Stress (© diego cervo - Fotolia.com)

Ideally, we'd all live next to some amazing roads and mountain bike trails, with warm weather and great food. Oh, and we wouldn’t have to go to work each day.

Unfortunately, our lives aren’t like this. We lead complicated existences full of daily hassles. This places physical and psychological stress on us, which can have a significant impact on training and performance.

The problem

There are two types of stress: physical and psychological. The physical is what we target in training. By doing so, we hope that our body reacts by making us fitter and faster.

Outside training, our lives have other sources of stress that need to be absorbed, but this takes energy and uses up our vital resources. The greater the stress we experience outside our training, the less energy we have left to cope with training, so it’s important to remove as much stress as possible in our daily lives.

The causes

Physical stress in our day comes from sitting at a desk for a long time, standing on our feet all day, doing a physically demanding job or doing DIY projects that our body isn’t used to.

Psychological stress comes from commuting or business travel, deadlines and targets, or when we have difficult relationships with colleagues and people at home that play on our mind.

This background can then make it difficult to sleep, so we struggle to fully recover from training. It can be difficult to get hold of the right foods during the day, or we make unhealthy choices and perhaps wash it all down with a little more alcohol than we should. All of this makes dealing with life’s physical and psychological stress more challenging.

The result is that we have less energy, vigour, motivation and capacity to train and race. If we were a car, this would be like starting our sessions with a half-empty fuel tank. This makes improvements from training slow, riding hard work and race results poor.

How to reduce stress

Try these exercises for off-loading the pressures of the day:

1 Create a transition from your source of stress: If it’s work that’s causing you stress, introduce a stress-busting routine for when you leave work. Just before you leave make a note of what you want to tackle tomorrow, so you don’t have to bear it in mind all night. Then, as you switch off your computer, grab your bag or close the door, say to yourself: “I’m leaving all this behind until tomorrow”, “I’m going to think about what I want this evening”. This gives you permission to leave work stuff at work. The same principle works  for leaving home stress at home.

2 De-stress your thinking: Become aware of when you use pressure-inducing thoughts such as “I must…”, “I need to…”, “I have to…”, “I should…”. These only increase the pressure and stress you experience. Instead, when they appear, question whether you REALLY must, have to, need to or should do these things. If not, tone down the statement that goes through your mind. Or, if you DO  have to, need to etc. then say to yourself  instead: “I will…”, “I want to…” and remind yourself that it will be fine and doable, with  no need to worry about it.

For more on beating stress, see our articles Cycle away from stress and Stress beating eating.

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