03/23/2026
Everyone has a stress tolerance or “stress cup.”🫗 A full stress cup is the maximum amount of stress that you can take, and this will vary for everyone. Paying attention and respecting the limits of the stress cup is where you’ll find progress. Let’s break down what this looks like, and how to increase your stress tolerance.📈
Say you wake up feeling refreshed, and you decide to go for a strength training workout. As amazing as strength training workouts are, these still count as stress getting added your stress cup. After your workout, you decide to go home, shower and eat a solid breakfast — refueling your body🍴. This will take some stress out of your stress cup because you need to fuel yourself. When we are skip meals or not putting fuel in our bodies, we automatically put stress on the body and add more to our stress cup. This means that if you’re in a phase of trying to lose fat or adding muscle without adding any fat, you are already under more stress than you would otherwise be, increasing how much is in your stress cup at any given time.🚰 This will make your cup pretty full from the start of your day, meaning we must be much more careful with what we put you through and how much stress we are adding to your already almost full stress cup.
If your stress cup is already pretty full, and we add three strength training workouts to your week, your stress cup will likely overfill and begin to spill out. This will have you struggling with the process, dealing with shame cycles, and feeling unsuccessful.😖 This is not where you want to be.
Instead, if we recognize that you are starting with a full stress cup, maybe we’d plan for you to do only one strength training workout that week, and add a couple days of walks for some intentional movement that isn’t driving your stress levels way up. Doing this will help increase your recoverability day by day, week by week, so that each day you are starting with more energy and increasing your overall tolerance for stress.🪫⚡
When our lives are full of exceedingly demanding stresses from many sources, 24 hours a day, it’s important that you can recover from the stresses you are putting yourself through. Make sure you are staying aware of where your stress levels are at, and not overfilling your cup. Stay dry!💧✨