talk about what that looks like for a woman specifically, right because men have adrenal glands to obviously, but for women, what we what we see is that as we enter perimenopause, and as we get older, our adrenal glands start to compensate for sex hormone production. So, you know, in our early 20s, in our fertile years, our ovaries are producing progesterone, estrogen, all of our sex hormones to really focus on fertility, right. And that’s, that’s the time of our life when our body is hopefully living optimally when it comes to those hormone production. As we get older, the ovaries start to produce less, and the adrenal glands start to produce more so they kind of take on the load, so to speak as we get older. And so if you think about it, if we’re already in a state of stress, now, that doesn’t necessarily mean personal stress, that could be the stress of our environment that could be the stress of Just living in a pandemic atmosphere, right? Like it could be anything, it could be environmental toxins in our house, not necessarily whether or not you’re stressed out from work or family or that kind of thing. We’re talking about any sort of stress, you could also mean, physical stress. If you are overtraining, if you’re somebody who is really into fitness, and you’re really taxing the body every single day without proper rest, the adrenals could be at play. So we already have this sort of adrenal system that is helping control our stress response. And so as we get older as women, it also starts to take on the job of sex hormone production. And so that’s typically what starts to happen when women in their mid 30s to early 40s, start complaining of weight gain. They say I’m not really sure what’s going on, I’m doing all the things that I’ve always done. I’m exercising the same way I did in my 20s, or I’ve gone back to it right or I’m eating healthy and I just seem to be gaining weight, the answer is most likely related to your adrenals. If your adrenals are overtaxed, they could be potentially causing your body to hold on to fat.
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So let’s talk a little bit more about what that means. As far as adrenal fatigue. I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue. Around 10 years ago, I started having some symptoms that were really uncharacteristic, for me, I’ve always been somebody who’s kind of a night owl, I like to stay up late and wake up late. I’m not really an early bird. I’ve never really been someone who likes to just bounce out of bed in the morning with high energy. I like to stay in bed as long as I can. I’m just that person, I can’t, I can’t make myself get up and move. But I started to notice other symptoms, too, I started to notice that I wasn’t sleeping very, very well at night, I was having I would fall asleep, but I would have trouble staying asleep. So I would start having some wakings in the middle of the night. And I just could not get myself settled back to a deep sleep. I also started to notice that around three or 4pm in the afternoon, I felt like I needed a nap. Or I felt like I needed some sort of caffeine boost. To get through the rest of the day, my husband and I would sit down to watch a show or a movie at night and I would fall asleep on the couch. And so these things started happening, I started feeling a little bit weaker. In my workouts I started I remember specifically doing a yoga workout, which obviously is low impact. And I was holding a warrior pose. And I just felt like I couldn’t hold my arms up any longer. I just felt exhausted. So I went to the doctor. We did, of course, all of the required testing, we looked at my sex hormones, we looked at my adrenals my cortisol. And my doctor said your cortisol is rock bottom. And most likely because I am also a low progesterone person. That’s that seems to be sort of my MO. She’s like we talked specifically a lot about the progesterone, steal that can happen when your adrenals start to steal those sex hormones for energy and for stress response. And so I just wasn’t feeling myself and I knew I wasn’t and my doctor mentioned this phrase, adrenal fatigue, and I had never heard of it before. I had never been told this before. She gave me the recommendation. And I’ll give you the same recommendation to check out the book, adrenal fatigue, the 21st century Stress Syndrome by James L. Wilson, it’s available on Amazon or anywhere books are sold. When I started reading that book, after her recommendation, I started realizing how many of these symptoms I had been experiencing for so long. For me, it wasn’t necessarily tied to perimenopause, it actually started happening for me in my late 20s. When I started feeling this fatigue, I knew something had to change because I literally did not feel myself, I got to the point where I even started having anxiety attacks like little sort of panic attacks where I just couldn’t call my brain. I couldn’t sleep, I just I was miserable. And so what I found, though, was that there are a lot of other women dealing with this exact same thing. I started seeing people sort of show up on my social media, mutual friends, who were all talking about, hey, has anybody ever heard of adrenal fatigue, because that’s what I’m supposedly dealing with. And so this was all new to me. And I wanted to make sure that I did my best to kind of get back on my feet to really get my energy back. So first of all, let me just pause here and say that if you are someone who says, Oh my gosh, I feel like you’re speaking to me. That is exactly how I feel I have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, I need that cup of coffee at 4pm. I, you know can’t seem to get enough strength in my workouts. This is something that I want you to investigate, I want you to go about exactly as I teach with everything else like finding a functional medicine doctor who will do the right type of testing, not just bloodwork, but maybe even deeper, right with urine and saliva to really get a feel for what’s going on in your body and to see maybe what deficiencies could be occurring and so if this is at play for you, there are some things that you can do and I’m going to explain to you and describe for you what I did, and the regimen that my doctor put me on, that does not necessarily mean that it is the right regimen for you. So as always just a disclaimer that you want to make sure that you’re working with some sort of functional medicine doctor to get the right protocol for you. But I just want you to know that there is hope, and that there is plenty that you can be doing to really boost your adrenals. And to get them back on track. Now, that doesn’t mean that you might not, you know, you may see some flare ups for the rest of your life with adrenal fatigue. I know for me, when I when I started running my gym, and I was teaching 5am boot camps, I started to see the adrenal fatigue settle back in. And when my daughter was born, and I was sort of up during the night feeding a baby, I started to also see it settle back in. And so it comes back into my life, when I have those sort of high stress times where I’m either physically overdoing it or I’m not sleeping, whether it be because of children or whatnot. So it might not be something that you get rid of completely, but you can definitely improve it and you can definitely get back to feeling yourself. So what are those things?
