Stress Is Ruining Your Fitness

We’ve all been told how bad stress can be. But just how well do we understand it and its effects? To start, stress is at its worst when it is prolonged. The body is built to deal with short shots of stress, which can even be beneficial in some circumstances. A moderate amount of stress increases our performance in many tasks, it’s once we exceed that limit, and do so for an unnatural length of time, that negative effects set in.

The other common misunderstanding is that stress of different varieties have different effects on your body?emotional stress results in something different to physical stress. This is an intuitive notion, but one that is not grounded in science. Breaking Muscle has more:

Most people only look at the training performed in the gym or on the track when assessing levels of fatigue. However, the body doesn?t differentiate between mental, emotional, or physical stress. As far as the systems of the body are concerned, stress is stress.

That time your boss dropped a big pile of work on your desk that had to be done before you left the office was just as traumatic for your body as a max effort squat day. So the last thing you should be doing if you?ve just had one of those days is head to the gym and max out. This seems counter-intuitive. When you have a bad day, it?s natural to want to take out that aggression in the gym and let off some steam. But when you do, you?ve essentially had what amounts to two max effort sessions in the same day, as far as your body is concerned.

If prolonged stress is doing the real damage, then a stressful day isn’t going to get better by heading straight to the gym. Make sure you check out the full post for more details.