Homeostasis And The Art Of Balancing Stress & Recovery

Homeostasis is the body’s ability to sense load, adapt to it, and return to a stable internal baseline.

It’s not a fixed point…

It’s a range. And, depending on what you’re up to, that range will fluctuate.

When I work with clients to build a training program, I also help them define the boundaries of what homeostasis should look like for them.

It’s not about being permanently relaxed. It’s about being able to move away from the baseline when you train and perform, and then come back again reliably, regardless of what’s happening around you.

As musicians, we live with many variables that constantly change. Fights, buses, different beds, the demands of different gigs. Or the opposite, and coming off a run of gigs to the sound of total silence. Depending on the person, sometimes the latter can be more dysregulating than the former.

Having a toolbox that helps you return to the baseline regardless of the changing world around you is super important for keeping your performances world-class, your training as efficient and productive as possible, and for avoiding things like burnout and chronic nervous system dysregulation.

Why Unrecovered Stress Shifts Your Baseline

Anything that adds load to your nervous system is a stressor.

Training is a stressor. Poor sleep is a stressor. Travel, dehydration, psychological pressure, and unfamiliar environments are all stressors. The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between them. It doesn’t label them as good or bad. It just registers load.

Exercise absolutely can be energising and de-stressing.

But it can also be incredibly taxing for the nervous system.

If you add load to the nervous system today and don’t recover properly, some of that load carries over. This is where the concept of allostatic load comes into play.

Allostasis is the process of adapting to stress.

Allostatic load is the unrecovered cost of that adaptation.

In practical terms, it’s the leftover sympathetic dominance that hasn’t been balanced back out through active recovery.

And so, the aim is to find ways to minimise any “unrecovered” load.

Why Touring Raises Baseline Load

For musicians, touring, erratic schedules, and constantly changing demands make it difficult to prevent the accumulation of allostatic load.

You’re often not sleeping in your own bed. You’re travelling. Your circadian rhythm is often out of whack. Nutrition is inconsistent. Sleep is often of poor quality. Flights dehydrate you. And then there’s the psychological pressure of delivering flawless performances regardless of these factors.

That’s a breeding ground for burnout and dysregulation.

Training Decisions Must Change When Baseline Is Elevated

Obviously, training increases your capacity.

It allows you to widen your homeostatic range and train your nervous system to become more adaptable. But training without a plan or a finger on the interoceptive pulse just adds more load to an already elevated system.

Gym and training culture comes from the bodybuilding lineage, where the point of training is the training itself.

That provides a sticking point for musicians and artists.

We are athletes in our own right. We don’t train for the sake of training. We train to deliver more consistent performances. We train to avoid injury. We train for clarity of thought and for command over our physiology. We train as a performance insurance.

And so, it pays to have a more intelligent and flexible approach to training.

That’s why I like to use data-driven decisions with the people I work with. We use many methods to assess recovery. From daily check-ins and monitoring energy levels, to using data such as resting heart rate and HRV trends to get a better look at what’s happening with their internal physiology.

This allows us to make better decisions about when and how to push training in amongst performance schedules and travel plans.

I find most people naturally have an all-or-nothing approach to training, and if they’re not going hard, then they feel like they’re wasting time.

So when you put that pressure on top of an already dysregulated baseline (for all of the reasons we discussed above), you’re only making the problem worse. In the spirit of progressive overload, pushing through training sessions for the sake of it can muddy the picture with data, progression, momentum, and motivation.

From an adaptation perspective, the smarter move is to use a tiered system based on data about your recovery levels.

Some days, your recovery will give you the green light to push with both your resistance training and your conditioning work. It might give you the green light for one but not the other. It might suggest that you can manage only lighter accessory work or mobility work. Or it might suggest that active recovery, such as NSDRs, breathwork, refuelling, and a heavier day of parasympathetic regulatory work, is what is needed.

That way, you’re not muddying the data. You’re not regressing. And you don’t have to deal with the mental pressure of trying to keep up with whatever target you set for yourself.

As a musician, regulation is the name of the game, and your training is there to support your performance.

And so, it pays to have a flexible mindset.

Sustainable performance, both on stage and in the gym, comes from knowing when (and how) to rebalance the system so tomorrow is still available to you.

That’s it for today!