Stress And Exercise: Managing One To Maximize The Other

Stress: An Often Overlooked Factor

I remember being told there are only two certainties in life: you will die and you will pay taxes. To this day, I feel there's a third certainty that has yet to be universally recognised. No matter where you live, what gender you are, and how much money you make, you will experience stress. Ironically, it will probably be because of either of the first two 'certainties’.

When I refer to stress it is important that I clarify what I mean. Stress, you see, can have many meanings, particularly in science. It can refer to the amount of force applied to a structure such as a building or even a muscle, known as 'mechanical stress’, or it can even mean the buildup of metabolic substances in the muscle in response to exercise, termed 'metabolic stress’.

I am, of course, instead referring to psychological stress, which is defined as a disturbance of the psychological process which can manifest behavioural or emotional responses, like freaking out (the response) when you’re running late for work (the stressor).

Like many phenomena that affect the human mind, stress not only has an affect on someone's behaviour or emotions, but also has many physical effects, especially when this stress or anxiety, the bad kind, is constantly elevated, when, for example, you have a large project due in three weeks and you haven't done a thing for it yet, or they’re letting people go in your job and you’re not sure how secure your professional circumstances are.

The effects don’t stop there either. Cortisol is a hormone associated with stress. A hormone is basically a chemical messenger the body uses to communicate with itself, and cortisol has shown to be a potential player in the development of depression by disrupting certain chemical processes in the brain related to brain matter growth and development. There is also some evidence of high stress levels putting someone at a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, and there’s no mystery surrounding the link between stress and high blood pressure, which can negatively affect heart health.

READ 5 Anti Stress Relaxation Techniques

So, with all the negative effects that stress can have on the overall health of a person, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it can also negatively impact how you adapt to exercise, reducing the effectiveness of your workout and even possibly reducing the amount of work you could potentially do in each session. In fact, there’s already been studies showing that injury risk increases, aerobic work capacity decreases and that the amount of strength gained from weight training is decreased in people with high levels of stress compared to relatively less stressed individuals.

Couple this with the fact that cortisol, a hormone closely linked with stress, also seems to enhance fat storage and you’ve got a lot of good reasons to start managing stress if you’re an athlete or even a recreational exerciser just trying to get into better shape as it can help increase how much strength you gain, fat you lose or even how hard you can push yourself during cardio. So, that just leaves us with the question of how.

Stress Management: What It Is And How To Do It?

Just like stress itself, there are a few different types of managing, or minimising stress, known as ‘coping’ or ‘coping strategies’. One form of coping, which is probably the most commonly known to people, is passive coping, which consists of using external cues or tasks as a distraction from the stressor without dealing with the stressor directly, i.e. scrolling on Facebook, eating ‘comfort foods’, visiting friends or even using recreational drugs (which includes alcohol by the way). Active coping entails tackling the stressor head on and trying to deal with it directly

Don’t confuse active coping as being somewhat superior to passive. Both forms of coping have been show to work. However, active coping strategy is what we’ll provide some guidance and examples on in this article, mainly because passive coping is both the usual ‘go-to’ form of coping for most people, and because passive coping is usually easier to do and generally requires no information about how to do it.

So, how does someone ‘do’ active stress management or coping?

Firstly, there are two main ways to carry out active coping; Problem-focused coping, which deals with the stressor itself by trying to reduce, eliminate or even substitute it, and emotional-based coping, which deals with how you react to the stressor, i.e. do you scream and load up a machine gun, or take a deep breath and count to ten? So, is there a superior form of stress management? Not really.

For example, if the stressor is able to be eliminated, like a project due for college or a meeting with your boss, then active emotional strategies, such as recognising your feeling of discomfort and using it as motivation for engaging with the stressful event, are most useful. However, if the stressor is not able to be eliminated, such as people being let go in your job, then passive strategies, such as using ‘procrastination’ or the above form of passive coping, might lead to better results. 

One study showed that problem based coping, such as tackling that college project, was more effective in long-term health outcomes than emotion based coping, though factors such as duration, stressor type and individual response varied considerably.

Gender is also a factor, with avoidance emotional-based coping like procrastination seeming to work better in the long term for women than for men, who seemed to experience exacerbated stress later on. Men were also more likely to use recreational drugs like alcohol, whereas women were more likely to use social support.

So, below are a few examples of active stress management, both emotional and problem-focused:

Emotion Focused:

1. Meditation

2. Deep breathing

3. Cognitive Reappraisal or Re-framing — Focusing on the positive aspects of the problem and the emotions you’re feeling, concentrating on what you can learn.

4. Disruption of negative thoughts — Saying the word ‘stop’ in your head when negative thoughts accumulate.

Problem Focused:

1. Deconstruction of the problem — Breaking the problem down into manageable steps and tasks.

2. Allocating a certain time-slot and period in the day for addressing the problem.

3. Brainstorming potential solutions to the problem amongst yourself or with a group.

4. Writing down potential plans or back-up plans for dealing with the problem.

READ Best Tips for Stress Management

Notice that above, all the methods involve directly dealing with the stressor, or your response to it, and all contain a method of recognising the problem and developing a systematic response to it that could then be used to tackle another stressor in a similar way.

These methods should now help arm you to minimise your stress levels and help you get the most out of your workouts, or, if you’re an athlete, your performance in competition.