PTSD TRAINING PROTOCOL

Therapy can help you bring awareness to your internal world—your emotions, thoughts, and triggers. But what if talk therapy is uncomfortable? What if you simply don’t have the language to name how you feel inside? For many, talk therapy just isn’t enough.

With the illumination of new research, we now understand that there are action-oriented ways to release triggers, and even better, grow from them.

When you move with intention, you become aware of how your body reacts to stress. Instead of disassociating from the world around you, connecting to your body’s internal cues will ground you back to reality. Exercise will give you autonomy over your body’s reaction to triggers, thereby bringing you to a calm state of mind. There are many types of movement to ground you—most common being yoga—however, strength and conditioning training brings unique adaptations to not just manage, but have control over your body’s reaction to stress.

INDEX:

• What Is Stress?

• Neuroplasticity Exercises

• PTSD and Exercises

• Desensitizing Your Nervous System Through Exercise

• Body Mind Spirit: True Healing

• Next Steps: Training

What Is Stress?

Stress is any form of pressure—physical, emotional, or psychological. Regardless of the source, your body reacts to it all the same. Now, physical stress through exercise is for a prescribed amount of time. After a workout, your body rests, and therefore adapts and grows. Emotional and psychological stress can be adaptive too, but only if you are able to bring yourself back into a calm state of mind and reflect. However, those of us who’ve faced psychological chronic stress, such as PTSD, know how hard it is to have control over our state of being.

The General Adaptation Theory by Hans Selye, explains how our bodies adapt to chronic stress if we are unable to come back down from a triggered state of mind, known as “fight or flight.” The fight or flight state automatically suppresses our immune system, which allows us to quickly make decisions under stress. However, if we fail to remove ourselves from this state of being, then our bodies adapt and continue to take away resources from our immune system. Therefore, chronic stress opens the door to physical and mental illnesses, as our immune systems become ineffective from depleted resources. Commonly known illnesses due to chronic stress include heart attacks, and can also include infections, joint & muscle pain, and even contribute to cancer.

Exercise as a Modality To Release Stress

Exercise not only releases neurotransmitters and chemicals, such as serotonin and dopamine, to make you feel good, but also is an outlet for your body to “vent” and release all of it’s accumulated stress. When you exhaust your body, it has no other option but to rest physically and even psychologically. Think about a time you’ve pushed yourself physically to exhaustion, even from a long days of work; you don’t have the capacity to argue or deal with any more stress. Exercise works the same way. Except this time, you recover and become better with a larger capacity to work under more load.

Neuroplasticity Exercises

Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to heal itself. It means to “rewire” and form new connections in the brain. Practically, it is the ability to change your psychology, your way of thinking and dealing with problems. This is how we are able to make new choices, new thoughts, and a new ways of living to create lasting change. It starts with you making a new decision today. If you do it once, you can do it again. And again. And again until a pattern in made. Then what was once hard becomes effortless.

• Exercise automatically induces neuroplasticity, at least 90 minutes a week at moderate intensity elicits substantial benefits.

• Exercise is as effective as anti-depressants without the side-effects of fatigue, skin and organ issues etc. with at least 90 min/week at moderate intensity.

• Both strength and aerobic training elicit neuroplasticity with at least 90 min/week at moderate intensity; training strength and conditioning together are thought to elicit even more benefits than training one or the other.

• Particularly, exercise with a focus on mind-body connection increase emotional regulation by increasing the density of gray matter in the brain.

Healing Through Mind-Body Connection

As people go through healing, it can often feel uncomfortable and at times may imitate symptoms associated with depression. You may say, “I just want to feel like myself again.” This isn’t just in your head; it is a physiological truth for some, that you’ve lost a connection to yourself. Alexithymia, is a neurophysiological phenomenon that disrupts body awareness and emotional recognition. It is not a disorder, but is often associated with PTSD and other neurological conditions. Alexithymia is when you are not able to sense and communicate what is going on with yourself internally.

Additionally, those with PTSD have abnormal activation of the insula, which is the center of your body awareness. It interprets sensations from organs and tissues—muscles, joints and proprioceptive systems. An overly sensitive insula can trigger explosive reactions of fight-or-flight just from feeling on edge, even though to others nothing has occurred to warrant your reaction. In order to understand how your trauma has affected you both physiologically and psychologically, you need to reconnect to your body awareness and its internal sensations & communication.

Only by reconnecting emotionally to your body can you bridge the internal disconnect between your body, mind, and the objective reality. This can be achieved through exercise with a focus on mind-body connections, to let the mind heal by connecting to your body and it’s internal sensations/signals. This is the essence of a bottom-up approach to healing—starting with the body’s awareness & feeling, then listening to what the mind is saying—versus a top-down approach, which is starting with the mind, such as traditional talk therapy.

