If you’ve coached people for any length of time, you have come across this one. Someone is making steady progress for months, then their numbers stall for no obvious reason. They’re sleeping about the same, eating about the same, running the same programme. A few weeks later you find out they’ve been dealing with a redundancy, or a sick parent, or a break-up, and haven’t mentioned it.
Most of us think of training as the thing that helps with stress, and it does. What gets talked about less is how much stress affects the training itself. If you understand both, you can adjust in a bad week instead of grinding through it, and you’ll have a better sense of when the gym isn’t going to be enough.
- 1. What stress does to your body and your training
- 2. How lifting, cardio and mobility work help manage stress
- 3. Adjusting training volume during high-stress periods
- 4. Signs stress is affecting your recovery and progress
- 5. When training isn't enough: recognising when to seek extra support
- 6. A simple weekly template for stressful weeks
- Final thoughts
- Sources
1. What stress does to your body and your training
Stress isn’t just a feeling. It affects your sleep, your appetite and your energy, and those are the same things you rely on to recover between sessions.
There’s decent research on this in lifters specifically. In one study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (Bartholomew et al., 2008), 135 university students did a 12-week weight training course, two sessions a week. Before they started, they filled in a questionnaire about stressful life events. At the end, the students with low stress had gained significantly more strength on their bench press and squat than the students with high stress, even though everyone followed the same plan.
The same research group followed this up in 2014 (Stults-Kolehmainen, Bartholomew and Sinha). This time they had people do a hard leg press session and then tracked their recovery over four days. People with more stress in their lives got their strength and energy back more slowly, and life stress was also tied to how tired and sore they felt. That still held after the researchers accounted for fitness level, training load and experience. Their conclusion was fairly simple: if you’re under a lot of stress, you may need more time to recover.
So if your usual programme suddenly feels much harder during a rough month, it probably isn’t a motivation problem. A lot of your recovery is just going elsewhere.
2. How lifting, cardio and mobility work help manage stress
The good news is that training is still one of the most reliable things you can do for your head. The World Health Organization’s fact sheet on physical activity (updated June 2024) says regular activity reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety in adults. It recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week for adults, and says muscle strengthening is good for everyone.
For lifting in particular, a 2017 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine (Gordon et al.) looked at 16 randomised trials with 922 people in total. Resistance training reduced anxiety symptoms, more so in healthy adults than in people with an existing physical or mental health condition. Interestingly, how hard or how often people trained didn’t make much difference to the result. In other words, you don’t need a perfect programme to get the benefit. Doing it regularly is what counts.
Cardio works a bit differently. A lot of people find steady, repetitive effort like walking, cycling or rowing helps them clear their head after a tense day, and it’s the easiest way to build up those weekly minutes. Mobility work and lighter sessions haven’t been studied as much for stress, so I won’t oversell them. Their main value is that they keep you moving on days when a heavy session would leave you worse off.
3. Adjusting training volume during high-stress periods
If stress slows your recovery, it makes sense to reduce how much you’re asking your body to recover from. That doesn’t mean you stop training. You just make some sensible cuts.
The simplest change is to keep your working weights roughly where they are and drop a set or two from each exercise. That way you hold on to your strength without piling up fatigue. You can also swap a long accessory day for a shorter full-body session. If you normally train off fixed percentages, it’s worth switching to RPE or reps in reserve for a while, so the session matches how you actually feel that day. And if your sleep has gone to pieces, push your next jump in weight back a week.
It’s basically a deload, just one that life schedules for you. In my experience, the people who come out of a hard few months in decent shape didn’t force every session. They kept turning up at about 70% and didn’t lose the habit.
4. Signs stress is affecting your recovery and progress
Your training log will often show stress before you’ve really admitted it. Things to look out for:
- Warm-up or working weights feeling unusually heavy
- Soreness hanging around for a day or two longer than normal
- Waking up tired even after a decent night’s sleep
- Not wanting to train when you’d usually look forward to it
- Eating a lot more, or a lot less, than usual
- Getting irritable in the gym or short with training partners
- Progress stalling even though you’re being consistent
One of these on its own doesn’t mean much. If you’re ticking off several for more than a couple of weeks, cut your volume back and take an honest look at what’s going on outside the gym.
5. When training isn’t enough: recognising when to seek extra support
Training helps, but it can’t fix everything. If the stress is coming from grief, money problems or a job that’s wearing you down, more squats won’t change the cause.
It’s also worth being honest with yourself about how you’re coping. Some people throw themselves into training as an escape and end up overtraining. For others, stress starts showing up as an extra drink or two every evening, or leaning on something else to switch off. If a coping habit has started to feel like something you can’t go without, that’s a sign the problem is bigger than a programme change.
Talking to your GP or a counsellor is a good place to start, and it’s more normal than most people think. For people whose way of coping has turned into substance use, there’s specialist help at different levels, from outpatient counselling to residential care with ongoing support once they leave. Many people keep exercising alongside that kind of support, and it’s worth raising with whoever is helping you.
If you’re in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, get help straight away: call or text 988 in the US and Canada, call Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, or Lifeline on 13 11 14 in Australia.
6. A simple weekly template for stressful weeks
This is a stripped-back week that keeps you training without asking too much of your recovery:
| Day | Session | Notes |
| Monday | Full-body strength (A) | 3 main lifts, 2–3 working sets each, around RPE 7 |
| Tuesday | 20–30 min easy cardio | Walk, bike or row at a pace where you can still talk |
| Wednesday | Mobility and light core | About 20 minutes, nothing too taxing |
| Thursday | Full-body strength (B) | Different main lifts, same approach as Monday |
| Friday | Rest or a walk | Get to bed early if you can |
| Saturday | Optional cardio or sport | Only if you feel up to it |
| Sunday | Rest | Plan the week and sort out some food |
For most people, two strength sessions a week is enough to hold on to their progress, and the cardio and mobility days get you close to the WHO’s 150 minutes. If you miss a day, don’t try to make it up. Just carry on with the next one.
Once things settle down, build back up to your normal volume over a week or two. Most of the time your strength is still there.
Final thoughts
A good programme isn’t just one that works when life is going well. It’s one you can scale back when things get hard, and it shouldn’t stop you from asking for help when you need it.
Sources
- Bartholomew, J. B., Stults-Kolehmainen, M. A., Elrod, C. C. and Todd, J. S. (2008). Strength gains after resistance training: the effect of stressful, negative life events. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 22(4), 1215–1221. https://doi.org/10.1519/JSC.0b013e318173d0bf
- Stults-Kolehmainen, M. A., Bartholomew, J. B. and 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
- Gordon, B. R., McDowell, C. P., Lyons, M. and Herring, M. P. (2017). The effects of resistance exercise training on anxiety: a meta-analysis and meta-regression analysis of randomized controlled trials. Sports Medicine, 47(12), 2521–2532. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-017-0769-0
- World Health Organization. Physical activity (fact sheet, updated 26 June 2024). https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/physical-activity
