397: The Nervous System & Running Performance – The Missing Link to Stronger, Injury-Free Running

In episode 397 of the Real Life Runners Podcast, we focused on the often overlooked component for improved running performance and injury prevention: the nervous system. While many runners emphasize training plans, mileage, strength training, nutrition, and paces, the regulation of the nervous system is crucial for optimal results. We delve into the autonomic nervous system, explaining the roles of the sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) systems. Signs of nervous system dysregulation, such as constant fatigue, trouble sleeping, and frequent injuries, are discussed. We explore the methods for better nervous system regulation, including proper training plans, HRV monitoring, recovery techniques, and lifestyle adjustments like adequate sleep and nutrition. The episode underscores the importance of balancing stress and recovery to enhance running performance and overall well-being.

02:26 The Importance of the Nervous System in Running

03:20 Understanding the Autonomic Nervous System

04:12 Balancing the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Systems

08:45 Signs of Nervous System Dysregulation

12:44 Regulating Your Nervous System for Better Performance

16:09 Using HRV to Monitor Nervous System Health

23:03 Building a Stronger Parasympathetic Response

25:24 Lifestyle Factors for Nervous System Health 

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Transcript

Angie: 0:00

This is the Real Life Runners Podcast, episode number 397. Today we're talking about the missing link to stronger, injury free running. So many runners only focus on training plans, mileage, and pace, and even strength training. But one crucial factor is often overlooked. And it's more than just strength training. It's more than just your nutrition, or your mileage, or your pace, or your training plan. And that's what we're going to dig into today. Because once you master this Your whole running life is going to change. So stay tuned. What's up runners. Welcome to the show today. You've got a solo Angie episode today because life has been kind of crazy lately. We have had just all sorts of fun things happening. Um, last week was my birthday, as you know, and I also had a week long virtual workshop with my business coach and mentor, which was amazing, but it was three very, very long days. Kevin decided he was coaching track again this season. So he's been busy every single day with track practice. Our girls are into theater and softball and Irish dance and all the things. So it has just been nonstop since the start of the year, which is all good things, you know, and this is the, the beautiful thing, obviously Kevin's 100 mile race, you know, we had that in January also. So our life has been filled with so many good things and so many blessings, and we are so, so grateful, and it's also been a very, very busy time, and so Kevin and I trying to find time to record the podcast together has been a bit challenging, and so today, We're going to do a solo episode, and I'm really, really excited to talk to you about today's topic, because this topic is one of the secrets that so many runners don't understand. And even running coaches and physical therapists don't really understand this whole thing. And it really holds the key to so much of how we respond to our training. So what am I talking about? I'm talking about your nervous system. Okay, your ability to run strong, recover well and avoid injury isn't just about your muscles. It's just, it's not just about endurance as much as I love to talk about strength training and mobility on this podcast. It's not about all of that. Those are all components of this and your strength training and your mobility and your nutrition and the way that you're training and your runs and The 80 20 rule and easy runs and hard runs, all of those things feed into your nervous system because your nervous system is the key that controls all of it. And that's why nervous system regulation is that key to better running performance. And so today we're going to talk about how you can train smarter. By learning how to work with your nervous system instead of against it because so many runners get into problems with their nervous system. And today we're going to talk about all of those details and why. Okay, so let's start off with a little overview of what is the nervous system and why should runners care about this. So today in Spanish. In particular, we're talking about your autonomic nervous system and your autonomic nervous system is essentially this automatic system in the body that happens without you having to think about it. It is, it is basically all run subconsciously. And so this is the cool thing is that, you know, you don't have to think about your heart beating. Your heart just beats automatically. You don't have to think about breathing. You just breathe automatically. These are things, thank goodness. That we don't have to think about because these are processes that are required and necessary for our survival. So your autonomic nervous system controls things like respiration, your breathing, your heart rate, your blood pressure, your digestion, all of these things that are happening in your body automatically that you don't have to think about. So this is a beautiful thing. Now there's two sides of your autonomic nervous system. There is your sympathetic. nervous system, which is also known as your fight or flight system, which prepares your body for action, right? Fight or flight. So your sympathetic nervous system is very important for performance, but if your sympathetic nervous