Bodybuilding: How to reduce anxiety and stress?

Few people can escape stress in our complicated modern lives. Nearly 2 out of 3 French people are stressed, according to a 2023 Ipsos survey. And athletes, for all their discipline and resilience, can’t escape it either. Between intensive training, competitions, the pressure of goals and the constraints of everyday life, stress can be a major brake on training. And bodybuilding is no exception, making it difficult to gain or maintain muscle. Fortunately, there are effective strategies for managing stress and minimizing its effects. This is what we’ll be looking at next.

Chronic stress can be detrimental to muscle gains in bodybuilding because of its effects on the body, hormones and morale. When a person is stressed, the body releases cortisol, a catabolic hormone that breaks down muscle proteins for energy, reducing protein synthesis and muscle gain. High cortisol levels in athletes inevitably lead to reduced strength and muscle mass.

Chronic stress also leads to systemic inflammation, which impairs muscle recovery and promotes the onset of disease. There’s a lot of talk about stress-induced illness, and it’s no myth. Chronic stress degrades the activity of the immune system.

What’s more, stress disrupts sleep, the importance of which for recovery is well known. Among other things, lack of sleep reduces the production of growth hormone (GH) – secreted mainly at night – a hormone essential for tissue regeneration.

Stress can also alter your appetite and disrupt the way you eat and your caloric intake, leading to under-eating – and difficulty gaining muscle – or over-eating – and fat gain.