How Stress Affects Your Exercise

April 1, 2024

At Diced Kitchen, we’ve found that while a healthy amount of the right kind of stress—like exercise—is good for your body, too much of the wrong kind can send you down the wrong path. Stress impacts almost everything that happens in your body, and that includes your weight loss efforts.

Reduces Your Performance

When stressed, your body is already under a massive strain. Your muscles aren’t fresh, are too tight and already partially exhausted. This can lead to poor form, reduce the workload they can deliver, and in extreme cases they can give out unexpectedly and lead to injury.

Properly stretching and getting enough rest will minimize these issues, but the best way to avoid them is reducing the stress in your life. Are there stressors you tolerate because that’s how it’s always been? What can you move around to give your body a fighting chance?

Minimizes Your Gains

This fee is well hidden, but it’s one of the costliest. When your body is stressed to near capacity before you even walk start, you leave little headroom to push beyond its existing strength; that means you push yourself very little, and your body grows little—but to you, it still feels like a full workout.

Worse, most of the recovery your body does repairs the strain that stress put on your body, and very little goes to your body. This makes your recovery less efficient, and leaves growth that would’ve happened on the table.

Makes Your Rest Inefficient

This leads to our final point: the stress that reduced your performance and minimizes your gains follows you into sleep. There, it keeps your muscles working at near capacity, never letting them rest so they can heal and grow.

Managing your stress is a crucial part of managing or losing weight. Without keeping it in check, your body is always paying these hidden costs, reducing your gains, and ultimately your motivation. When it comes to treating your body right, managing stress is only second to eating right.