system is constantly activated, if it's overactive, that can lead to chronic stress, overtraining and burnout, which is what so many runners experience. On the other hand, we have your parasympathetic nervous system, which is known as your rest and digest system or rest and recovery system. And so your parasympathetic System is responsible for recovery, digestion and repair, which are obviously all essential for injury prevention and long term performance because we've talked about before running and your workouts and your training. All of these place stress on your body and you're actually breaking your body down when you're working out, which is the point. The whole point is Stressing your body and then allowing your body to recover and build back stronger than it was before. This is why we train, right? So this is a very good thing. However, it becomes problematic when we are Activating the sympathetic nervous system too much and not getting enough parasympathetic action to help balance it out. So balancing these two systems is the key to optimize your performance to help you avoid fatigue, injuries, and plateaus. Okay, so when your sympathetic nervous system is overactive, This can hurt your performance. This can lead you to feeling tired all the time, right? Like if you've ever just, I mean, I know that so many women, especially when you're in perimenopause and menopause, this is the most common symptom that I hear them talking about is fatigue. Just, I am just so tired all the time. And so much of that is because of the chronic stress that they are under from training, from life and from lack of recovery. And so when we are in this chronic stress mode, our body stays more in that fight or flight mode more, more in that sympathetic activation. And the more time we spend in that, the more fatigued we are, the more we are, uh, more prone to burnout. We have slower recovery times. We have lingering soreness that. doesn't resolve after a couple of days, you increase your risk for injury because your body's not recovered. It's not building back stronger. It can also lead to poor sleep. It can lead to hormone imbalances. And those of us that are in perimenopause and menopause, we are already dealing with hormonal issues. And so we don't want to. are training to add to that and that's one of the things that I try to help runners understand all the time is that the way that you're training matters because the way you're training could be making your hormone imbalances even worse it could be throwing your system into a state of hormonal chaos even more than what's naturally happening in perimenopause and menopause and so when your body is constantly stressed when you're in this sympathetic mode It prioritizes survival over performance. Your body's just trying to stay alive. And this is a beautiful thing. Like, this is one of the things that I talk to my runners about all the time. Because when people start to hear that, they get upset about it. And I help remind them, this is exactly what your body's supposed to do. Your body's doing its job. It's your nervous system's job to keep you alive, especially your autonomic nervous system, right? All of these functions like breathing and heart rate and all these things. Those are the functions of your body In order to keep you alive And so if your body's constantly stressed out It doesn't care how fast you're running unless you're being chased by a lion, right? Which thank goodness We don't have to worry about anymore. But overall it doesn't care if you're running an eight minute mile versus a nine minute mile. It's saying, okay, I have a lot of fatigue here. How can I conserve more energy? And so in order to conserve more energy, you're probably going to start running slower. You're probably not going to have the same level of energy and endurance out on your runs because your body's just trying to survive. Your body's trying to make sure that it has enough energy to stay alive, to keep your heart beating, to keep breathing, to keep doing all these things. It doesn't care if you're running a nine. 30 mile versus a 10 minute mile, right? So it makes sense of why we start to see performance declines. If our bodies are in this constant state of stress and sympathetic nervous system over activation. Okay. So some of the signs of nervous system dysregulation in runners, like some of the things that you might be experiencing. So if you answer yes to any of these things that I'm about to mention, you be in a state of nervous system dysregulation. regulation. So if you are always feeling tired, but wired, right? It's a really weird sensation for those of you that have never really experienced this, but it's like you're tired. A lot of people feel this, especially at the end of the day, you're sitting on the couch and you're trying to relax and you feel just exhausted, but you're wired and you can't fall asleep. Or right. Oh, I shouldn't say when you're sitting on the couch, I should say when you finally get to bed at night, right? You're lying there and you know, you're tired, your body's tired. You can't fall asleep because your brain's going all over the place, and you're thinking of a million things at once, right? Uh, another sign of nervous system dysregulation is trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. A lot of the times it's from the thing I just talked about, right? Because you can't calm your brain down. You know, I, I have a program called Press Play. I might be renaming that to Running Through Menopause. But one of the things that we talk about is sleep and how to get better sleep. And this one action. That I suggest to my runners. I'm going to share it with you