How Stress Impacts your Fat Loss and Muscle Growth Goals

Why stress management is important to reach your fitness goals

Stress is something we all encounter at some point in our lives, but how does it impact our goals when it comes to losing fat or building muscle. Does stress make it harder to build muscle? Does stress make it easy to store fat? Is there a good form of stress? What happens when stress is left unchecked? We’ll go into these questions to give you a better understanding on how stress plays a role in your fitness journey.

Defining stress

Stress can mean many things in different contexts. For our purposes, we will be referring to mental stress.

Imagine stress like water behind a damn. Water puts pressure on the damn. When there is too much, the damn becomes damaged and can even break. When there is not enough water, the damn is unable to be productive and generate electricity. The damn like us, need the right amount of stress to be productive without breaking. Let’s dive further into what good stress looks like.

The good side of stress

Stress sometimes feels like an odd thing for an animal to develop. It seems like we would do just fine without it. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The body has developed stress signaling as a motivator to do something necessary for survival.

Sometimes stress is also required for us to complete tasks that bring us closer to our goals. If you take work, for example, you wouldn’t get much done without stress motivating you to perform necessary tasks. Stress can also be a strong motivator for us to eat throughout the day. Without taking it too far, this stress is very useful for sustaining our lives.

The bad side of stress

Let’s talk about the bad kind of stress; it does exist. Bad stress can also be defined as chronic stress. This happens when you have multiple or one single source of stress building or maintaining at a high level beyond your capabilities. This stress is quite harmful for almost all aspects of life, and it can even shorten lifespans. It is crucial for us to have systems to manage stress and keep us out of this zone as much as possible.

Although, some of the areas affected by stress are outside of the scope of this article, let’s dive into what is relevant for us.

Prevention of muscle growth

High levels of stress cause the release of higher cortisol levels within the system. These higher levels of this hormone work on two levels to impair muscle growth.

On the first level, these hormones will trigger breakdown of the muscle tissue to aid in supporting the body’s functions. For building muscle or even maintaining muscle, this is bad news.

Cortisol also suppresses the body’s ability to release testosterone, one of the most important muscle building hormones. This can take a big chunk out of your overall ability to develop muscle tissue.

Another way cortisol inhibits muscle growth is by impacting sleep. Without consistent quality sleep, the body’s ability to repair itself is greatly diminished, and the aftermath adds up quick.

Promotion of fat gain

If your goal is to burn fat, high levels of stress might slow down your fat loss progress to a screeching halt.

The stress hormone, cortisol, promotes more fat production in the form of adipose tissue to occur in the body. On top of that, with higher levels of cortisol, the body holds onto more water weight. All in all, stepping on the scale week to week with high stress levels can start an unwanted cycle of frustration and stress that results in almost no change from week to week.

Stress management

Obviously, too much stress is a bad thing for accomplishing your fitness goals, but where do we start in managing this stress to keep things under control?

Identifying the source of stress can be a great place to start when trying to manage it. It can give you clues on where it is coming from and how to approach it best.

For preventative measures, something I highly recommend for everyone to do is to take an hour each day and spend it doing some sort of destress activity. This activity can be anything that allows the body and mind to relax for a bit. Doing this exercise proves to be super helpful in dropping background stress levels.

Exercising regularly can also have a great benefit on managing stress levels. This can be any kind of exercise, but my favorite form for stress management is resistance training.

Keeping your diet full of nutritious whole foods is another way to keep stress levels in check.

If you are looking for a stress free approach to fat loss, consider applying for coaching with us, and we’ll get you to your goal in a sustainable way.