Manage Stress Inside and Outside the Gym To Get the Most Out of Your Training and Life

By Trevor Corrado

Creating positive training adaptations and living well outside of the gym are a matter of properly dosing, managing, and coping with stress. While stress is often a dirty word, we’re going to learn how to use it to our advantage and create an action plan to put ourselves in the best possible position to succeed. 

If you’re a meathead like me, you want to be able to consistently train hard, put on muscle, and crush heavy weights in the gym. You probably also want to maximize your time outside of the gym and live life to its fullest. But in order for these things to happen, we need to ensure that we’re responding appropriately to all of the various signals that we receive on a daily basis. These signals can be encompassed by the oft’ misused word stress, and they account for regulating all of the conscious and unconscious processes that are bodies go through from the moment we are born until the day we die. 

So today we’re going to talk specifically about stress – what it is, why we need it, how it relates to your training, and how to manage it appropriately.

What is Stress?

Stress is any form of demand placed on the body that deviates homeostasis – which is a tight equilibrium of our internal physiology such as our body temperature, blood glucose levels, fluid levels, PH, etc. Whenever there is a threat to homeostasis, there needs to be a response to that threat so we can deal with it not only in the immediate tense, but make the adaptations necessary to handle that stress better should it happen again. 

Specifically, stress is experienced at the level of the brain. We have something called an Autonomic Nervous System which regulates unconscious bodily functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, reproduction, etc. The brain receives messages about the body and our external environment and either stimulates or inhibits various processes depending on the perception of that information. 

Eustress vs Distress

Typically, Stress is framed as being negative. We’re taught that we shouldn’t want any in our lives, and if we have some, we better get rid of it. However, if we understand the definition of stress, then we know that we absolutely need it in order to do cool things like add 10 pounds to our deadlift one rep max, learn a new skill, or meet important deadlines. Stress is contextual, and can either be a positive in our lives, or a Eustress. Or if unable to cope, respond to appropriately or left unmanaged, can manifest itself negatively, as a Distress. 

If we can alter our perception of stress, understand how to use it to our advantage, and mitigate the the harmful effects of the things that we can’t control, then we can begin to make some serious headway in both our training and daily lives. 

The Stress Response and Training

With all that in mind let’s dive into how this is going to help you get bigger, stronger, and faster, because that’s why you’re really here. Good training comes down to good stress management. We want to apply the right amount of stress at the right time to produce a specific adaptation. Generally speaking, the bigger, stronger, and faster that you become, the more stress that you need to apply in order to cause a greater magnitude of homeostasis deviation.

The larger “dent” that you need to create means that you get a greater response, but only if you pressed that ‘stress’ button with just the right amount of force according to the resources that you have available so that you can recover and exceed the level of fitness that you were previously at for that specific quality.  We can adjust how much stress we apply and with how much force by managing your exercise selection, training intensity, volume, and frequency.

Manage Your Training Like a Good Playlist

Training is as much of an art as it is a science. There needs to be an ebb and flow, based upon a number of factors that ultimately are determined by the direction that you want to go in. It’s like music in a lot of ways. Music can have a profound effect on our emotional state and physiology, all depending on the song and the timing of that song.

Exercise selection is like songs on your playlist. You want the right songs at the right time depending on your environment, mood, and the task at hand. “Shout” gets played at a certain time at every wedding for a reason, and you blast the Wu-Tang-Clan on the days you’re trying to mash in the gym.

And Just like you want the right song at the right time, you want to ensure that you’re providing the right type of training stress at the right time given your specific goals and the timeline that you’re on. 

Frequency

Frequency is how many times you click repeat on the same song. Some songs you only want to hear at specific times and perhaps less frequently (The Macarena, anyone?). Others you can listen to many times over for multiple days in a row. The exposure to a certain song depends on how it makes you feel and the kind of response that you want from that song (are you half in the bag at a wedding or are you approaching a 1 rep max deadlift?). 