because it's so powerful and so many of them on one of our live calls recently talked about this one habit that they started that they learned about from the program and How much it helped them to stay asleep not only to fall asleep but to also stay asleep and that was keeping a journal next to their bed and And just writing about their thoughts before they go to bed, like learning how to just get all of your thoughts down on paper. It's a skill, right? Because we want to filter our thoughts a lot, but just kind of doing a brain dump and getting all of your thoughts down on paper, writing everything down before you go to bed. And some of the ladies that started to implement this habit haven't been able to sleep. Through the night in years and one one person said I've slept through the night the last 10 days straight, which is Incredible because think about how much that then ripples out to the rest of your life when you get better sleep and you wake up Refreshed you just have more energy. You're in a better mood You're able to be more productive during the day your workouts feel better, right? You're nicer to your family Like there's all these things that improve just because of this one domino of, I got better sleep, right? So how can we get better sleep? That's a really, really important thing that we go into even deeper, um, inside of the program. Um, so other signs that your nervous system might be dysregulated, frequent injuries or aches and pains that won't go away, or just sore after all of your runs, your workouts feel harder than they should. Your heart rate stays elevated. Even after easy runs, right? You notice maybe on your easy run that your heart rate is elevated or it's higher than it should be. It's really hard for you to kind of get that heart rate down. I know we talk a lot, not, not we, but out in the fitness world, people are talking a lot about zone two training lately. Which is a helpful tool. However, it's going to be very hard for you to stay in zone two. If your nervous system is dysregulated because your heart rate is going to be high, basically all the time. Now I shouldn't say all the time, of course, because that's a overgeneralization. That's not really true, but your heart rate does stay elevated. Maybe more than it should, maybe more than you want it to. People find it very, very difficult sometimes to get down into the zone two range. And so they say, well, screw it. I'm just not going to do it. Right. And that's one of the reasons that we teach effort based training. Instead of heart rate, um, training because it's easier to kind of get a feel for does this feel easy and if it doesn't, okay, maybe I need to slow down a little bit. Maybe I need to take a walking break. It's really, really, really important. Okay, so those are some signs that your nervous system could be dysregulated. Um, so now let's get into how to regulate your nervous system for a better running performance. Cause I'm guessing that most of you probably answered yes to at least one of those things, right? Maybe not. Maybe you're doing fantastic and that's awesome, but maybe you know somebody that is dealing with these things. And if so, I would love for you to just pause this episode and hit share, share it with your friend, you know, share it on social media. Um, if you haven't left us a review. Hit pause and leave us a review on Apple podcasts. I know I've been asking for reviews for a little while now, and I haven't gotten a new one lately. So I would love for you, if you find this podcast helpful to let, leave us a review, let us know, are we doing a good job here? Are we, you know, hitting some of the topics that matter to you guys? And if you're, there's topics that you want us to hear about or, um, do some more episodes about, let us know. Okay, so let's get into how to regulate your nervous system now for better running performance because now you know that your nervous system is the key now you understand what nervous system dysregulation looks like so then the next question obviously becomes okay well what do I do about it right how do I regulate my nervous system so that I can not only improve my running but feel better in my daily life and that's really important. Okay. I think it all comes down to is like, you want to feel strong. You want to have energy. You want to feel vibrant invite vitality, have more vitality in, in your life. Right? So the first thing that we need to do is really understand how to train smarter and not harder. And we've talked about this concept many times on the podcast, because so many runners, especially over 40, they tend to just push themselves harder when they feel like they're losing fitness, but this. Pretty much always backfires, right? Like it might work for a little bit, but eventually at some point it catches up to you if you're just constantly going out and trying to push yourself hard all the time, most of the time, if people are pushing hard all the time, they end up with injuries, they end up feeling burnt out. So they end up with inconsistency. There's lots of different things that end up happening because you're just pushing too hard all the time. And it's hard to do hard things all the time, right? Like we have to have that balance of easy and hard. And that's what polarized training is. Polarized training means that you're balancing your hard workouts with true easy runs. Okay. Let me say that again. True easy runs, right? A lot of times I tell clients go out and run easy and they're like, Okay, and I look at, you know, what they did and what their workout looks like and what their paces were. And I asked them, I'm like, did that, did that feel easy? And they're