If there’s one thing that’s true nowadays, it’s that we’re all way too stressed out. From looming deadlines to heavy responsibilities, many people are feeling the pressure — and as we are continuously discovering, all that stress is not great for our mental or physical health.

Is there a chance that taking the right herbs and supplements can help?

Adaptogens are a group of natural herbs used for centuries in traditional medicinal practices. Ancient though they may be, they’re now experiencing a new wave of popularity thanks to today’s high-stress culture. Let’s talk about what adaptogens are, how they’re used, and some of the options you might consider adding to your routine to alleviate your body and mind from modern-day pressures.

What Are Adaptogens? 

Adaptogens are natural plants and herbs used in ancient Chinese and Ayurvedic medicinal practices for centuries. These herbs, which include popular options like ginseng and Rhodiola rosea, were prized for their ability to help the body resist typical life stressors and provide nonspecific health benefits. 

While these plants have been in use for a long time, the term “adaptogen” was first coined in 1940 by a scientist named N. Lazarev.  It refers to a group of herbs thought to help your body adapt to external stimuli and stressors, ultimately minimizing the damage that they can cause to the body.

How Adaptogens Are Thought to Work 

Adaptogens are thought to help regulate your body’s response to stress by supporting the adrenal system, a group of glands above your kidneys that play key roles in your body’s stress response. When you’re faced with a stressful situation, these glands secrete hormones like cortisol, which allow your body to respond appropriately to the situation. 

This reaction is essential to survival: for example, the hormone cortisol can free up energy stored in your cells for quick use, allowing you to carry out your “fight or flight” reaction if you’re faced with immediate danger. Unfortunately, this reaction can backfire when someone is facing constant, chronic stress. Some researchers believe that your body can become overworked and overstimulated due to excess chronic or intense stress. The theory is that this can then lead to “adrenal fatigue,” a condition linked to issues like low blood sugar, suppressed immune responses, and inflammation.

This is where adaptogenic herbs come into play. Adaptogens are thought to increase the effectiveness of your adrenal gland secretion, which helps balance hormones and minimize overproduction. Ultimately, the idea is that adaptogens can help maintain homeostasis, or balance, in your body by preventing excess hormone production, supporting your body through stressful periods without allowing you to “burn out.”

Do Adaptogens Really Work? 

There is growing evidence that supports the idea that adaptogens can be effective in helping you combat the negative effects stress has on your physical and mental health. For example, clinical studies have found that the use of Schisandra chinensis and Eleutherococcus senticosus helped enhance endurance and mental performance in patients struggling with weakness and mild fatigue. 

In addition to supporting the body against these symptoms of stress, there’s even some evidence to suggest that some adaptogens can help with other health issues. For example, some researchers hypothesize that certain adaptogens have anti-inflammatory properties that may be able to fight neuroinflammation, a key factor in disorders like neurodegenerative diseases, depression, and anxiety. However, more research is needed to fully understand how adaptogens can be used in this application. 

That being said, research on the applications of adaptogens is still in its early phases. While these herbs have shown promise in helping support the body in various ways, many adaptogens have not been studied well enough to understand specifics like effective doses and long-term side effects. 

The bottom line: there is certainly research (and centuries of traditional experience) that show that the use of adaptogens is pretty promising for giving our bodies support against stress. However, there is still more research needed to establish their clinical efficacy.

Popular Adaptogens With Scientific Backing 

Ashwagandha 

Ashwagandha has been used in traditional Ayurvedic and Unani medicinal practices in India and is now gaining popularity worldwide. Many studies have found that ashwagandha was linked with improved self-reported levels of stress, and some limited studies have also suggested that ashwagandha usage may help improve sleep. 

Ginseng

Panax ginseng is an extremely popular adaptogen used historically in Eastern Asian medicine. Like other adaptogens, ginseng is thought to help your body modulate your hormonal response to stress, maintain homeostasis, and reduce stress-associated issues. In addition, many studies have also shown that ginseng may modulate the immune system and may even have antibacterial and antiviral properties that can support general immune health.

