keeping cortisol down while training

[pete89]

To make a long story short, im a lifetime natural, I had come off a really hard contest season last year which really took a toll on my body. About 4 months after I still felt I wasnt fully recovered, really sluggish, training sucked ect. So I went to the doc and all blood work came back normal accept my cortisol was high however I had no physical signs of it, doc had no answer. Went to an endo same thing, so I took some more time and got it taken again two months later, it went down but it was just made the tip of the normal range, to me thats still pretty high.

Since then I havent been able to really get in a good grove of training some weeks I can only go 3x a week without feeling burnt out, but theres a constant feeling of fatigue and burnout that I cant seem to correct.

I am and have been for years a mid/high volume trainer, its what I responded to. I was thinking im either going to have to cut my training back all together or find a way to train around controlling cortisol. So very low volume came to mind.

Im unsure tho, since training to failure in it self is very stressfull, Is doing something like dc with very low volume but beyond failure training going to cause less cortisol release vs more volume but sets not taken to failure?

[Sammich]

If your cortisol is high, it means you're driving yourself too hard in life in general. Of course I'm neglecting the possibility of a medical reason for it being high, but if you tested again and it was low, then it's likely not a medical issue.

You need to focus on proper sleep, relaxation, cutting down on stimulants, lowering stress, and getting smarter about your diet and training. I think you're looking in the wrong area here -- to control your cortisol, what you do outside of the gym is way more important than what you do inside.

Nevertheless, training-wise you'd be wise to keep your lifting sessions to under an hour. If you want to lower stress from training, then DC is NOT the way to go, as it is a phenomenally taxing system. Try some training systems where you don't go to failure and that also have lower volume than what you're used to.