PTSD and Exercises

Strength training controls the tension and relax cycle of muscles. When purposefully trained, it induces both physical and psychological triggers in a controlled setting with controlled intensity, in order to train your body’s reaction to mental triggers. Ultimately, opening the pathway to working through your trauma. Focused training of the body opens up the communication and awareness to mental/emotional triggers. Once you’ve released the physiological triggers, it’s time to reapply the lessons to heal the psychological triggers. This can open the door to therapy or self-healing through reflective writing and other forms of self expressions.

• Example: Notice when your shoulders are tense from stress or frustrated. Pause. Sense what thought/emotions/smell/relationship triggers your tension. Then ask yourself why?

• Body tension/triggers inform the state of mind, and the state of mind releases or triggers the body.

• Releasing physiological triggers and confronting mental triggers opens your flow state of being: when your body awareness is emotionally connected to the mind, and your mental state of mind is also in-tune to your physical sensations. “Flow state” is complete body-mind awareness into the present moment as is used by athletes to tap into their highest potential.

Desensitize Your Nervous System Through Exercise

The more severe your PTSD symptoms, the more susceptible you are to being retraumatized through memory & flashbacks that can be elicited through talk therapy. A study on Vietnam veterans who stuck with repeated sessions of talk therapy became more depressed, violent and fearful; some even led to hospitalization by coping with substance abuse, including alcohol. This is where a bottom-up approach become vital. PTSD leaves one in a chronically tense, fight or flight, state of mind, where your nerves are constantly excited, ready for any worse case scenario at all times. Living with the sympathetic nervous system always on, elicits many negative physiological adaptations, which we learned in the “What is Stress?” section. The goal is to encourage the parasympathetic nervous system—”rest and digest”—which is the predominant way of being for balanced individuals, to turn on more often. Below are strategies to activate the parasympathetics nervous system.

• Vagus Nerve Healing: Stimulated by breathwork with exercise, neck & shoulders alignment, and endurance/interval training.

• Heart Rate Variability, HRV: HRV is lower in those with PTSD. However, exercise increases HRV, especially with focused breathing during movement.

• Beta & Peak Alpha Waves: These brain frequencies are associated with emotional processing, and increase both acutely and long-term with exercise.

• Interoception: Awareness of your bodily cues & needs. It is enhanced through mind-body connection during exercise. “If you don’t feel hungry, you can’t nourish it, if you mistake anxiety for hunger, you can eat too much, or if you can’t feel when you’re satiated you’ll keep eating” —Besser Van Der Kolk.

Ways to Regulate Your Nervous System

• Strength & Conditioning: Builds physical capacity and automatically elicits neuroplasticity.

• Variable Intensity Training: Teaches the nervous system to be controlled under stress.

• Breathwork: Stimulates the vagus nerve under stress. To be done while moving weight—of your own or with load.

• Interoception: Awakens your bodily senses, related to mind-muscle connection in lifting.

• Proprioception & Gait Training: Brings body and spatial awareness.

• Isometrics: Ground the body and mind.

Body Mind Spirit: True Healing

Yoga and tai chi are considered pillars for effective movement-based strategies to heal trauma and PTSD. But western science often become dogma and omits one crucial truth: the spirituality of these practices is not secondary—it’s foundational. Now, knowledge is powerful in opening our minds to a new approach, however, there are limitations in knowledge by itself. Both yoga and tai chi are ancient practices that are built from their respective spiritual ideologies, Hinduism and Taoism, that guide their movement and mindfulness practices.

True healing may require more than physical and mental strategies—it may involve deepening your spirituality, or even exploring it for the first time. Whatever spiritual ideology you practice, it is meant to enhance and push you forward to truly receive full healing.

The goal of training PTSD through strength & conditioning exercise is to open the body’s communication to the mind, so that the body can release triggers and move forward, so then it teaches the mind to release triggers and move forward, and ultimately receive true transformation and healing if one is open to it spiritually.

Disclaimer: There is NO spiritual component included in consultations or training sessions. Nor is strength and conditioning programming spiritually based; programs are grounded in evidence-based science. I simply encourage anyone who is in the pursuit of true inner healing to deepen theirselves spiritually if they feel compelled to do so, in whatever ideology they feel called to pursue.

Devotional: Prayer For Body Mind Spirit

I personally believe in Christianity and respect anyone who believes differently. If you are looking to deepen your body-mind-spirit connection, click above.

Next Steps: Training

Start your road to true healing, and see if training is the right strategy for you.