Rhodiola rosea

Rhodiola rosea is another popular adaptogen. In addition to its potential stress-modulating benefits, there’s even some evidence that Rhodiola rosea can help with your athletic endeavors! Human studies have suggested that Rhodiola rosea supplementation is associated with improved endurance and performance in athletes.

How to Incorporate Adaptogens Into Your Routine 

• Always talk to your doctor first. While many adaptogens are generally considered safe for most people, some may still have side effects or can interact with medications. There also isn’t a ton of research on the long-term use of some adaptogens, so it’s best to speak with your primary care provider before adding these herbs to your supplement regimen. 

• Read labels. Adaptogens are available in a variety of forms, like supplements, teas, and drinks. Because there aren’t any established dosing instructions for most, it’s important to pay attention to the dosages, frequency, and timing suggested by manufacturers. 

• Use it as part of a balanced stress management practice. While adaptogenic herbs may help support your stress response, relying on them alone may not be enough. For best results, combine with other wellness practices that can help with stress, like regular exercise, adequate sleep, and stress management techniques.

Adaptogens May Be the Missing Piece of Your Wellness Plan

Adaptogens are more than just the latest wellness trend. Modern research is now beginning to confirm what traditional medicinal practices have suggested for centuries: there may be plenty of real, quantifiable benefits that can come from taking these herbs, from helping your body manage stress to boosting your immune system. 

However, this research is still formative, so it’s crucial to talk to a healthcare provider before adding these herbs to your routine. If used correctly and safely, adaptogens may be an immune-boosting component for your self-care plan.

When you’re set on a fitness goal, there are few feelings quite as frustrating as consistently hitting the gym and still not seeing results as quickly as you’d like to. If you feel as though you aren’t growing at the pace that you’d like — or if your progress has hit a wall completely — it might be time to “hack” your routines to optimize your growth. Read on for tips on maximizing your muscle growth with the right exercise, diet, and recovery strategies. 

The science of muscle growth 

Muscle growth (aka muscle hypertrophy) happens through a combination of exercise and diet. 

Resistance training is an incredible stimulus for muscle growth. When you lift challenging loads, as you do during weight training, you cause minuscule amounts of physical damage to your muscle tissues. However, when you’re eating the right diet — and to be most specific, when you eat plenty of protein —  your immune system launches a process called muscle protein synthesis that can heal that damage by building new muscle tissue. 

So, if you want to maximize your muscle growth, you’ll need to optimize both your exercise routine and your diet to give your muscles all of the tools they will need to grow. In addition, it’s also important to make room for your recovery period since this is when your body will actually get to act on all the metabolic adaptations necessary for muscle growth.  

Possible limitations to muscle growth 

Now, while exercise, diet, and recovery are crucial steps to muscle hypertrophy, it’s also important to acknowledge that muscle growth is dependent on a variety of factors. Unlike working out and eating right, some of these factors can’t be changed, which can somewhat limit your ability to grow muscle.  

Genetics is one such factor. While you can train and eat well, your muscle strength and power are still going to be somewhat influenced by your genetics. 

Age is another factor that may impact your muscle. After reaching a certain age, many people experience a gradual decline in muscle mass called sarcopenia. Some of this seems to be due to a natural slowdown of your body’s rate of muscle protein synthesis. However, some aging-related muscle loss also seems to be due to lifestyle changes, so making an effort to exercise can help with this. 

It’s also important to remember that, like any other fitness goal, muscle growth is a process. Things don’t happen overnight, and you need to be consistent in order to get the most out of your hypertrophy routine. However, despite all of these potential limitations, you can maximize your personal growth with the right training, diet, and recovery approaches. Training tips to maximize muscle growth 

Work the same muscles multiple times a week. 

Your current workout split might not be enough to maximize muscle growth, especially if you’re only working out muscle groups once a week. 

After reviewing data from several studies regarding resistance training frequency, researchers concluded that major muscle groups should be worked out at least twice a week to maximize growth versus just once a week. 

