Let's talk about the relationship between stress and your muscles.

When you go through chronic stress, which creates an elevation of cortisol, various things happen

to different parts of your body, but today we're going to focus more on the skeletal muscles.

And it's not necessarily just excessive stress. It could be excess amount of cortisol, another name for that would be

glucocorticoids, or as an external source, if you're on prednisone, for example, you're getting a lot of that cortisol, and that can create the same effect.

There's two primary effects that happen with the muscles.

One, you have this increased catabolic effect.

Catabolic means a breakdown of something.

So we're getting a breakdown of muscle protein.

And number two, you have this decrease of the anabolic effect of the muscles.

So this means you're not going to build the muscles back up. You're not going to make new muscles.

So if we look at the chain of events, we have increased amounts of stress, or prednisone, or an increased amount of cortisol

from another reason, maybe you had a tumor on your adrenal, or whatever.

So there are other reasons why your cortisol might go up.

But what happens is it targets the muscle, and you start getting atrophy of the muscle.

And what's happening is we're getting this muscle that's turning into amino acids.

And the amino acids are there as a precursor to make new glucose in the liver.

And that's called gluconeogenesis.

Neo meaning new genesis meaning the creation of.

So we're making new glucose from non-carbohydrate sources.

And in the process of breaking down this muscle protein, there's going to be two main muscle groups that are going to be involved.

Primarily, it could be other muscles too, but primarily it's going to be your thigh muscles, okay?

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