If you’ve ever hit a plateau in the gym, struggled with stubborn body fat, or felt constantly rundown despite working out consistently, there’s a good chance stress is playing a bigger role than you think!

We often treat training, nutrition, and sleep as the “big 3” pillars of fitness but managing stress deserves just as much attention. Especially if you're balancing work deadlines, family life, and trying to hit the gym consistently.

Here’s how stress can quietly derail your progress:

When you're under chronic stress, your nervous system stays in a sympathetic (fight-or-flight) state. This means elevated cortisol levels, reduced focus, impaired coordination, and slower reaction times all of which can make you lift less, run slower, or need to take way more breaks during metabolic conditioning. You might feel like you’re grinding, but your effort is providing diminishing returns.

Muscle repair, hormonal balance, and deep sleep all rely on your body being in a parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) state. If your stress bucket is full, your body stays inflamed longer, repairs slower, and you wake up feeling like you didn’t even sleep. Poor recovery isn’t always about training volume it’s often about life stress that’s not being offloaded.

Stress affects hunger hormones like ghrelin and leptin. (We talked a lot about these hormones last week if you missed it read here) https://adetofitness.beehiiv.com/p/are-you-making-this-eating-mistake

Stress also increases cravings for calorie dense, high-sugar foods. Combine this with poor sleep and slowed recovery, and your body can start retaining fat, especially around the midsection. It’s not just about calories in and calories out it’s about what state your body is in and how long.

So how do we fight back? You just need go to stress management tactics you can fall back on consistently. Here are a few of my favorites we can start today!

The Problem Tree:
This takes a little imagination but what you do is you take your problems physically go through the motions of lifting them off of your body and hang them up in the tree once you hang them we no longer think about them until we physically pick them up the next morning. I promise there wont be as many there in the morning and they won’t be so heavy either!

10-Min Walks (Daily):
Morning or post-meal — walking is underrated for clearing your head and calming your nervous system.

Plan Downtime Like Workouts:
Schedule recovery with intention. Treat sleep, relaxing hobbies, or even a bath like a training session as a non-negotiable.

Stress is part of life. This is not a binary all or nothing battle there will be times where we do better at managing stress and times where we fall into bad habits. The real key to success is practicing these good habits daily for the times when stress is unavoidable and we must power on with life, but when we learn to manage it, you unlock better performance, faster recovery, and a leaner, stronger you.