Making a workout schedule is a good strategy to ensure that you’re working out enough. Consider writing an in-depth training schedule that will cover your desired muscle groups enough times throughout the week, or at least assigning certain days of the week to specific muscle groups. 

Embrace the principle of “progressive overload.” 

You don’t necessarily need to do a ton of different lifts to challenge your muscles — you can effectively grow your muscles by doing the same exercises over and over as long as you’re using the principle of progressive overload. 

“Progressive overload” is simply the practice of gradually increasing the load of the weights that you’re working with throughout your training journey. For example, if you’re using 20-pound dumbbells for your bicep curls one week, you might consider moving up to 25-pound dumbbells once those 20’s become easier to lift. 

Some studies have also suggested that increasing the number of reps you do is also a good way to practice progressive overload and encourage muscle hypertrophy. In other words, if you get comfortable curling those 25-pound dumbbells for 10 repetitions (reps) per set, you can then increase to 15 repetitions per set. 

No matter how you choose to overload, working out this way continually challenges you, which means that your muscles have to work harder and harder even though you’re doing the same exercise. 

Focus on the eccentric movements 

That sore feeling you get after a big workout (aka delayed-onset muscle soreness, or DOMS) happens as a result of damage that your muscles experience during the eccentric phase of your workout. During these movements, the muscle is lengthened. Some examples of eccentric exercises include lowering into a squat (which lengthens your glutes and quadriceps) or extending your arm during a bicep curl (which lengthens your bicep). 

“Damage” might sound bad. But when it comes to muscle growth, this is actually a good thing since your immune system repairs that muscle tissue and it grows back bigger and stronger.

Some studies have suggested that focusing on eccentric exercises may help spur on muscle damage, which some researchers believe may then spur on hypertrophy. 

On the other hand, some other evidence indicates that muscle damage on its own isn’t necessarily a deciding factor for muscle growth. Instead, a big reason that the eccentric phase is so important is because you can often lift heavier loads during the eccentric phase. This increase in exercise intensity during the eccentric phase of a workout can promote muscle growth more than the movements during concentric phases. 

Most lifting exercises include both concentric and eccentric phases. For example, the process of lowering down into a squat is the eccentric part of the movement, but standing back up is concentric. So to emphasize the eccentric phase of your workout, you can do things like pausing at the bottom of your squat or doing squat pulses in addition to completing the full range of motion.  

Incorporate some time-efficient workouts into your training schedule. 

If your goal is to save time during your workout rather than faster overall, you might benefit from adding more advanced workout techniques into your routine. 

For example, some athletes will add drop sets to their routine, in which they lift a heavy weight for a certain number of repetitions and then “drop” to a lower weight, performing those movements until failure. These challenging exercise strategies are thought to push your muscles to the limit more efficiently than traditional sets. While they don’t make you grow faster than traditional workout sets, per se, there is evidence that doing drop sets can lead to comparable hypertrophy results while being more time-efficient. In other words: drop sets are just as good for helping you grow muscle as traditional sets, but they take less time to perform. 

Diet tips for maximizing muscle growth 

Eat plenty of protein.  

Because protein plays such a critical role in muscle growth, one of the easiest diet “hacks” for muscle growth is to eat plenty of it to complement your resistance training. 

Some experts recommend eating between 1.3-1.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day to maximize protein synthesis. Focus on eating plenty of complete protein sources in your diet like poultry, meat, and dairy. It’s also a good idea to eat a variety of plant-based protein sources like legumes, grains, nuts, and seeds. 

In addition to food, protein supplements can help you meet your needs if you aren’t getting enough of it from your diet alone. However, it’s also important to note that just eating tons and tons of protein has its limits, so simply stuffing your diet with as much protein as you can isn’t the most effective route. Instead, aim to eat 1.3-1.8 grams of protein per kilogram of your body weight per day for the most efficient growth routine. 

Try BCAAs.

Protein can be further broken down into smaller units called amino acids. Some athletes swear by supplementing specific amino acids to help further their muscle growth. 

Branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) are particularly important amino acids because they are thought to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. However, it’s still more important to get your amino acids from whole protein sources first before supplementing. For example, beef, salmon, and eggs are all good sources of the BCAA leucine, but they’re also excellent sources of complete protein to help you with your overall goals. Recovery strategies for better muscle growth 

Get plenty of sleep. 

Recovery is often overlooked in the muscle-building formula, but it can significantly slow your progress down if you aren’t giving it enough attention. For example, your sleep quality is one major factor of muscle growth that you may not always consider. Sleep deprivation is thought to negatively impact your strength and performance in the gym, which may then impact your ability to build muscle. There’s also some evidence to suggest that sleep deprivation can affect hormones like testosterone and cortisol that play roles in your muscles’ abilities to grow. 

Don’t neglect your rest days.

Finally, while it’s important to put in the work to build muscle faster, it’s just as important to give yourself some time to rest. After all, letting yourself rest gives your immune system the energy necessary to repair and rebuild after those big workouts. 

In fact, too much training can put you at risk of overtraining syndrome, which has been linked to a variety of negative symptoms like weakness, inflammation, and muscle stress that can severely impact your ability to train effectively. 

While you’re planning your workout routine for the week, give yourself at least one or two days of active rest to dedicate to your recovery. You can always do more moderate physical activity during these days if you want to keep moving, like yoga or walking. The important thing is to take a break from those intense and heavy workouts so that your muscles are allowed to grow to their full potential. 

Conclusion 

Muscle hypertrophy is a long process, and it requires plenty of dedication and consistency. However, with a challenging weightlifting routine, plenty of high-quality protein, and proper rest and recovery, you can optimize your body’s ability to build muscle and reach your health and fitness goals.

Menopause is a natural phase of life that eventually happens to everyone who menstruates, once they reach a certain age. But, natural as it may be, menopause also comes with a variety of symptoms that can impact your quality of life — including changes to your body composition, such as muscle mass loss and visceral fat gain. This article will discuss how menopause is linked to visceral fat gain, and what you can do to manage it. 

How menopause affects your body

Most people with menstrual cycles have been going through a regular monthly hormonal cycle since puberty. During this cycle, the hormones estrogen and progesterone go up and down to signal to your body when it’s time to ovulate, or release an egg from your ovaries to travel through your fallopian tubes to be fertilized. If the body detects that that monthly egg has not been fertilized, the hormones cycle again, to indicate that it’s time to shed the uterine lining (otherwise known as your period). 

However, as you approach menopause, that regular hormone cycle changes. More specifically, estrogen and progesterone levels both become much more irregular and gradually decline, leading to irregular periods and an eventual complete stop to your menstrual cycle that signals the end of your ability to naturally reproduce. 

It’s important to note that the term “menopause” here can actually be divided into separate phases: perimenopause and post-menopause.

1. Perimenopause, which literally translates to “around menopause,” is the period of time when your hormone levels start changing, leading to irregular periods and other common symptoms of menopause, such as weight changes and hot flashes. This phase can last for several years. 

2. Menopause is officially defined as a timespan of twelve straight months with no period. Post-menopause, as the name suggests, is the period of time after you have reached “official” menopause. 

Menopause and visceral fat gain

Unfortunately, one of the consequences of hormonal changes during menopause is that many people report uncomfortable and annoying symptoms. One of the most notable changes to your health is that your irregular hormone levels, paired with overall lifestyle changes that tend to happen during this time of life, are sometimes linked to weight gain. 

On average, menopause is associated with a significant weight gain of roughly 2 – 2.5 kg over three years. What’s more, menopause is also associated with a redistribution of body fat — specifically, many people going through menopause find that they gain weight in their midsection. 

In addition to the fat tissue found closely beneath your skin and which you can often see in abdominal weight gain (known as subcutaneous fat), menopause is also associated with increased visceral fat. Visceral fat is a kind of fat that is found deep in your abdomen. It cushions your organs. Unlike subcutaneous fat, which is the kind of fat tissue that probably comes to mind first, visceral fat can be hard to detect if you aren’t monitoring your body composition in addition to your weight. Menopause-associated visceral fat gain can begin during perimenopause and can also continue through post-menopause. 

