Does Psychological Stress Impact Your Progress in the Gym?
A Holistic View of Stress
We all experience stress. Regardless of our career, lifestyle, family and relationship life, prior experiences and personality type, everyone faces a unique set of stressors day to day. As human beings, we are confronted with a plethora of different stimuli in every waking moment, in which we have to interpret, make sense of, and adapt to. One minute we’re rushing to get to work on time. The next we’re trying to finish an assignment before the deadline date. Then suddenly we’re having an argument with our spouse. Then one of the kids gets sick. Beyond the day to day stresses we all face, there’s also the larger events that can leave a larger negative impact, whether it be a car accident, the death of a loved one, losing a job. The combination of these smaller day to day stressors and larger more profound stressors all leave a unique imprint on our physiology, having downstream effects on our metabolic and cardiovascular health, immune function, disease risk, cognitive function, memory, and risk for chronic pain.
All sounds lovely, doesn’t it! What a depressing opening paragraph!
I’m depicting quite the pessimistic view of human life here, but it’s simply to illustrate the point that stress can impact our body in profound ways. Of course, somebody would be extraordinarily unlucky to be exposed to all the aforementioned stressors all at once! Most people’s lives consist of a messy combination of positive, negative and neutral experiences from the mundane, to the euphoric, to the downright traumatic. But all of these experiences have tangible effects on our body’s ability to cope with future stressors. As human beings, we have finite resources to deal with stress, and much of human health and flourishing is about ensuring that the stress we face doesn’t exceed our capacity to successfully adapt to it.
So where does training fit into this puzzle?
The training we complete is another form of stress. By lifting heavy weights and completing strenuous cardiovascular activity, we are adding another stress stimulus into the picture each week. Now, I can already hear whispers from the back of the room ‘So is he saying training is bad for us?!’. No, that is not what I’m saying! In fact, training is extraordinarily good for us, despite being a stressor. The health benefits, the increase in physical and psychological resilience, and the mental health benefits that training affords us actually increases our capacity to deal with stress in other aspects of life, in many cases.
However, in cases where non-training stressors are high (like in the examples given at the beginning of this article), our capacity to cope with stress of training becomes diminished. This is where we start to see performance fluctuations, low energy levels, and high levels of perceived effort during training sessions.
This is an important consideration for people to consider, as it is often neglected when people embark on their health and fitness journey. Your capacity to tolerate training will be determined by the stressors that are occurring outside the 4 walls of the gym. It’s common for people to wonder why they aren’t getting bigger, stronger, leaner, or more athletic, given all the work they’re putting in at the gym. However, its often the case that they’re either not controlling the stress that’s occurring outside the gym effectively enough, or they aren’t adjusting the training stress to accommodate the stress that’s happening outside the gym. Or a combination of both!
The Cup Analogy
One of the most practical easy-to-understand ways to understand stress and the impact it plays on our health, our ability to adapt to training and successfully reduce risk of pain/injury is the cup analogy.
Imagine all the stressors we are exposed to as being poured into a cup. An overfilled cup (where too many stressors build up) results in burnout, overtraining, pain and injury.
It’s a useful analogy because it helps broaden people’s notion of stress into physical and non-physical factors. In fact, it doesn’t draw much distinction between different types of stress. Regardless of where it comes from (physical, psychological, social) its all contributing to how full our cup is. It’s also actionable – there a two main ways we can reduce the risk of injury, pain, burnout, and keep making progress in the gym:
1) Decrease some of the stressors and loads that are in our cup
2) Increase the size of our cup to be able to tolerate more stressors
‘But do we have any actual data unequivocally demonstrating that psycho-emotional stress impacts progress in the gym?!’, I hear you quick-witted and sceptical folk exclaiming from the back of the class!
And that’s a great question. As it turns out, we absolutely do…
Firstly, we know that experimentally manipulating someone’s acute emotional state can significantly impact performance in the short term, positively or negatively. For example, a study found that salivary cortisol and squat 3 repetition max performance increased following participants viewing an erotic, aggressive or training motivation video clip prior to lifting (yes, you read that correctly. Watching an erotic movie improved squat performance. Certainly a less than conventional performance enhancing strategy!). On the flip side, an acute decline in running performance has been seen demonstrated immediately following a cognitively fatiguing task. As well as high levels of anxiety reducing performance in sporting tasks. This data clearly shows that a changing psychological/emotional state alters how we are able to perform in physical tasks.
These performance changes don’t just occur in the short term, either…
Low resilience to stress has been shown to compromise cardiovascular and maximum power adaptations. Recovery and running economy is negatively impacted by life stress, and stress has been found to have a negative impact on training outcome in triathletes. So, It seems that via either direct or indirect pathways, both acute and chronic elevated stress can impact performance and training adaptation. More data is needed in resistance training populations, but you can clearly see that self rated stress can have significant impacts on progress throughout a training cycle.
What about injury risk?
Research has found conclusive evidence to show that high levels of previous negative life stress, and a high level of sensitivity to stressful events increase injury risk. As do personality characteristics such as ‘Self blame’, perfectionism and anxiety. Amongst college students, high levels of academic stress have been shown to increase injury risk, and high levels of psychological stress have been shown to diminish the effectiveness of ‘return to play’ rehabilitation programs in athletes recovering from injury.
So, the data supports psychological stress having an impact on acute and chronic performance, and injury risk over time. Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article, where I will dive a little deeper into how and why stress impacts physical performance and injury risk from an evolutionary perspective, and how stress physiology can give us an understanding of how the brain mediates stress responses.
Thanks for reading!