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let’s talk about the relationship between stress  and your muscles when you go through chronic  

stress which creates an elevation of cortisol  various things happen to different parts of  

your body but today we’re going to focus more  on the skeletal muscles and it’s not necessarily  

just excessive stress it could be excess  amount of cortisol another name for that  

would be glucocorticoids or as an external  source if you’re on prednisone for example  

you’re getting a lot of that cortisol and that  can create the same effect there’s two primary  

effects that happen with the muscles number  one you have this increased catabolic effect  

okay catabolic means a breakdown of something  so we’re getting a breakdown of muscle protein  

okay and number two you have this decrease of  the anabolic effect of the muscles so this means  

you’re not going to build the muscles back up  you’re not going to make new muscles so if we look  

at the chain of events we have increased amount  of stress or prednisone or an increased amount  

of cortisol from another reason maybe you had a  tumor on your adrenal or whatever so there are  

other reasons why your cortisol might go up but  what happens it targets the muscle and you start  

getting atrophy of the muscle and what’s happening  is we’re getting this muscle that’s turning into  

amino acids and the amino acids are there as a  precursor to make new glucose okay in the liver  

and that’s called gluconeogenesis neo meaning new  genesis meaning the creation of so we’re making  

new glucose from non-carbohydrate sources and in  the process of breaking down this muscle protein  

there’s going to be two main muscle groups that  are going to be involved primarily it could be  

other muscles too but primarily it’s going to  be your thigh muscles okay the quadricep and the  

glute muscles your glutamas maximus apparently  those are two muscles that we have in abundance so  

that’s what the body is going to go after and this  is all a survival mechanism and what the body is  

trying to do is it’s trying to preserve glucose  to support the fuel in your brain now normally  

protein is not used for fuel but during certain  survival mechanisms the body has this plan b where  

it starts tapping into the protein to increase  glucose to actually help us survive and so the  

brain cannot exclusively live on ketones it has to  use glucose too and if you’re not feeding it sugar  

it’s going to then make it from various sources  so you have the stress primarily chronic stress  

over a period of time that then starts breaking  down your muscles turns them into amino acids  

and in the liver that’s converted into glucose we  also have several other things going on we have  

the suppression of glucose uptake of the cells for  the preservation of glucose for the brain we also  

have suppression of the utilization of glucose and  we have the suppression of glycogen synthesis so  

in other words your body’s not going to focus on  storing glucose it wants to keep it high in the  

blood so the brain can take what it needs so this  is what chronic stress does to your muscles okay  

and it’s all a survival mechanism to help you  survive and feed the brain which is the one of  

the most important organs during survival so what  can you do to counter some of this of course you  

want to isolate the source of your stress and do  whatever you can to reduce that stress number two  

vitamin b1 and vitamin b5 is essential you can get  that from nutritional yeast that will greatly help  

counter the effects of cortisol and the third  thing is vitamin d3 which can also help you  

naturally reduce cortisol now there’s many  many other things you can do for stress but  

these are probably three of the top most important  things to focus on all right thanks for watching  

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