You know that engine-revving feeling you’ve got after a really hard intensity workout or race? You cooled down long ago – but you feel like your heart is racing, and it necessarily isn’t. Your core feels rattled and you can’t calm down on the inside.

It’s an uncomfortable feeling and you can blame it on your body’s hormonal response to prolonged, high intensity efforts. This usually only happens in the course of endurance training – it doesn’t occur in shorter bouts of high intensity efforts.

This sensation is caused when a cocktail of hormones is released – epinephrine, norepinephrine, cortisol and others – all with the intent of stabilizing homeostasis, or balance in your physiology. Their job is to help your body ‘get over it’ so to speak.

While all of this is essentially good it doesn’t mean that its bearable and isn’t without negative effects. After all, we want these hormones around, but only in small amounts for a short period of time. An exaggerated stress response to high intensity endurance bouts can lead to short-term symptoms including:

• Insomnia
• Nausea
• Loss of appetite
• Elevated heart rate (10 or so beats above your normal resting)
• Elevated respiratory rate

Over the long term, excess ‘stress’ hormones can contribute to muscle protein and bone loss (as these hormones can have an oppositional effect on the anabolic nature of testosterone and insulin). Additionally cortisol has an immunosuppressive effect, meaning it lowers immunity by suppressing white blood cell and antibody production.

Taking proper care to recover is the first step in maintaining normal stress hormone balance in endurance athletes. Yet time, family and work commitments can all make active and passive recovery a rarely experienced event.

Cortisol Recovery was made to help your body cope with the physiological effects of endurance training stress. It works by stabilizing hormone levels, specifically cortisol. Used immediately post exercise it will enhance the recovery process and if needed it can be taken again before bedtime to quiet the post exercise rattle, so that your sleep is actually restful and not interrupted by elevated post exercise stress hormones.

Taken along with basic recovery tasks – eating a nutrient-rich meal, gentle active recovery movement, and getting adequate sleep; Cortisol Recovery will help you feel more rested and more energetic, keeping your stress hormones in check.