like, well, it's probably like a four or a five, four or five is not easy. A true easy run is a level two or three out of 10. Okay, it's easier than you think and there's a lot of runners that think oh if I go that easy I'm not gonna be making progress and that is the opposite of what's true. Okay, you can only Do the hard stuff if you balance it with the easy stuff if you're going hard all the time or even moderate Medium effort level like that five six out of ten and then you're doing hard sometimes you're still overloading the nervous system And you want to try avoiding that, right? Avoid overloading the nervous system because you want your nervous system to be more regulated and be more balanced. So what are some good tools for us to kind of assess this? HRV is one. And HRV is, is a term that stands for heart rate variability. You may or may not have heard about HRV. It's kind of, you know, coming out more in the literature and in, Kind of popular media and social media and HRV is a great tool to assess how well your nervous system is handling stress. HRV basically helps you see how well am I recovering. So what is HRV and why does this matter? HRV measures the variation in time between heartbeats. Okay. And this is controlled by your autonomic nervous system. So unlike your resting heart rate, which is just a simple beats per minute count, right? Your resting heart rate is just how many beats per minute is like how many times per minute does your heartbeat when you're at rest? Which is also a very helpful measure. Okay, if you, if you don't have something to measure your HRV, a lot of these watches and trackers and things measure HRV now, which is pretty cool. You know, the accuracy of them is a little questionable sometimes and you have to take it with a grain of salt, right? Whenever I look at some of these metrics, it's not that The HRV is exactly correct, but it can help us track trends over time. And that's really what we want to look at more than the actual number itself. So your resting heart rate is also a really good monitor because, um, I'll give you myself as an example, actually. So my typical resting heart rate is In the high forties, I would say like around 48 beats per minute, like overnight when I'm sleeping and last week because it was a very, uh, stress, I don't want to call it stressful because I don't like thinking of things as stress, um, and telling myself that I'm stressed because you know, your brain has a lot of power over how you experience everything in your life, but it was a very full week. It was very busy week. It was very full calendar, lots of things going on. Yeah. And it was also the week before I got my period too, which also makes a difference in how your body's responding. So last week my resting heart rate was, uh, like in the low 50s more. It was like more like 51, 50, 51, which doesn't seem like a lot. But when it's day after day after day, and my average now changes in this whole week versus an average of 48, right? Cause when it, when, when my average is 48, it basically ranges from, I would say 45 to 50, sometimes it gets down a little bit lower, but that's kind of the average, whereas when my average is 51, it probably ranges more from like 50 to 55, right? So I'm kind of looking at these ranges here. And so I. But by the time last week when I got to Friday, like I was feeling good all week long. I was busy. I was going, going, going. Right? The adrenaline was pumping. And by the time I hit Friday, my body was like, Ooh, we're done. I'm tired. Ange. Right? We need, we need to have a down day. So Understanding that and then kind of going back and looking and saying, like, Oh, my heart, my resting heart rate has been kind of high that can help us see, like, how hard should I be training this week? And I was doing some, some harder things last week too, right? And so that's a little bit about resting heart rate, but going back to HRV, um, The HRV kind of looks at the subtle fluctuations between your heartbeat, okay? So if you have a higher HRV that means that your nervous system is balanced and it's responding well to stress and that you're recovering well, okay, so A high HRV is what we want. We want variability between those heart rate, uh, heartbeats. A lower HRV means that your body is under stress, okay? So whether it's from your training, from poor sleep, emotional stress, illness, or a combination of all of this. I mean, there are so many people getting sick right now. So much is going around, right? So if your HRV is lower, that is telling you that you might need more recovery. Whereas if your HRV is higher, it means, okay, you're probably ready for a harder session again, right? Your, your body is recovered and you're ready to go out and hit a harder session again. Okay? So that's kind of how you can use HRV. If you're, if you have something to help you monitor your HRV, okay, this isn't something that you can just monitor yourself, um, like by checking your pulse or anything like that. You would need some sort of HRV monitor. So if your HRV is high, that means your nervous system is good. Like it's a great day for a workout, right? Let's go. Let's time. It's time to push it out. But if your HRV is low, it means that your body is still recovering. So you might want to opt for an easy run or an extra recovery day. Even if you have a workout on the schedule. Right? Because especially if you are over 40, your body starts to need more recovery time than it used to. It doesn't recover from those harder sessions as well. So if you have something to track your HRV, it can be a great tool to use to help you kind of make these decisions. Now, every single time your HRV is low, does