How cortisol impacts muscle growth and stops you from progressing

As someone who has been through a lot of trauma, stressful situations and still working on myself to find a more peaceful lifestyle, I can tell you that being stressed becomes part of you. Chronic stress isn’t something you can feel or put an emotion on, but you’ll notice in other ways especially as a bodybuilder.

I spoke about stress and cortisol and how it affects your body in this blog post, but what about muscle growth?

Cortisol is a catabolic hormone, meaning it makes glucose, fatty acids and amino acids available in the blood stream. You’re probably thinking, well isn’t that what we need when building muscle? You’re completely right, the problem is muscles normally rely on their internal glycogen for bursts of energy, but in the presence of cortisol, muscle cells decrease glucose uptake and consumption and increase protein degradation.

You see, when you need to run from a tiger you need a quick boost of energy in the form of glucose. At a rested state the body converts the food we eat during the day for energy, or stored fat. This process isn’t efficient enough for when we need to run, so that’s why we release the hormone cortisol at times of danger.

Seems pretty smart ey, but it’s not. Your body can be a bit oversensitive, thinking it’s a threat when you get a phone call from your boss. Cortisol can also be released under prolonged periods, like if you work in health care and have patients lined up. Dealing with mental abuse and living in a constant state of fear is also known to release cortisol.

The problem is we’re not built for prolonged periods of stress and your muscles will suffer.

Chronic stress will lead to elevated levels of cortisol, can be as high as 9 times higher than normal. This leads to:

→ Muscle weakness: You won’t be able to reach enough volume to reach hypertrophy
→ Muscle tention: That can lead to injuries such as pinched nerves
→ Inflammation and weak immune system: Your muscles will be inflamed and sore for longer, you’ll get sick more often. Thus you won’t be able to keep intensity and volume up and you’ll need more time to recover.
→ Not enough sleep and recovery: Muscles repair during sleep, so if you don’t get enough you’ll just end up breaking down everything you’ve been trying to build up.

If there’s higher levels of catabolic hormones than there is anabolic, your body will lose muscle mass.

Constant levels of high cortisol is exhausting for the body and will eventually lead to drained cortisol levels. This leads to
brain fog, depressiveness, lightheadedness, food cravings, low energy and much more. For muscle growth it means:

→ Again, muscle weakness
→ Not enough access to amino acids, glycogen and fatty acids: Like I mentioned, cortisol makes these available in the blood stream and if there’s lack of availability. It’s not a problem if you eat enough and around the right time, but most people don’t. If you eat a sandwich in the morning, most of those carbs will be stored away for later if you don’t have a very active job and will workout in the afternoon. If you don’t have the cortisol to unlock, means it will stay there and you will not get enough energy for your workout.
→ Your muscles will suffer because you will break them down at the gym, then go home and eat some food usually not enough and then go to sleep where most of the muscle building happens. Now, if you don’t fuel up enough with carbs and protein before bed time that means that there’s not enough to rebuild from. You body can’t even use what’s available, because your metabolism is out of balance.

So, stop thinking gym is therapy. You’re just making things worse.

So back to how this affects a bodybuilder. I’ve trained for many years and also been chronically stressed and suffered depression, low energy, dizziness and cravings aka stress eating and these have been at it’s worse lately while I’ve had months of stressful situations lined up. I’ve been hitting my protein as far as I know, and I’ve been eating well most of the time and definitely kept the workout volume up especially lately.

So yes, stress affects your muscle growth. I tried to use gym as therapy, just ended up with me getting injured and even more stressed about not being able to train. I’m finally seeing and feeling the changes after I’ve adapted my nutrition and training around my stress to manage the stress and reduce cortisol.

Source one, source 2