The Window of Tolerance: What Every Coach Should Understand About Regulation and Skill Breakdown
You’re teaching a technical movement. One athlete gets agitated. Another starts rushing. Someone else seems to space out or gives up halfway through. You re-cue. Slow it down. Offer support.
But nothing sticks.
It’s easy to assume they need more discipline, more focus, or better movement prep.
But sometimes what you’re seeing is this: the nervous system has exceeded its capacity to process and learn.
This article introduces the Window of Tolerance, a psychological and physiological model for understanding how people stay regulated under stress and how that affects attention, learning, and movement quality. It also explains what happens when athletes move outside that window, especially during new or high-demand skill work.
What Is the Window of Tolerance?
The Window of Tolerance (Siegel, 1999) describes the zone of arousal in which a person can stay physically regulated, emotionally present, and cognitively flexible.
Inside this window, an athlete can:
Stay calm enough to absorb information
Maintain control of movement and breathing
Adjust based on feedback or mistakes
Stay connected to the task even under fatigue or social pressure
Outside the window, stress and stimulation exceed the nervous system’s capacity. The athlete drops into either:
Hyperarousal (fight/flight)
Frustration, emotional outbursts, rushing
Tension, clumsiness, unsafe technique
Verbal shutdown (“I can’t,” “This is stupid”)
Hypoarousal (freeze/collapse)
Zoning out, disconnection
Slowed reactions, blank stares
“Giving up” or emotional shutdown
🧠 In both states, executive functioning is compromised. This includes working memory, attention control, and movement coordination, all essential for skill learning. Recent studies on autonomic flexibility (Thayer et al., 2012) show that athletes with better vagal tone (the nervous system’s ability to return to baseline) learn faster, adapt better, and recover more quickly after stress.
How Stress Impacts Learning in CrossFit
When athletes are asked to learn new motor patterns, perform under time pressure, receive multiple cues at once, train through fear, etc., the brain must process, store, and integrate new input under stress.
This relies on a balance between two systems:
The limbic system (emotional/survival response)
The prefrontal cortex (planning, reflection, motor coordination)
🧠 When arousal is too high, the limbic system overrides the prefrontal cortex. The athlete isn’t learning - they’re reacting. Functional neuroimaging (Arnsten, 2009) shows that even brief stress shuts down prefrontal access. Athletes may feel “stupid” when this happens, but it’s neurological, not personal.
Introducing the CNS Threshold
The central nervous system (CNS) processes sensory input, coordinates movement, and handles motor learning. It also filters stimulation: noise, pressure, pain, time cues, attention demands.
When CNS stress accumulates, athletes become:
Disorganised in their movement
Less responsive to cues
More emotionally volatile or withdrawn
Prone to performance drops despite physical readiness
This is especially true for:
Beginners learning multiple new skills
Neurodivergent athletes (e.g. ADHD, sensory sensitivity)
Athletes under high emotional or cognitive load (grief, fatigue, work stress, competition)
Evidence from predictive processing frameworks (Clark, 2013) suggests the brain is constantly predicting what’s coming next. When overwhelmed, it stops updating accurately - explaining why under CNS load, athletes struggle to perform skills they’ve previously mastered.
You’re not just coaching muscle and motor patterns. You’re coaching nervous system bandwidth.
Signs Your Athlete Is Outside Their Window
Cognitive signs:
Can’t repeat instructions
Misunderstands cue even after repetition
Disorganised between reps
Asking repetitive or unrelated questions
Emotional signs:
Irritability, over-apologising, withdrawing
Freezing, emotional shutdown, outbursts
Self-criticism (“I’m useless,” “I suck at this”)
Physiological signs:
Breath holding or fast shallow breathing
Sudden fatigue
Stiffness or erratic movements
Once you see these signs, stop cueing technique. You're no longer in a coaching moment, you're in a regulation moment.
5 Ways to Help Athletes Stay Inside Their Window
1. Regulate Before You Instruct
Athletes can’t absorb movement cues while dysregulated.
🧠 Coach move:
Pause. Reduce volume. Slow your pace. Encourage a quick reset (e.g., two full nasal breaths).
🧘 Studies in interoceptive training (Mehling et al., 2012) show that breath-focused resets improve not just emotional states, but actual proprioceptive accuracy, which enhances learning.
2. Titrate Skill Complexity
Titration means introducing new demands gradually, based on the athlete’s current state.
🧠 Coach move:
Break movements into 2–3 step progressions
Only add next steps once the previous is fluent and stable under mild pressure
Reduce novelty when the nervous system is under strain (e.g. after tough day, poor sleep, or emotional stress)
3. Protect Cognitive Bandwidth
The brain can only track so many inputs under load. Skill learning competes with:
Noise
Internal pressure
Pain/discomfort
Social stress
Time pressure
🧠 Coach move:
Give one cue at a time
Use consistent language (“head through,” “chest tall”)
Create quiet times or 1:1 moments when possible
This preserves attentional resources for actual learning.
4. Build in Downshifts
The nervous system benefits from active recovery - not just physically, but neurologically.
🧠 Coach move:
After skill blocks or EMOMs, include:
60–90 seconds of eyes-closed nasal breathing
Light aerobic pacing
Walk breaks, mobility reset, or silence
Research from Stanford (Huberman et al., 2021) supports physiological sighs (double inhale + long exhale) as a highly effective tool for fast nervous system recovery.
5. Shift the Narrative
Athletes may interpret their dysregulation as failure. Shame narrows the window even more.
🧠 Coach language:
Instead of: “Why can’t you get this today?”
Try: “Let’s reset your system and come back when it’s ready, this isn’t about effort, it’s about capacity.”
Normalize self-awareness as a strength.
Final Thought: Nervous System First, Skill Second
Movement quality doesn’t only depend on strength or willpower.
It depends on whether the brain is available to learn.
As a coach, your job isn’t just to deliver programming. It’s to track thresholds and know when to push, when to pause, and when to help the athlete come back online.
Because the truth is: you can’t cue a body that’s no longer listening.
But if you protect the window, learning becomes possible again.
References
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.
Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181–204.
Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666.
Huberman, A. D., et al. (2021). Effects of brief autonomic interventions on arousal and performance. Cell Reports Medicine, 2(4), 100319.
Mehling, W. E., et al. (2012). The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA). PLOS ONE, 7(11), e48230.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. Norton.
Siegel, D. J. (1999). The Developing Mind. Guilford Press.
Thayer, J. F., et al. (2012). A meta-analysis of heart rate variability and neuroimaging studies. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 36(2), 747–756.