that mean that you need to skip your workout? No, of course not, right? And that's why it's more important for us to track trends. A single low HRV reading isn't a big deal. Right? Like if you have a single low HRV, but you actually check in with yourself and you're like, okay Well, how do I actually feel and you the answer is I feel okay, you know I'm maybe I'm a little bit tired, but I'm gonna go try this workout. Anyway, that's totally okay and this is really one of the reasons that we Coach our runners so much on effort based training and really understanding how to interpret the body, the signs and the symptoms that your body is trying to send you, right? It's not about just looking at a number on your watch. Okay, because one low HRV doesn't mean that anything really, okay, but it can be a useful tool to track trends over time, because if you are noticing like a downward trend in your HRV, that could be a sign that your nervous system is struggling to keep up with it. Okay. Either your training stress or your life stress or all the different, maybe all of the above, right? All of the different ways that your body is being stressed. So HRV can be a helpful tool. But again, it is not the be all end all. It's just a little window. It's just a little monitor into your nervous system's readiness for training. Okay. So. Um, learning to use that as a tool can help you to train smarter, can help you to avoid burnout and optimize recovery. But again, it's not everything. Okay. Checking in and just asking yourself, how do I feel today? And really answering that truthfully is so much more powerful, quite honestly, right? We have to, but that's the key is truthfully, right? Like we can't try to lie to ourselves. We can't try to pretend that I'm not feeling this way. I can't try to just keep pushing and like, you know, I'll recover at some point in time because it's going to catch up to you. All right. All right. The second thing that we want to look at when it comes to how to regulate your nervous system for better running performance outside of our training is to build a stronger parasympathetic response. We have to teach our body how to switch from sympathetic activation into parasympathetic. Okay, from that fight or flight. Into that rest and recovery and digest mode, right? So there are tools that we can use. And this is something that where people sometimes get a little confused because you might be saying to yourself, Angie, you just told me at the beginning of the episode that these, this is my automatic. Responses, right? These all happen automatically, and I don't have control over them, which is true, right? Your autonomic nervous system does happen automatically. Your body shifts into sympathetic or parasympathetic mode automatically. However, some of the things that we do, like our training choices that we talked about, and some of the things that we're going to talk about now with parasympathetic, some of the things that we do consciously, that we do, Have control over that. We do voluntarily can help our system to shift into one or the other, right? So if we're training too hard, that is a voluntary choice. We're choosing to keep our body in that sympathetic mode by doing things to help. Stimulate more of a parasympathetic response. Things like breath work, right? Helps your body to shift into recovery mode faster. Things like cold, cold exposure or contrast therapy. Now there's some differences in the literature. Males and females respond to ice therapy different and to to cold exposure differently. Okay. So that is something to note, you know, things like grounding and exposure to nature, help to calm your nervous system and restrict, reduce those stress hormones. Okay. Things like cooling down after a workout, instead of like when you finish your workout and you just like, Move on to the next thing in your day doing some cool downs, you know, either cooling down by easy jog or a walk or some gentle stretching or some breath work, different things that you can do to basically help your nervous system. No. Okay, workouts done. It's now time to shift into recover and repair mode. All right. So things like that that can help to stimulate our parasympathetic response. And finally, the other things that we absolutely need to do to help regulate our nervous system is to get enough sleep and to make sure that we're getting the right nutrition for nervous system health. And these, again, these are the pillars inside the program that I have, you know, for the running through menopause program. These are some of the pillars. Like we look at all of these things because they all matter when you get. More sleep and when you get better sleep, it helps your nervous system to reset overnight, right? Like especially getting more deep sleep, you know, there are different stages of sleep there's four different stages of sleep in the sleep cycle and one stage is deep sleep and Most people are not getting enough deep sleep. And when we don't allow our bodies to get into that deep sleep, it doesn't recover fully, which is why a lot of people wake up. Even if you're getting eight hours of sleep, if you're not getting, if your body's not able to shift into deep sleep mode, you might still be waking up feeling tired, okay? Because your nervous system doesn't get that full reset. Um, things like caffeine and alcohol also can affect nervous system regulation, right? Minimizing your caffeine intake, especially in the afternoon. Like. I'm a coffee drinker, y'all, so I am definitely not going to be one to tell you to cut out caffeine, all right? I love my coffee. I love the taste of it, the smell of it, the experience of it, making it, the