Taking things slow and steady with your fitness isn’t shirking – it’s smart. You’re not just building muscles or endurance – you’re designing a sustainable rhythm that cultivates resilience  to combat stress in the longer term.

When you sprint toward results, stress spikes: cortisol surges, expectations skyrocket, and burnout’s just around the corner.

That steady pace rewires how you handle stress. You’re not becoming a reactive stress-machine – you’re learning to respond, to regulate. Aim to make each small step a victory. It’s not about creating the ideal body in record time, it’s about an attitude that says: “I can do this; let’s keep going.” You’ll gradually build greater confidence over months and years, not days.

Mindfulness, too, plays its part in building resilience to stress. When you’re not sprinting, you notice how your breath deepens during each movement, how your heartbeat slows, how your posture shifts. That moment-by-moment awareness. is the bridge between physical effort and emotional calm (I talk more about this in my post  The Power of the small).

Over time, your body will become fitter, and you’ll be psychologically more attuned. Those tiny changes, repeated, remodel your baseline stress levels. You sleep better. You thinking will become clearer and more focused. Many people also report that they feel calmer emotionally.

This great progress will enable you to spot the warning signs earlier in the stress cycle; taking early action means that stress is easier to deal with and you’ll be less likely to be caught unprepared.

So yes, slow is powerful when it comes to building resilience to stress. It embodies respect for the process, not obsession with the outcome. Build the habit, tend to the small wins, and your resilience will compound. Months from now, your calmer mind and stronger body will pay you dividends you’d never see from a frantic dash.

Embrace the pace. You’ve got this.

Photo: Pexels/Leeloothefirst