In training, we can manipulate our response to a stressor by how frequently we expose ourselves to it. Things like training age, biological age, neuromuscular efficiency, the time of the year relative to when you need to peak, and host of other factors can help determine the optimal frequency of a given lift or modality. 

Intensity

Intensity is how loud you play a song. In our world of improving performance, we view intensity from the absolute perspective – total load on the bar or how close we are to our maximal effort, usually a 1 rep max in the weight room, but it could be event specific (think 100m sprint). The closer you are to that 100% effort, the more “intense” the set is.

Intensity can also be viewed from a relative perspective, or the perceived level of effort we are experiencing from performing a given task. Relative intensity can increase or decrease the magnitude of the stress response via the manipulation of rest periods, tempo, exercise order, and exercise pairings (supersets, etc). 

Both variables are important in our training and can often have an inverse relationship. A well designed training program will have a level of synergy among them. The closer you are to competition or peaking, the more specific and “absolutely” intense, your training should be. 

Volume

Volume is how many times you can listen to a playlist before you need to add more songs or take some out. We’ve all been to a wedding (we’ll stick with this theme) where there were way too many slow songs. Too much volume. It’s redundant, the timing sucks, and it’s taking away from people having a good time. 

The key with volume in training is knowing when enough is enough and to time the amount with the phase of training that you’re in relative to your desired outcome. Too much volume leads to things like chronic fatigue, poor movement quality, a loss of desire to train, and an overall failure to adapt. 

Too little volume and we have the issue of not enough stress at not great enough of a magnitude. How much volume you can recover from is highly individualized, but there are ways to increase your ability to handle more work such as building an aerobic base, having a good diet and lifestyle, and of course carefully titrating up what you can handle over time. 

The Marriage of Training and Lifestyle

Getting the most from your training program is not as simple as slapping down sets and reps on a piece of paper (putting random songs on a playlist), but orchestrating all of the moving parts in such a way that allows you to get the best possible response so that you can reach the highest level of performance that you’re capable of. 

We run into problems in our training when we the stress imposed consistently exceeds our ability to adapt to it. This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of blending good training practices in the gym with a good lifestyle (and all that encompasses that word) outside of it. 

We know that training is an acute stressor. We are attempting to “rev that engine” to the highest degree possible given the time frame and overall objective of the workout. In terms of autonomics, we are deliberately driving ourselves into a sympathetic – or flight or flight – state. Various hormones are released to liberate energy, increase our heart rate and blood pressure, and drive blood to our working muscles. All good things, and necessary in order to respond and adapt so that we can grow bigger, faster, stronger. 

What Goes Up Must Come Down

However, what goes UP must come DOWN. We can’t stay in that vigilant state forever and constantly be “on”. In order to facilitate the recovery process, we want to shift into a parasympathetic -or rest and digest- state so that we can begin to clear inflammation, repair damaged tissue, and turn on more anabolic signaling. 

What goes on outside of the gym and your perception of stress is going to have a significant impact on your ability to traverse smoothly from Wu-Tang-Clan mashing in the weight room to Netflix and chill. Your sleep, nutrition, work, relationships, finances, hobbies, and just about any day to day interaction you can think of is either adding to your bank account of reserves to handle more stress, or taking some away. 

A Bigger, Stronger, Faster Meathead = Well Managed Stress Over Time

So it’s clear that stress is not something to be avoided, but something that we manage over time. And in order to manage something, we first need to identify what we want to actually do. What do you want from your training? What kind of lifestyle practices do you want to implement to enhance both the training response and your overall well being? How does this all fit together under your current circumstances? 

Here are some action steps that you can take to ensure that you’re directing your resources where you want them to go. 

Identify Your Goals

1. Identify your goals inside and outside of training for the next 3-6 months, why they are important to you, and what obstacles can potentially stand in your way from achieving them.

At first glance, these obstacles can certainly fall under the ‘Distress’ category, but if you are able to re-frame them or perhaps formulate a plan to mitigate them, you can begin to have some control and therefore begin to take ownership over your behaviors.