ritual that surrounds my coffee. Right, and there's a lot of people are like you need to cut caffeine and you need to cut alcohol. I also love wine Okay, but I've also significantly decreased my consumption of it. It's not that you can't have these things it's that you have to be more mindful of your choices and How much you're having? And when you're having it, so for me, caffeine, I pretty much don't drink coffee afternoon, like sometimes I'll let it go to like one or two o'clock at the latest, okay, but I definitely don't drink caffeine after two o'clock, I like to leave at least eight hours between my last You Drink of caffeine and my intended bedtime. Okay. I try to go to bed around 10 ish. Um, it's been harder to go to bed around 10 with the girls. I'm getting older, but that's still the goal, you know? So usually Kevin and I are in bed around like 10, 10 30, there was over break. We started to, we noticed that kind of kept getting pushed to like 11 ish. So we're trying to bring it back down because sleep is so, so important. Um, so trying to minimize your, your caffeine intake, especially in the afternoon. And then alcohol too, like if you're someone that, uh, drinks alcohol, drinking alcohol earlier in the evening and drinking alcohol with food will help your body process it more versus drinking alcohol later because the later you drink it, the closer to sleep, the more it's going to affect your sleep. And so if it affects your sleep, it's going to affect the way that your nervous system is able to regulate and reset overnight, uh, nutrition before and after your runs, fueling properly. Makes a huge difference in how your nervous system responds to stress because if you're out on your run and you are not well fueled, okay, this is where the whole idea of like working out fasted comes in, like if you are someone that doesn't eat before you run, you need to stop that you need to fuel yourself before running. Because when you fuel properly before and after your runs, you can help your body understand, I've got enough fuel on board here, okay? When you, your blood sugar falls, when you have low blood sugar, that stimulates more nervous system stress. It overstresses your nervous system. Your body doesn't think that it has what it needs for the task at hand. So it gets stressed out and it starts breaking stuff down, trying to find fuel. Your body kind of goes into like floor alarm mode. Like, I need fuel. Where am I going to find it? Right? And it starts breaking down your muscle. It starts breaking down bone. Fat, unfortunately, is one of the last places it likes to go because it takes more energy to break down fat. And use fatty acids as energy production, especially when you're running too hard because you need appropriate levels of oxygen to break down fat and to oxidize and metabolize fat. So Getting the proper nutrition can really really help to support your nervous system balance and again We go into all sorts of specifics inside inside the program. So if you are someone I know I keep referring to it but if you are someone that wants These action steps that wants to understand, okay, how do I actually implement these things without feeling completely overwhelmed? Cause if you're listening to this and you're like, gosh, this is including everything. And it's like, yeah, it does. Right. All of your choices have an effect on your nervous system. And if you're feeling tired and you're feeling burnt out and you're feeling stressed all the time that stinks, right? You don't have to feel that way. There are lots of things that you can do, which is a beautiful thing. It doesn't mean you have to do all of them. But you can start implementing some of them. And if you want that coaching and that step by step guide on, okay, how do I actually start to put these things and apply them to my life? Get on the priority list. Okay? You don't have to sign up, but if you are interested in some help with this, go over to realliferunners. com forward slash priority and put your name and your email on that list so that you're the first to know when enrollment opens again for the program. Okay? And then you'll get to see all the details of the program and you'll just make. be able to make the decision, um, for you that's right, you know, to make a decision if that's, if this is the thing that's right for you or not. All right. Part number three that we want to talk about. So now you guys, you understand why your nervous system is so important and how to tell if you are in a state of nervous system dysregulation. You also are understand some ways that you can start to regulate your nervous system. So the third thing that you want to do is kind of like. Figure out like how to tell if your nervous system is helping your running or hurting your running. Okay, because like we mentioned Running and training places stress on the body and there but there's a difference between healthy stress and chronic stress Healthy stress is what we want. We when we go out and run longer distances when we lift heavy weights We are putting stress on our body and on our nervous system And that's what we want because stress forces your body to adapt in some way. So if it's a healthy level of training and a healthy level of stress, your body's going to adapt and it's going to get stronger. If it's chronic stress that's constantly breaking the body down, then your body's gonna probably keep breaking down and getting weaker. So if you have a strong regulated nervous system, it adapts to your training, it bounces back, and it actually gets stronger than it was before. Beautiful thing. That's how you get faster. That's how you improve your endurance. But if your