Does Psychological Stress Impact Your Progress in the Gym? Part 2
In part 1 we discussed the basics of how stress may impact our ability to successfully perform in the gym and adapt to training. Now we take a deeper dive on how exactly this occurs from an evolutionary perspective, before going into a bit more detail on how stress is psychologically mediated. Get ready to head down the rabbit hole!
Diving deeper – The mechanics of the stress-response
Back in far less peaceful and abundant times during human evolution, life was more dangerous, at least in the short term. The ever-present life threatening risk of coming across a predator, or the desperate attempt at hunting prey to survive, meant that we required certain systems to evolve to help mobilise and protect us in the face of danger. Despite the relative safety and comfort that most of us now live in (compared to way back when), we still have these same neurophysiological systems in place. Whilst we aren’t often faced with acute life threatening stressors, we are faced with constant small (but often impactful) psychological and social stressors. And in these situations, we turn on the same stress responses as we did during our evolutionary past. When these systems are turned on chronically over time, it can begin to seriously impact our physical and mental health, and the resources we have to adapt to training.
Having an argument with a loved one, realising you’ve missed an appointment, or even having a bad training session and feeling bad about it, can activate the same stress responses that would occur if you were being chased across the savannah by a lion. High activation of the sympathetic nervous system and the subsequent release of adrenaline, noradrenaline and/or glucocorticoids (stress hormones) from the adrenal glands often follow these situations. This is often colloquially termed the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism. Heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate increases, and short-term protection of resources are prioritised over long term building projects.
The Power of the Mind - The Brain as the Master Gland in stress responses
Recent advancements in stress research place the brain firmly as the master organ for orchestrating all downstream physiological effects to imposed challenges. Emotion-processing areas of the brain (such as the amygdala and the basal ganglia) are the first to register challenge and perceive threat. Therefore, the emotional resonance placed on a given event (whether it is perceived as highly stressful, fairly stressful or not very stressful at all) then determines how our body perceives and responds to a given stressor. Fundamentally, how we perceive and interpret stress matters more than anything else.
What does this mean for progress in the gym?
This means recovery and adaptation to training (getting stronger, leaner, more athletic) – a fairly costly process - will immediately be put on the back seat, and in serious cases abandoned altogether in periods of high psychological stress. Slower recovery rates, greater pain/injury risk, poorer performances in training sessions ensue. You may well be able to get away with it in times of short-term stress and still make progress. But if these stress responses are activated chronically, it can start having a significant impact on the progress you’re making in the gym.
Abandoning a Naïve, out-dated view of training Adaptation
John Kiely’s model of Training Adaptation, emphasising the importance of psychological factors in determining the personalisation of adaptation to a given training stress.
Training stress has typically been considered in a vacuum, independent from all other of life’s stressors, which leads to a somewhat reductionist view of how human beings adapt to physical training and exercise.
Now, the last thing I want you to take away from this article series is that if you just think positive thoughts and develop more psychological resilience that you will make brilliant progress in the gym, regardless of how you structure training. This would be straight up pseudo-science. Physiology still matters, after all. Muscles still respond to progressive tension. Our energy systems still adapt to training stressors. However psychologically healthy you are, you still need appropriately organised and structured training to adapt to training. But that’s for future blog posts. We’re talking ‘bout the mind right now, okay?!
With that being said, much of the training planning and organisation theory that has formed the bedrock of periodization theory (periodization is a fancy name given to the process of structuring long term training) completely fails to consider the unique psychological makeup of an individual, their prior experiences, their history of stress, and how these factors influence adaptation to training. Once someone has completed a training session, a plethora of psychological responses play a role in determining our subsequent adaptive potential to the training demands that were imposed.
Why does all of this matter to you?
It’s so common for me to see people simply burn out trying to complete training programs that are just far too stressful for their current ability to tolerate them. If you are an extremely busy business owner, or a mum of 4, or a manual labourer working 50-hour weeks, or have just found out your mother is ill (insert any physically and mentally stressful lifestyle here, really) you simply can’t be expected to cope with the additionally high demands of a rigorous 6-day a week training program and come out the other side well recovered, motivated and excited to train. When designing a good training program, an understanding of a persons stress tolerance and individual personality is just as important as the reps, the sets and the exercise selection.
Looking at stress more broadly
Once we adopt this more holistic notion of stress, we can start to see how everything we are exposed to on a day to day basis is either filling our cup with more stress, or giving us the reserves to build a bigger cup, so we can tolerate more.
In this visual representation of 3 different stress cups, you can see that the individual in the middle is beginning to ‘burn the candle from both ends’ from a stress perspective, and can only tolerate a small amount of exercise without his/her cup being overfilled. The individual on the right, however, has managed life stressors appropriately and therefore has a huge reserve for performing high intensity exercise. Winning.
A word on exercise as a stress reducer
It may have become clear to you now that the notion of exercise as a stress reducer is a little simplistic – exercise can absolutely be a huge stress reducer, as long as the intensity and the frequency of that exercise doesn’t exceed your current stress tolerance. So by all means use exercise for its therapeutic benefits, so long as said therapy is not leaving you chronically under-recovered and experiencing symptoms of exercise induced burnout. Participating in exercise that you actually enjoy is a huge influencer of whether it is accompanied with psychological benefits – so choose wisely. As soon as you begin despising the exercise or training you’re doing, it’s probably time to take a break and do something else.
From an injury risk standpoint, we also know that gradually increasing training workload over time has a protective effect on injury (key point: Gradually). Avoiding big spikes in training load, but instead methodically increasing your training stress over time is a great strategy to protect yourself from injury – this increased training capacity increases the size of your cup.
Of course, there are an infinite amount of ways we can look after our body and mind in order to put ourselves in the best position to manage our own stress cup, starting with what I consider to be the fundamentals:
- Slowly and methodically increasing training workload over time
- Getting enough sleep quantity and quality
- Eating enough food, and the right types of food to support lifestyle and performance goals
- Implementing stress management strategies
In conclusion…
The stress we are exposed to outside of the gym impacts our readiness to perform inside the gym, and our ability to adapt to training. However perfect we think a training program is on paper, human beings aren’t predictable machines. We’re far more complex than a simple input-output equation, and we have to take this into account when looking to make physical exercise and performance a consistent part of our lifestyle over the long term.
Look after both your body and mind. As I hope these two blogs have suggested, they are more intimately intertwined than we may initially realise…