Training Goals

Why:

Obstacles/Limitations:

Possible Solutions:

Life Goals (personal, professional, relationships, etc)

Why:

Obstacles/Limitations:

Possible Solutions:

Fill in the Gaps Within Your Training Program

2. Take a look at your current training program and try to fill in the gaps. 

How is that playlist coming along?  Do you need to make certain adjustments based upon your goal?

What key performance indicators are you using to determine if what you’re doing is (or isn’t) working? 

Once you know the qualities that you want to address (hypertrophy, strength, power, capacity,etc) you can then begin to break down your program into its constituent parts – ala periodization and effective program design. These markers are your compass, but you still need to drive to get to your destination. 

You could effectively break this down with the following:

Quality: What do you want to improve? 

1.

2.

3.

Key Performance Indicators: How will you measure it?

1.

2.

3.

Limiting Factors: What are your current obstacles? 

1.

2.

3.

Programming: What’s your plan of action?

1. Training Days Per Week

2. Exercise Selection

3. Volume/Intensity/Frequency

Timeline: how much time do you have to reach your first objective?

• Beginning Date
• End Date
• Check-In Points

Perform a Lifestyle Assessment

3. Now perform the same examination with your lifestyle – including sleep, nutrition, and anything else that goes into what makes you, well, human. While getting into the specifics of nutrition and sleep are beyond the scope of this article, taking the time to reflect on your current behaviors and finding the lowest hanging fruit to get the biggest bang for your buck will allow you to make progress without worrying about being ‘perfect’. 

The Lifestyle Self Assessment: 

Give yourself a subjective score of 0-5, with 0 being awful and 5 being you’re on top of your game. It might make sense to even keep a journal for a few weeks to see where these are all trending.

• Energy: how are your energy levels throughout the day?
• Mood: how is your general mood each day?
• Mindfulness: how is your focus each day? Do you take time for yourself? 
• Purpose: are you working towards your greater purpose each day?
• Relationships/Social Engagement: how are the relationships in your life?
• Hobbies: how often are you engaging in hobbies outside of training?
• NEAT/Movement: do you move enough each day outside of the time you’re at the gym?
• Nutrition: do you eat according to your health, performance, and body comp goals?
• Sleep: how is your sleep quantity and quality on a daily basis? 
• Stress: how is your perception of everything that is going on in your life? 

 Now take the 1 to 3 things from the above that you would like to improve FIRST (don’t try to change everything at once) and break it down just like you did with your training.

Quality: What do you want to improve? 

1.

2.

3.

Key Performance Indicators: How will you measure it?

1.

2.

3. 

Limiting Factors: What are your current obstacles?

1.

2.

3.

“Programming”: What’s your plan of action? 

1.

2.

3.

Timeline: How long will you have to make these changes? *I realize an odd thing to do with lifestyle changes, but you might make it goal to meditate for 5 minutes a day for 60 days, as an example.

• Beginning Date
• End Date
• Check-In Points

From Planning to Executing

Now that you’ve formulated a game plan, it’s your job to execute. Much like the process of making adaptations in fitness take time, so will making these changes to your lifestyle. Start small, observe trends, and make adjustments as needed. 

The goal with this exercise is not to aim for perfection on all of these things across the board, but to learn to look at your training and lifestyle objectively so that you can create a plan of action to control what you can and learn to cope with what you can’t. 

Perform Great, Live Better

While training is the management of the amount of stress that you impart on your meat suit over a duration of time, it unfortunately does not exist in a vacuum. Everything impacts everything and you are a system of systems. If we can alter our perception of our external environment, manage our inputs, and learn to go with the flow, we will not only reach performance heights that we were previously incapable of, but build a life that is more than just mashing numbers in the weight room. 

About the Author  

Trevor Corrado

CPT

Trevor Corrado is a personal trainer based out of Northern New Jersey. Trevor uses a variety of approaches to help clients get stronger and move better. He previously competed in powerlifting for 4 years and still actively coaches others in competition. Trevor has over 4 years of coaching experience and has spent time learning from some of the best in the industry. He offers individualized programming and can be found on Instagram @corrado_strength.