nervous system is dysregulated, it makes you feel like, what the heck am I doing here? Why? I'm putting in all this work, but I'm not seeing progress. And so many runners suffer from that. And it doesn't have to be like this way, right? And this is really what I want you to understand. Is that, like, when you understand your nervous system and how it responds and how your body adapts to training, that's where it all starts to come together, okay? So ways that you can start to kind of track your nervous system, you can start to look at your HRV, if you have something that tracks that. You can look at your resting heart rate and your morning heart rate trends, okay? Like, check your heart rate before you get out of bed in the morning. And just write it down and start to see, okay, you know, am I rested like is if, if your resting heart rate is higher, it could mean that you're overtraining, right? Start to kind of track these things, tracking your mood and your energy levels, right? Are you waking up and feeling irritable or sluggish or overly emotional? Not, not just when you wake up, but throughout your day, like, are you finding it hard to deal with kind of normal stress, normal everyday stress? This is people like we, we go through stressful times. We have things in our life that can lead to stress, but how are you handling it? You know, if it's, if it seems like it's getting to you or just making you feel more anxious or depressed or sad or just overly emotional or irritable, if you, if you find yourself snapping at people all the time. These could be signs of a dysregulated nervous system. So, what are you going to do about it? Alright? You have to understand how all these things put together. Alright? You want to start thinking about how your training and how your daily choices are affecting your nervous system. Because when you learn to work with your body, when you learn how to work with your nervous system, this can help prevent injury, it can improve your performance, and it can just help you feel stronger and have more energy in your daily life. All right. So just as a little recap here, check and see, okay, step number one is to see, is my nervous system out of balance? Is my nervous system dysregulated? You know, am I always, are you someone that's always in like go, go, go mode? Number two, you can start using down regulation techniques that we talked about, like breath work, grounding techniques, making sure that your easy runs are easy, right? Step three would be like looking at your, at your training, making sure that you are, okay. Training easy most of the time and then training hard some of the time and getting enough recovery and making sure that you've got your nutrition on point as well. And then for number four is looking at your lifestyle, right? Starting to maybe track some of these things, tracking your sleep, tracking your resting heart rate or your HRV or your energy levels to see how your body's responding to all of these things. Because if you're tired all of the time, is it worth it? Right? Like, is it worth it? Like, you want to train for your first, first half, half marathon or your first marathon? Great. Wonderful. You don't have to feel exhausted all the time. That is a common misconception and a common myth. They're like, Oh, well, of course you feel tired. It's, I'm training for my first marathon. Like, yeah, your body's probably going to be more tired than it normally is when you're not training for a marathon, but you shouldn't feel exhausted all the time. You shouldn't feel irritable and more anxious and you shouldn't see your body gaining weight. That's another actual symptom that I. We didn't even talk about today is like, if you notice that your body's gaining weight, it's also a sign that your nervous system is dysregulated, especially if you're training hard. You know, especially if you're increasing your training load, a lot of people that train for marathons notice that they gain weight and it's because their recovery is totally out of whack. So their body is holding on to the weight instead of using it as fuel. Okay. So I really, really hope that this episode gave you a new insight that, you know, Nervous system is something that we really need to be thinking about. It's something that you're probably going to see me talking a lot more about because this truly is this missing link, this secret that a lot of people don't know about and don't understand. And by regulating stress and starting to balance your training more and understanding nutrition and sleep and your, how all of your lifestyle factors play into. Your nervous system health, you're going to be able to run stronger. You're going to be able to recover faster and you're just going to feel better overall. And I think that's what it's all about for all of us, right? So if you found this episode helpful, I would love for you to reach out to me on Instagram, share it with a friend, or leave us a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. And let me know what's one thing that you're going to start doing. to support your nervous system. I would love to hear from you over on Instagram at real life runners. So as always, thanks for spending this time with us. This has been, or I should say with me since Kevin wasn't here with me today. Um, hopefully he will be back next week. Um, I actually have some really cool guests coming on the podcast as well. So stay tuned for all of those things. We've got a lot of really cool things planned for the podcast and for our coaching program this year. So. Thanks for joining us. This has been the Real Life Runners podcast, episode number 397. Now get out there and run your life.