Lowers cortisol

rest days reduce cortisol

Good info, thank you.
Sleep is my biggest concern right now.
After a challenging workout day, I often fall into bed completely exhausted, but fail to fall asleep.
Sometimes it takes hours of agonising discomfort for me to finally catch some sleep.
Obv. that's especially bad when I wanna put in some work the next day.

what if i don't want to do a rest day

That is very possible, absolutely.
In terms of food, what I managed to find out is basically just your standard clean eating.
Limit sugar, avoid processed shit and all that.
Apparently coffee is really shitty in this regard too, while green tea is supposed to help.
Bananas are good for cortisol too, if I remember correctly.

For sleeping I would recommend ZMA (Also has a lot of other benefits) and melatonin. Taking all 3 will give you more dreams though, which for me is a positive but for other people not.

you'll have high cortisol

Attached: shruggirl.jpg (726x800, 77K)

This is basically the dilemma here.
I wanna train 5-6 days a week, alternating between HIIT running, boxing gym and easy long runs for recovery.
Cortisol doesn't make that easy.

It should logically follow, that if cortisol blocks test, reducing cortisol will increase test effectively.

Do you consume caffeine and sugar? Cut those out. You can still train every day without raising cortisol but if you're having trouble sleeping/recovering you might be overtraining.

I found some ashwagandha extract capsules that contain added magnesium, zinc and a couple of different b vitamins.
ZMA is just zinc magnesium and b6 anyway, right?

I doubt those are of high quality. Ashwagandha is often contaminated with heavy metals from bad brands so I wouldn't risk it. Also I suspect that the dosage would be very low because ZMA capsules are very large already by itself, plus the ashwagandha then I would assume that they reduced the dosages.