What Lobsters Teach Us About Stress
I just read that lobsters are “biologically immortal.” This doesn’t really mean that they live forever. However, they don’t show any biological signs of aging. Lobsters will eat, grow, and molt indefinitely. They will continue to have a stable metabolism and will mate and reproduce with the vigor of their youthful selves.
When they molt, they shed their hard exoskeleton along with rigid parts of their digestive system. Because of this process, scientists have nothing hard to sample, so therefore don’t have an accurate method for determining the age of a lobster. When a lobster grows its shell does not do that. The lobster knows it’s time to molt when the pressure inside the shell becomes too much to bear. It sheds its shell in order to grow a new, bigger one. This molting process itself puts a lot of stress on the lobster and each new molting requires more and more energy. When the shell is finally shed, the lobster is then starving and nutrient deficient. This stress can be what kills the lobster in the end. The lobster must endure stress in order to grow. If the lobster uses stress properly, it is able to grow because of it. Researchers have found what they think to be lobsters more than 100 years old. They have become very efficient at handling stress. For all we know, there may be 500-pound lobsters somewhere in the deep we just haven’t discovered yet. Imagine those claws!
Many people try to do everything they can to avoid being uncomfortable. We go from temperature-controlled houses to jobs in temperature-controlled buildings. We avoid confrontation and other stressful situations. We escape from stress with medications and sometimes can resort to recreational drugs and alcohol to cope. Maybe working through some stress for ourselves can sometimes be the best option in order to stimulate growth.
It’s easy for me to relate it to strength training. It’s stress that makes muscles grow (or hypertrophy) and get stronger. When a muscle is placed under a significant amount of mechanical tension, it will stimulate specific responses necessary for growth. A lot of these responses are classified as inflammation, or stress. Strength training will acutely increase IGF1 (insulin-like growth factor 1), a pro-inflammatory cytokine. IL-6 (interleukin 6) and CRP (C-reactive protein), which are also pro-inflammatory responses, are acutely elevated post exercise. It is in response to this stress that the muscle adapts with increased muscle protein synthesis. The muscle has to work its way through the stress itself or adaptation will not occur.
A Swedish study in 2017 published in the medical journal Acta Physiologica tested the hypothesis that high doses of anti-inflammatory drugs would attenuate the adaptive response to resistance training. Subjects were dosed with daily ibuprofen during an eight-week training period. Ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory that downregulates IL-6. It was concluded that “over-the-counter doses of ibuprofen attenuate strength and muscle hypertrophic adaptations to 8 weeks of resistance training.” Meaning that because the stress was handled by exogenous means rather than allowing the muscle to work through the stress itself and adapt, there was no adaptation and no increase in strength or muscle size.
If you are an individual looking to use strength training to gain strength or size, you may want to avoid intake of anti-inflammatories post-workout and let your body handle the stress itself and adapt. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. If the lobster took ibuprofen every time it felt some discomfort, maybe it would never shed its shell and there would never be any growth.
There may be additional far-reaching benefits to allowing your body to adapt to stress on its own. A study was published in the journal Nutrition Research and Practice in 2010 titled “Effects of Resistance Training on the Inflammatory Response.” The study investigated the effect resistance training had on low-grade inflammation-related diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Researchers were able to determine through systematic review that “assuring adherence to a resistance training program is essential to get the benefits after overcoming the first acute resistance training responses. Hence long-term resistance training could be an effective way to prevent, and delay inflammatory chronic diseases.” Subjecting individuals to stress and allowing them to work through stress on their own allows them to overcome stress more efficiently in the future.
Stress shouldn’t always be avoided. It is overcoming stress that allows us to grow. This does not mean you should be seeking out as much stress as possible. It is only good stress if it is stress you can recover from. Adventurer and educator Tom Senninger talks about the “learning zone model,” which is also applicable to stress. Think of it like an egg in a frying pan, with the yolk being the comfort zone where there is little stress (heat) and change occurs very slowly. Outside the yolk is the white of the egg where change happens more quickly and is referred to as the growth zone. Outside the white is the frying pan: high heat, the panic zone. Staying in the comfort zone won’t stimulate much change, but venturing into the panic zone isn’t recommended. That’s when you may need some help with recovery beyond your own bodily processes.
If you want to be a 500-pound lobster, you should probably try to stay in the growth zone. Eventually the stress may become too much for the lobster, but without any stress the lobster would never grow.
