Coach Kevin Dunn here with your weekly dose of fitness facts. This week I want to expand on something

I've touched upon before my show, basic lifestyle guidelines. These are things that clients or even

novice coaches may miss out on, but have a huge impact on your ability to progress in your training.

As I've discussed on a show a few times now,

we can see training as an adaptation to applied stress.

Training is like a medical intervention.

We have a specific prescription for a desired outcome.

We know that when you're given a prescription from a healthcare provider, they check that for

drug interactions, because one drug may interact with another in an undesirable way that negatively

impacts your health when, of course, we want the opposite.

So, what could be contraindicative to training?

The applied stress from training needs to be above minimum effective dose and below maximum tolerated dose to have a positive impact. Other forms of

stress would be a contraindication. Your maximum tolerated dose of training will be lower because overall stress is too high.

Here's where basic lifestyle guidelines come into play.

There are many things that can cause stress.

Sleep, nutrition, personal relationships, workload, playing other sports, and so on. So let's have a look at the

basic guidelines I give to my own clients to reduce stress and increase the effectiveness

of their training. First of all, to lower intake of inflammatory products.

I'll just talk a little bit about food here,

but inflammatory products can come in all sorts of ways.

It could be chemicals applied to the skin,

there's shampoos or moisturizers,

...