One Gym Session Calms Anxiety Regardless of How You Lift, Study Finds

For millions of young adults living with persistent, low-grade worry, a prescription for the weight room may sound too simple to be true. Yet a new randomized crossover trial published in Trends in Psychology reports that a single session of resistance training meaningfully reduced state anxiety and overall mood disturbance in young adults with subclinical generalized anxiety disorder, and that the benefit emerged regardless of how the workout was configured. The finding challenges a long-standing assumption in exercise psychology that only moderate-intensity lifting calms the anxious brain, and it points to the emotional experience of the workout itself as a powerful lever in mental health.

The research team, based at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, recruited eleven healthy young adults with an average age of 29, all of whom had been training with weights for at least a year and screened positive for subclinical generalized anxiety disorder using validated questionnaires. To qualify, participants needed scores of at least 6 on the generalized anxiety subscale of the Psychiatric Diagnostic Screening Questionnaire and 45 or above on the Penn State Worry Questionnaire, thresholds previously validated for identifying heightened, clinically relevant worry that falls short of a formal diagnosis.

The experimental design was a rigorous randomized crossover: each participant completed both resistance training protocols on separate laboratory visits separated by at least 72 hours, with order determined by balanced randomization. The two sessions were engineered to match volume load and relative intensity while differing sharply in structure. The first protocol, 3 x 10 with 60-second rest intervals, involved three sets of ten repetitions at 85 percent of the participant’s ten-repetition maximum, performed on leg press and leg extension machines. The second, 8 x 3 with 120-second rest intervals, spread eight sets of three repetitions at 85 percent of the three-repetition maximum across the same exercises. Both protocols sat firmly in the high-intensity zone, but the shorter-rest configuration imposes far greater cardiometabolic strain, driving up heart rate, blood lactate, and the acute sensations of distress that exercise psychologists call interoceptive signals.

Anxiety, measured with the State subscale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, dropped significantly 30 minutes after both sessions. After the traditional 3 x 10 protocol, state anxiety fell from a baseline of 44.1 to 40.3 points, a large effect size of 1.1. After the cluster-style 8 x 3 protocol, it fell from 44.8 to 41.9, a moderate effect of 0.65. Crucially, the difference between protocols was not statistically significant, meaning that the anxiolytic effect did not depend on which configuration the participants performed. Total mood disturbance, a composite score from the Profile of Mood States that weighs tension, depression, anger, fatigue, and confusion against vigor, declined after both sessions as well, with effect sizes exceeding 1.3 in each case.

Beneath those headline results, the two workouts told very different emotional stories. Only the traditional high-repetition protocol significantly reduced anger, while only the cluster protocol cut fatigue and boosted vigor. More telling were the measures taken during exercise itself. Using the Feeling Scale, an 11-point scale from very bad to very good, the researchers tracked affective valence set by set. The 3 x 10 session pushed participants steadily into the high-activation displeasure quadrant of the circumplex model of affect, the emotional territory of tension and distress, and produced significantly lower post-exercise pleasure than the cluster session. The 8 x 3 session, by contrast, shifted participants toward high-activation pleasure, the quadrant associated with energy and vigor.

The perceptual side of the story was equally lopsided. Participants rated their exertion significantly higher after the 3 x 10 protocol, 9.6 versus 8.1 on a repetitions-in-reserve-based scale, and enjoyed it significantly less, scoring 42.3 versus 46.1 on the eight-item Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale. In other words, the two sessions moved roughly the same amount of iron but felt like entirely different experiences, one punishing and unpleasant, the other demanding yet enjoyable and energizing.

Those differences mattered for the psychological outcomes. In the traditional protocol, the magnitude of improvement in total mood disturbance correlated strongly with exercise enjoyment (r = 0.872) and negatively with post-exercise affective valence (r = -0.809), while changes in state anxiety tracked changes in affective valence (r = 0.547). In the cluster session, enjoyment correlated strongly with reductions in anger (r = 0.921), confusion (r = 0.823), and total mood disturbance (r = 0.821). These associations, though drawn from a small sample and not proof of causation, support the theoretical framework the authors set out to test: contemporary dual-mode theory holds that how exercise feels, the dynamic interplay between cognitive appraisal and bodily signals such as muscular burn and cardiovascular strain, shapes emotional outcomes, and hedonic theory predicts that people return to activities that feel good and avoid those that do not.

The findings complicate decades of dose-response research. Earlier studies, including work by O’Connor and colleagues in 1993 and Bartholomew and Linder in 1998, suggested a Goldilocks zone: moderate-intensity lifting reduced anxiety while low and high intensities did not, and one 2005 study found that lifting at 100 percent of the ten-repetition maximum actually increased anxiety. The new results show that high-intensity resistance exercise at 85 percent of maximal load, in two different configurations, reliably lowers anxiety in an anxious population when volume load is comparable. The authors suggest one intriguing explanation: exposure to controlled, manageable physiological stress may itself train emotion regulation, enhancing perceived control and cognitive reappraisal, effects that may be especially pronounced in people with elevated baseline anxiety.

Why did the more grueling session still calm the participants even while feeling worse? The researchers argue that anxiolysis and affective experience are partly separable pathways. The acute reduction in state anxiety may follow from physiological and psychological stress-processing mechanisms common to both protocols, while the subjective experience, pleasure, effort, and enjoyment, shapes which dimensions of mood improve and whether people will come back for more. That distinction has practical weight: if a workout leaves an anxious person feeling drained and miserable, adherence will likely suffer, and the long-term benefits of training will never materialize. The cluster configuration, with its long rests and brief sets, offered the same anxiety relief with less fatigue, more vigor, and greater enjoyment, making it the more attractive prescription for people who dread the gym.

The authors are candid about the study’s limits. The sample was small, only six participants completed the full mood-state analyses, and the study relied on self-report measures vulnerable to response bias. Only three women participated, precluding any analysis of sex differences, and the absence of a non-exercise control condition means expectancy effects or natural mood fluctuations cannot be fully ruled out, though the crossover design controls for many individual factors. Still, the moderate-to-large effect sizes observed suggest real clinical relevance, and the researchers call for larger trials with control conditions and long-term follow-up to test whether the perceptual and affective mechanisms identified here mediate the chronic mental health benefits of resistance training.

Even with those caveats, the study lands at a moment when the mental health case for strength training is accelerating. Meta-analyses have already established that resistance exercise training reduces anxiety symptoms in randomized controlled trials, and the mechanisms proposed for its effects span endorphin release, cortisol regulation, monoaminergic modulation, and improved sleep. What this new work adds is a sharper picture of the psychology inside the workout: anxiety relief appears robust across training configurations, but the feeling of the session, effort, pleasure, and enjoyment, is not a luxury. It may be the very pathway through which lifting weights rewires an anxious mind, and the detail most likely to determine whether an anxious young adult ever picks up a barbell twice.

Subject of Research: Acute effects of different resistance training configurations on anxiety and mood in young adults with subclinical generalized anxiety disorder

Article Title: Resistance Training Performed in Different Configurations Reduces Anxiety and Improves Mood States in Young Adults with Subclinical Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Article References: de Oliveira, L. C., Gobbo, H. R., Barbosa, G. M., Semmer, L. V., & de Oliveira, G. V. (2026). Resistance Training Performed in Different Configurations Reduces Anxiety and Improves Mood States in Young Adults with Subclinical Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00523-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00523-w

Keywords: resistance training, anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, mood states, affective valence, exercise psychology, state anxiety, perceived exertion, exercise enjoyment, mental health, randomized crossover trial, strength training