Hormone Zone Control

If you have ever wanted to gain muscle, lose fat, or just become more physically fit, you have probably run into a lot of challenges in trying to meet your goals, no matter what fitness level you currently maintain. If you are just getting started with making some changes in your life, or if you have run into some plateaus, there are a few key factors that will enable you to achieve your goals, the most important being mastery over your fitness hormones.

Hormones play an important role in every aspect of our physical health. They are the messengers that tell every cell, every tissue, every organ, and every system in our bodies what to do. You have probably heard of estrogen, testosterone, human growth hormone, and cortisol, to name a few. All of these hormones are produced naturally in the body, but the truth is that for most of us, they are all out of balance. This is why we get belly fat, love handles, restricted muscle growth, and other problem areas around our bodies.

One of the single most important fitness hormones that we want our bodies to produce more of is human growth hormone (HGH). While we are young, and growing, the HGH is free flowing and we can eat whatever we want and do almost nothing, and still look like athletes. Once we stop growing, HGH level continue to drop and do so as we progress in years.

They key to reversing this HGH drain on our bodies, and producing more of this fitness hormone is exercise intensity. By sending a performance message to our bodies, we stimulate our pituitary gland in our brain to produce more HGH.

Fitness programs such as metabolic resistance training (MRT), cross fit, and high intensity interval training, are good tools to achieve the desired effects of HGH. Another key is resistance. Not only do you want high intensity work outs that keep your heart rate up, but you want to have enough resistance to stimulate lean muscle growth.

By combining resistance and cardio paced exercise, your body produces lactic acid, which burns, and is a sign that you are in the correct work range to produce HGH.

Before you get to excited, you need to know the whole picture. Our bodies are integrated systems that work together, for better or worse, each part affecting every other part and affecting the whole. It is important to comprehensively research every aspect of a fitness routine before you begin, and even consult a doctor if necessary. A simplistic way to explain what hormones do what (which varies slightly from person to person, since we all have a unique biochemical and metabolic profile) is that cortisol is a stress hormone that contributes to belly fat, estrogen can contribute to chest and love handle fat (especially in males) and testosterone and HGH contribute to the production of muscle tissue. There are so many more hormones, and so much more to each of them, but that is why endocrinologists spend so long in school!

The fact is, you can continue to struggle with plateaus and poor results, or you can learn to master your hormones, and thus master your fitness goals.