fat percentages

[fergus]

How were you measuring cortisol, Test etc onspeed? Saliva or blood?

[onspeed]

Wasnt me in person Fergus – cant claim to be that good! I was too busy just tryig to keep them for killimng themselves training !

But he measured both blood and saliva – free and total T, free and total C and free and total estradiol

T showed a bit of a relationship to training performance and to overall training gains but not really to competitive performance per se (which I must admit surpirsed me a little given previous stuff in judo, rugby – maybe its more a combat hormone?)

whereas cortisol showed a strong relationship to training gain (-ve) and to performance (-ve) when levels were elevated (for the individual) for 3 days or more … I should say that in a couple of cases in performance testing if cortisol was actually low performance went down too – but cortisol was in fact normally a tad elevated on performance test days (anticipation?)

Be happy to share that data with you – if it is at all useful to you ?

[onspeed]

fergus – I meant to add above ..

this group of athletes also had quite high free T and quite low variation between them – may have influenced what we saw – whereas cortisol was much more variable

In some previous work we had a much greater spread of Ts in the athletes and actually found there there was quite a relationship between free T and performance on short burst power

If you forgive me for speculating I am really interested in the observation you made in another thread on athlete personality (or temperament) and training/ event choice

we have seen quite marked hormone differences across different events – e.g rowing vs throwing which of course may reflect the events and training but also do seem to relate to broad personality types – I guess there is a good body of evidence suggesting this in a more social setting too

I know you do a lot of work with boxers – we found that boxers showed a massive T response to boxing and not to a weight training session which we calculated was of similar intensity

man – a fascinating area for future thinking

thanks again mate !

[fergus]

Interesting thoughts and observations Onspeed – one of the things in sport that we do know is – there are few hard and fast rules!

WRT cortisol in my humble opinion there is alot of misinformation out there, such that it is a solely catabolic hormone (and also that we need to resort to various supplements to suppress it). Short term cortisol is useful and very necessary, longer term is detrimental – but just as dangerous is long term absence of it or failure to produce it.

(To be honest this is where I could go on a bit about cortisol and the inaccuracies of some claims)

Your obsrevations with regard to sports such as rowing is very accurate from my limited ‘experiences’

With regard to personality I have tried to do some interesting research to try and profile athletes (as for me the key for team sports is in individulisation of protocols) especially with regard to training types and recovery protocols as not everyone responds to the same stimulii.
Of course we are not all truly great artists like Ashley so the less gifted of us such as myself attempt to resort to science!
This has led me to trying to group or evaluate personalities.
Now HOW you look at it is interesting also – do you look at hormones, brain chemistry or physiological evidence? Regardless I feel it’s one of the difference between good and average coaches.

Do you think that perhaps the reason for your big T response in boxers may be more a reflection of the influence of other hormones (specifically our friend cortisol) rather than Test?

[onspeed]

Fergus

totally agree with you on cortisol

its got an unjustified bad reputation – she is one good hormones no doubt – repartitioning of energy resources is an essential part of adapting

in my own simple way – I see it as a stress hormone – a response to stress is essential to adaption!!!

in fact we have found that a good cortisol response is essential to hypertrophy

I guess i also see cortisol as one of those inverted U responses – too little bad too much bad but you sure need some to achieve optimal!

or maybe a traffic light system – some =green – i.e a good spike – if the spike lasts a long time you may be struggling a bit to cope with the stress = orange light and if it is elevated for days it is a red – stop and properely recover and allow adaption to that stress!
maybe thats all vastly over simplified !!!

But to be honest Ferg – I am a simple man!!! Cheers my friend

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