TECH BY TES
Building Mental & Physical Resilience To Stress By Dr. Derek Anderson
We hear it all the time. That stress impacts our performance, personal relationships, and decision-making. That everyone should have a long-term strategy to help deal with stress, just as you would create a strategic framework for your business. Instead of avoiding stress, why not meet it head-on and make your body more resilient? The key to determining how resilient you are to mental and physical stress is by using specific physiologic measurements. The best metric that captures this is your Heart Rate Variability (HRV). HRV is a measure of how efficiently your body can toggle between the two parts of your nervous system: the parasympathetic nervous system (allows you to digest your food, recover, rest, etc.) and the
sympathetic nervous system (gears your body up for stress by increasing heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, etc.). Having a higher HRV means that your body can quickly bounce back and forth between these systems and, ultimately, be able to handle higher stress loads. A lower HRV can indicate that your body is working harder than it should at rest due to various factors, such as fatigue, lack of physical fitness, stress, dehydration, poor diet, or illness. A lower HRV makes it difficult for you to respond to the impending physical and mental hurdles, robbing you of focus and performance. There are three ways to raise your HRV through fitness. 1. Dosing exercise correctly — if you want to build yourself into a force, progressively increasing the amount of
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exercise tailored to what your body can handle is extremely important. 2. More frequency, less intensity — less intensity more often will allow you to create a change with less overall stress on your system. 3. Vary your workouts — create a more profound impact on your body by varying your intensity and activities based on your body’s current state. As entrepreneurs and business owners, our lives are dedicated to our businesses. That said, we must ensure that we are operating at our optimal performance to see the same successes in ourselves that we expect for our businesses. Taking care of your health means taking care of business! “Tech Bytes” is powered by WEtech Alliance (WEtech-Alliance.com). The guest columnist for this issue Derek Anderson, Doctor of Chiropractic, is the owner of Ignite Health, a clinic/gym hybrid that uses chiropractic care, RMT services, and fitness coaching to meet patients’ wellness objectives. It is located at 1825 Manning Road in Tecumseh and online at: IgniteHealth.ca. Dr. Anderson resides in Tecumseh with his wife, two children, and their goldendoodle, Rio.
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