Consequences of visceral fat gain 

Knowing how your visceral fat composition stands is important because high visceral fat levels are heavily linked to the parameters of metabolic syndrome in women. Metabolic syndrome is the co-occurrence of multiple different conditions, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and high blood sugar, and the presence of metabolic syndrome means that a person is at higher risk of serious chronic health problems like heart disease and diabetes. 

One key reason that this may happen is because of how the redistribution of fat tissue in the midsection can impact your metabolism. In particular, visceral fat tissue is associated with insulin resistance, otherwise known as your body’s ability to properly metabolize sugar. Insulin allows the sugar in your system (aka glucose) to enter your cells to be used for fuel, but when your insulin sensitivity is low and your body becomes resistant to insulin, the sugar can then remain in your blood rather than in your cells Over time, this can lead to elevated blood sugar levels and subsequent complications like diabetes.  

More particularly, visceral fat has been linked to increased cardiometabolic risk in obese women, more so than other kinds of body fat like subcutaneous fat tissue. In other words: your visceral fat level can be a clear indicator of your risk of serious and often life-threatening heart conditions and events, like heart disease, strokes, and heart attacks.

How to control visceral fat gain during menopause 

Keep an eye on your body composition metrics

It’s hard to know how much visceral fat you have versus subcutaneous fat, since visceral fat is located deep inside your abdomen and usually can’t be easily seen or detected without the right technology. 

One of the easiest ways to find out your visceral fat risk is to use a body composition scale in addition to a weight scale. Body composition scales use bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) to analyze your body composition and determine key metrics like your visceral fat levels, as well as your overall Percent Body Fat and Fat-Free Mass — all of which can be much more helpful for analyzing your health and fitness levels than weight and Body Mass Index alone. You can also find out your body composition by undergoing a DEXA scan or getting an air displacement plethysmography test. Your doctor may have helpful insights as well.

Don’t underestimate the power of lifestyle changes

One of the most important points to take away from this article is that fat gain does not necessarily need to be inevitable during menopause — in many cases, there are plenty of lifestyle changes you can make to mitigate the changes. 

For example: although menopause can cause hormonal changes that lend themselves to weight gain, some people also find that their physical activity declines during this period in time, which can exacerbate the issue. But exercise can be effective for weight control even during menopause. What’s more: some studies have found that exercise is actually imperative for targeting visceral fat.

If it’s your first time exercising (or your first time in a long time), start with moderate physical activity several days a week, such as walking or swimming. As your body becomes more accustomed to this, you can work your way up to longer and more intense exercises, such as jogging, weight-lifting, and boxing.

Talk to your doctor about other options

Because menopause can be so taxing on your health and challenging to your well-being, there are several other options out there for addressing those hormonal changes. However, your first move should be to chat with your doctor to determine the right course of action for you, especially since not all of the “solutions” out there are rooted in clinical research or suited for everybody. 

For example, some natural remedies and herbs, like black cohosh, vitex, sage, and fenugreek, have been used for centuries in traditional medicinal practices and are thought to “balance your hormones” and improve various menopause-related symptoms. However, there isn’t strong clinical evidence to support these claims, especially when it comes to targeting body composition, so these should be taken with a grain of salt. 

In addition, some people find that they benefit from hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which helps with combatting their naturally-declining estrogen levels. However, this may not be the best route for everyone, so it’s vital to check in with your doctor to get their professional opinion.  

Conclusion 

Menopause is definitely associated with increased visceral fat in some people, which can increase your risk for several chronic conditions. However, this doesn’t mean that visceral fat gain is inevitable, nor does it mean that you can’t do anything about it. By talking to your doctor about other options, staying active, and making a conscious effort to live a healthy lifestyle focused on your body composition metrics, you can take control during menopause.