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Home > Revolution Health Radio > RHR: Exercise and “Adrenal Fatigue”
Podcast: Revolution Health Radio
Episode:

RHR: Exercise and “Adrenal Fatigue”
Category: Health
Duration: 00:25:32
Publish Date: 2016-12-15 18:26:52
Description:

revolution health radio

In this episode we cover:
  • The concept of metabolic reserve
  • The price of being busy
  • Halting withdrawals of metabolic reserve
  • Building metabolic reserve
  • The three stages of exercise
[smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/thehealthyskeptic/RHR_-_Exercise_and_Adrenal_Fatigue.mp3" title="Exercise and "Adrenal Fatigue"" artist="Chris Kresser" social="true" social_twitter="true" social_facebook="true" social_gplus="true" ] Chris Kresser:  Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. I’m Chris Kresser and today we’re going to answer a question from Jordan. So let’s give it a listen. Jordan: Hi Chris. Thank you for all that you do in helping people like myself. As a result of my HPA axis dysfunction, my metabolism is pretty much shot. I would love to exercise, but every time I do, my fatigue becomes exacerbated. I would love to hear your thoughts on exercise while suffering from adrenal fatigue. Thank you. Chris Kresser:  That’s a great question Jordan. It’s one that comes up a lot, particularly in my patient population, because I tend to see a lot of patients with HPA axis dysfunction. And for those of you that are not familiar with this term, this rather unwieldy term “HPA axis dysfunction,” or HPA-D, as we call it, the term you're probably familiar with that most people use for this condition is “adrenal fatigue.” For a lot of reasons that I won’t be going into in this particular podcast, I think adrenal fatigue is not an accurate description of this condition and is a bit of a misnomer. And the system that governs our response to stress and our tolerance of stress is the HPA axis, or the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis. And this is a system that often becomes dysfunctional when we’ve been exposed to chronic stress and inflammation and chronic illness, and so we call it HPA-D.

The concept of metabolic reserve

So before we jump into the specifics of my answer to Jordan's question, I want to introduce another important concept to you, which is metabolic reserve. So metabolic reserve is defined as the long-term capacity of cells, tissues, and organ systems to withstand repeated changes to physiological needs. So that's a mouthful, but we can use a couple of analogies to make it simpler to understand. So you can think of metabolic reserve like the charge level in a battery. So if the battery charge is full, your metabolic reserve is strong. You’ll be able to do a lot of work with whatever device that battery powers. But when that charge is depleted, the device stops functioning as well or obviously in some cases stops functioning entirely. If you have a cordless drill, for example, and the battery is run down, you won't be able to drill a big hole in something because that requires more power than is available.
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