Why Most People Need Their Workout to Calm Them Down, Not Wind Them Up
When we talk about prescribing exercise, one of the biggest factors isn’t fitness level — it’s the kind of life someone is already living. For most people, that life is already a stressed, high-intensity one before they’ve even laced up a shoe.
We’re Already Living Anaerobic Lives
Most of us live under a fairly constant low hum of stress — deadlines, traffic, notifications, packed schedules. This is a sympathetic nervous system state, meant to be occasional but for a lot of people close to permanent. This matters for exercise prescription, because it flips a common assumption on its head: piling more high-intensity, adrenaline-driving exercise on top of an already stressed system often isn’t what the body needs.
Exercise as a Counterbalance, Not an Amplifier
For most people in this stressed baseline, exercise is more valuable as a counterbalance than an amplifier. Calming, relaxing, parasympathetic-stimulating movement, the kind of steady aerobic work we’ve discussed elsewhere on this site, often does more for someone’s overall health than another hard session stacked on an overstimulated nervous system.
But Not Everyone Starts From the Same Place
Someone training for an endurance event, or living a naturally calmer, lower-stress life — perhaps outside the city, closer to nature — isn’t fighting the same sympathetic overload. For that person, there may be more room, and more need, for genuinely anaerobic, high-intensity training to keep progressing toward a performance goal.
Cycling Between Aerobic and Anaerobic Phases
The most effective approach for most people is cycling through periods of aerobic-dominant work and periods of anaerobic-dominant work, rather than treating training as a single, fixed intensity forever. If you’re not sure which phase suits where you’re at right now, that’s worth talking through with our team at Spinewise in Maidstone — call us on (03) 9318 7758 or book online.
Frequently Asked Questions
If your days are dominated by deadlines, constant notifications, poor sleep, and rarely feeling genuinely relaxed, you’re likely running with a fairly persistent stress load.
Not necessarily — it means being honest about whether more high-intensity work is actually helping you recover and progress, or adding to an already overloaded system.
Less so. If your baseline stress is already low, you likely have more capacity for anaerobic, high-intensity training.
Yes. If every session is high-intensity and your day-to-day life is already stressful, training can compound the same stress response it’s meant to help offset.
About the Author
Dr Trevor Chetcuti, B.Chiro.Sc, B.App.Sc (Clin), DIBAK, CNET
Dr Trevor Chetcuti is Clinical Director at Spinewise in Maidstone, holding dual degrees in Chiropractic and Clinical Science from RMIT University and a Teaching Diplomate in Applied Kinesiology through the International College of Applied Kinesiology (ICAK). He is chairman of ICAK International’s Board of Research and Standards and has spent over 20 years helping patients work through complex health, neurological and pain-related concerns.