The Role of Stress in Improving Fitness

This subject is near and dear to my heart currently, as I am making a big career transition.

From November 2025 until May 2026, I took a step back into full time work. It was in many ways wonderful, but mostly, it increased the stress load in my life from a manageable 5-6 out of 10 to a nail-biting 9. It was a role with a lot of human resource management (As in I was managing humans, AND answering to a lot more human resources concerns of a larger business organization), major in-person commitments, and a lot of new skills for me to learn and grow in. However, it was not possible for me to prioritize my health, family, and the responsibilities of my job, and so I made a very hard decision: I stepped down.

The irony of this was that the role was meant to be all about promoting healthy living, and over those six months, so many markers of my health and fitness crept down, and so I felt it would be best for me to pivot back to training. I was not being a good example to myself, or my clients. I was not taking good care of myself or my family. My sleep was declining, my resilience to criticism was going down (I was touchy and irritable, in other words.) I was not able to lift weights as consistently, and when I did, the numbers were just going down and my recovery was taking longer. My digestion was bad, and my nutrition was taking a back seat.

All of this personal information is just to give you an idea of the role stress plays in health goals (and to let you know why I have not been updating this website for a while!)

Some stress is good, and I always take stress levels into account when writing workouts and making nutrition goals for personal training clients. If I have a client working a high-stress, high-demand job, or with a baby that isn't sleeping well, I am going to be a lot more intentional with managing load and stress of our workouts together. If I have a client with mental health struggles, but without much physical/external stress, I might increase their physical stress with workouts, but decrease the mental stress, encouraging positive treatment of the body, walking them away from punishing themselves with exercise and working on making exercise a treat, a release, a form of caring for themselves and their body.

When we talk about fitness goals, we usually focus on the physical stuff: training splits, progressive overload, and macros. But your brain and body don't separate physical stress from life stress. When you're dealing with high psychological stress, your fitness and training goals can take a direct hit.

The Silent Recovery Killer

Most people think recovery only requires resting the specific muscles they just trained. However, research demonstrates that high psychological stress dramatically delays physical recovery. A benchmark study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research tracked athletes after a strenuous resistance workout and found that chronic mental stress severely impairs the recovery of muscular function, perceived energy, and soreness over a 96-hour period (Stults-Kolehmainen et al., 2014). When your brain is overwhelmed by life stress, your body’s ability to repair tissue and bounce back for your next workout is compromised, turning what should be a 48-hour recovery window into a four-day slog.

Elevated Injury Risk

Pushing through heavy training when you are mentally exhausted is a recipe for physical setbacks. Psychological stress alters your physical mechanics by increasing general muscle tension, which reduces flexibility and disrupts motor coordination (Hamlin et al., 2019). Furthermore, a consensus statement in Sports Medicine highlights that an athlete's acute stress response causes attentional decrements—like a loss of sensitivity to peripheral cues and increased distractibility—making stress the strongest psychological risk factor for acute sports injuries (Tranaeus et al., 2024). When you're highly stressed, your brain simply cannot process environmental cues as quickly, significantly raising the likelihood of a misstep, strain, or acute injury.

Blunting Your Adaptation and Progress

To build muscle or increase cardiovascular fitness, your body relies on a controlled cycle of breakdown and repair. Training acts as an acute physical stressor that triggers positive cellular adaptations, but adding heavy life stress to the mix shifts your biology onto a harmful continuum (Hamlin et al., 2019). Chronic stress forces the body into a prolonged catabolic (breakdown) state, elevating stress hormones like cortisol. This prolonged state limits your capacity to handle training volume and can completely stall muscle growth or endurance gains. Essentially, if your total stress load exceeds your ability to cope, your body stops adapting to your workouts and starts breaking down instead.

How do I manage stress I can't control?

This brings us to the question of managing high stress. Not everyone has the option to leave their job (I am aware of how priviliged I am in this regard, and so very grateful for my supportive family) or move out of a stressful living situation. They can't leave their newborn to mange their stress. So here are some tips for when life gets stressful.

1. Focus on what you CAN control. Think about what resources you have right now, and see if you are underutilyzing them. Do you have family you can lean into? Can you outsource grocery shopping a little with pick-up services? Can you get a cleaner? Can your partner help with a certain task that is really draining your batteries? Can you manage your time with more intention?

2. Focus on sleep first. This is going to make every part of your life easier, and if you are not getting at least 7-8 hours of sleep, this is going to be your first goal. If you have a young child who is not making it through the night, be kind to yourself. Maybe you can't get the full 8 hours, but how can you get at least one solid chunk of sleep before midnight, when our body does its deepest resting? Can you get a sleep aid that helps, such as an eye mask, ear plugs, white noise, blackout curtains, a better pillow or mattress, better temperature controlling device? Can you stop using screens 1-2 hours before bedtime? Can you find a good sleep story or guided meditation to make it easier to get to sleep without stressful thoughts disturbing you?

3. If work-outs stress you out more, they are not the right workouts. In my stressful job, I had to just accept that lifting weights would no longer look the same as it did when I was in a less stressful life situation. For me and the people I train, health will trump ego every time. If you push through and force your body to keep lifting heavier and heavier, to go through high-impact, high-energy workouts, it is no longer "if" you get an injury, but "when." Some gentler options include scaling runs down to brisk walks, taking a yoga/mobility class instead of a bootcamp, or backing down from 5 workouts a week to 2-3 to allow more recovery time.

4. Work on your escape plan. If you can't do any of these small changes and your life is so stressful that your health is declining, you need to work on your escape plan. It can and should be a considered move, it can maybe take a longer time than you would like, but your need to find work or support for your home life that also supports your health. We live in a world that does not care if you are healthy. It does not support you in seeking out health, unless it is financially beneficial to a company. This is the reality. If you want to be healthy, and your life is sabotaging you in every way, you need to start finding a parachute and an emergency exit. Chronic, negative stress is the catalyst that will break down every aspect of your health, and you can either make an escape plan, or shave years off of your life.

If you are going through a stressful stage of life and need a trainer who can support you, reach out to me. I will never drill sergeant you into injury, or push you so hard you cannot live your life afterward.

If you are in crisis in the United States, please reach out by call or text to 988.

Life should not be so hard that you cannot recover. You deserve rest. You deserve kindness.

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References

Hamlin, M. J., Wilkes, D., Elliot, C. A., Lizamore, C. A., & Kathiravel, Y. (2019). Monitoring training loads and perceived stress in young elite university athletes. *Frontiers in Physiology*, *10*, Article 34. [https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00034](https://www.google.com/search?q=https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00034)

Stults-Kolehmainen, M. A., Bartholomew, J. B., & Sinha, R. (2014). Chronic psychological stress impairs recovery of muscular function and somatic sensations over a 96-hour period. *Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research*, *28*(7), 2007-2017. [https://doi.org/10.1519/jsc.0000000000000335](https://www.google.com/search?q=https://doi.org/10.1519/jsc.0000000000000335)

Tranaeus, U., Gledhill, A., Johnson, U., Podlog, L., Wadey, R., Wiese Bjornstal, D., & Ivarsson, A. (2024). 50 years of research on the psychology of sport injury: A consensus statement. *Sports Medicine*, *54*(8), 1733-1748. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-024-02045-w](https://www.google.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.1007%2Fs40279-024-02045-w)