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Okay, so the first thing that I did was I really started to focus on my sleep, I started to make sure that I was going to bed earlier, I wasn’t just falling asleep on the couch at 9pm, I would actually go to bed if I felt tired. I would allow myself to sleep as long as possible in the morning, which I do realize, for those of you moms have young children, that doesn’t always get to happen. But when I started treating myself for this, it was before I had children, so I was able to kind of give myself that extra sleep. I also started using supplementation. Ashwagandha is really good for the adrenals as well as black licorice root, various other supplements as well. But I started specifically using ashwagandha. I consume it in my daily shake that I drink, my Nutritional Shake that I drink every morning. I also included capsules, the brand that I use specifically was Gaia adrenal health, they have a daily support tablet, they also have a nightly support tablet, I started using those every single day. And I would be lying if I said that I felt better right away.
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I mean, it was definitely probably two to three months of consistent supplementation, sleep prioritizing that shake that I really started to feel better. And then when it comes to my workouts, because I know that’s the question you’re going to be having. I scaled back my workouts during that time, I was at a really extreme state of adrenal fatigue, I was really in a place where I really couldn’t work out I was what they called workout resistant, like my body just was exhausted. And so I didn’t have much choice as much as I would have liked to have made that made that made that different for myself. So I forced myself to scale it back. I did like walks, I did yoga, maybe three, four times a week, just very gentle stretching, no high impact activity, no strength training or anything like that. It was probably two solid months of scaling it back to walks and like movement, before I was able to start to incorporate some strength training and stuff back into my routine. But I had to make sure that I was feeling good and that I was you know, back up to par, I couldn’t just force myself into making things worse. That was probably the main things that I was dealing with at the time and the things that were working for me. And one, one suggestion that I was given that was actually quite a game changer was to create stillness for myself, every single day. So if you’re like me, a lot of women are I find that a lot of women are going going going all day long. And they’re not never stopping, right. They they’re taking their kids to and from school, they’re running errands, they are getting that workout in, they’re making dinner for the family, they’re going to work there, you know, whatever the case is for you. They’re just non stop. And so I had to really force myself, literally with a timer on my phone, that would go off every afternoon at about 3:30 I would force myself to lay down, not just on the bed on the ground, I would ground myself on the floor on my back to literally let the physically let my adrenals take a breath. We mentioned how they sit right above the kidneys, they need rest to physical rest. And so every day, I would lay down for about 20 minutes mid afternoon to really let my adrenals sort of catch their breath before I would push through the rest of the day on my feet. And so if you’re somebody who struggles with stopping and slowing down, creating that stillness pattern for yourself is really is such a game changer. So those are the things that I would say those were the four things that I tackled my sleep, my supplementation, making sure I was lying down every day, and then scaling back my exercise. Now every woman is different if you are sort of just in the beginning stages of adrenal fatigue, or maybe you’re starting perimenopause, and you’re starting to see that weight gain that doesn’t want to budge and you’re starting to feel really frustrated. Let me be the first to tell you that it’s different for everyone. Some women can still maintain certain levels of exercise. But most likely if your adrenals are at play, which we again, we can prove through testing, it might be a good idea to scale back maybe to do two days of high intensity training and strength training and then take a day off. So for every two days of exercise, you take a day of rest, or maybe if you were like me and you’re in the advanced stages of adrenal fatigue, just taking some downtime, you know, 30 days or More to just walk and focus on your nutrition and hydrate, and do some light stretching and maybe even take a nap. I know it’s it’s a foreign concept for a lot of us. But those types of things can really help the adrenals heal. So these are hopefully some tips that you can take with you. If you’re wondering if you’re on the other side of this podcast, wondering if maybe this is at play for you, I highly suggest finding that functional medicine doctor asking for this testing. And just get a feel for what’s going on for yourself. Understanding the way your specific body handles stress, again, whether that stress is from work personal life, or if it’s just from the environment that we’re in, and the state of affairs that we’re in with this pandemic. Regardless, you need to know how your body’s responding. And if you’re in your mid 30s, to early 40s, if you haven’t had testing in a while, now’s the time, you want to make sure that you’re getting that testing so that you have something to compare it to, as you enter perimenopause, and then menopause, too many women will tell me, Well, I feel really great. So I don’t really think there’s any need for testing or their doctor tells them oh, well, you know, you’re not really having any symptoms. There’s no need for testing, when in reality, that’s the perfect time to death to test because then we have something to compare it to when you’re not feeling your best. I know that’s something that I wished I had had. When I was struggling with my migraines I wished that I had had some testing to show where I was when I felt good. So I hope all of this makes sense. I hope it’s helpful for you. I hope that you’ve learned something about the adrenals and adrenal fatigue. I highly recommend that you investigate this for yourself if you’re feeling any of these symptoms, and then take it upon yourself and your functional medicine doctor to find a good protocol for you. You will feel so much better if you can bounce out of bed in the morning if you can not have to rely on that cup of coffee in the afternoon. And if you can really just live your best life and that’s what I’m here for. So thanks so much for tuning in today and my friends, we will talk soon!
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Thanks for listening to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I hope you found value from today’s episode. If you did, please share it out to your friends or leave a review. Remember your cycles are your superpower and by aligning with them you can live your life with all the energy needs to be a mom, Wife, Daughter and friend to those you love. Until next time!