In strength and conditioning circles, you’ll often hear a familiar phrase:
“Stress is stress.”
It reminds us that all forms of stress, including mental, emotional, mechanical, and metabolic, affect the body and recovery.
And while that’s directionally true, it’s also not entirely accurate.
Because not all stress is created equal.
Not All Stress is Created Equal
Not all stress has the same effects on performance, fatigue, or injury risk.
Saying “stress is stress” glosses over important distinctions in how the body perceives, processes, and recovers from different types of stress.
A few of the key differences:
- Physiological vs. Biomechanical Stress
- A tough training session (mechanical load) and a bad night’s sleep (systemic recovery) both impact the body, but not in the same way.
- One may compromise tissue recovery or performance output directly (e.g., eccentric muscle damage), while the other interferes with hormonal regulation, coordination, or reaction time.
- Central vs. Peripheral Fatigue
- Staying up late reviewing film or scrolling social media creates central fatigue (affecting neural drive).
- High-rep back squats cause peripheral fatigue (localized muscular fatigue).
- Each type of fatigue affects performance differently, so recovery and training strategies need to be tailored accordingly.
- Physical vs. Mental Stress
- Physical stress comes from things like lifting weights, running sprints, or recovering from a hard game.
- Mental stress, on the other hand, is more subtle and includes anxiety about performance, academic pressure, life changes, contract years, or even toxic team dynamics.
- Physical can be measured through load, volume, HRV, RPE, etc., whereas mental stress is hard to measure, but you can definitely feel it in how an athlete moves, communicates, and recovers.
Allostatic Load is Real, But Nuanced
Yes, the brain and body integrate all forms of stress over time.
However, the effect of each type on tissue tolerance, movement quality, performance and injury risk varies.
While simplifying complexity can help us in the field, oversimplification can make us overlook important details.
Performing sprint repeats is not the same as getting only 4 hours of sleep, and high-volume eccentric contractions for the hamstrings are much different from the stress of not playing.
And this is not just theoretical; what we would do to recover from these stressors would also be different.
Coach's Takeaway
Let's stop using “stress is stress” as a blanket statement.
Start identifying the source and type of stress to understand the athlete's needs better.
This allows you to make better training decisions, such as adjusting volume, swapping modalities, or integrating recovery strategies that target the type of stress your athletes are under.
