Aerobic scope (AS), the difference between maximum (MMR) and resting metabolic rates (RMR) of oxygen consumption, is increasingly recognized as a valuable ecologically-relevant measure of organismal performance. However, measuring AS can be difficult because it requires eliciting MMR. In terrestrial vertebrates, MMR is typically measured via respirometry after either running animals to exhaustion or training them to walk on treadmills. The exhaustion and treadmill methods can be prohibitive in study scope, time, and money. We tested a novel method for eliciting MMR by perturbing lizards within flow respirometry chambers using a commercially-available, remote-controlled robot. We compared RMR, MMR, respiratory quotient (RQ), and recovery patterns for lizards treated with both the exhaustion and novel robot perturbation methods. RMR did not differ between methods, while MMR was greater when elicited via robot perturbation, which suggests robot perturbation is superior to the exhaustion method for measuring AS. Although recovery time did not differ between methods, post-recovery metabolic rate was greater than RMR when MMR was elicited via robot perturbation, and was less than RMR when MMR was elicited via exhaustion. The different post-recovery metabolic states we observed suggest that the stimulus used to elicit MMR has differing effects on long-term organismal energetics, possibly because of the physiological stress state elicited by both methods. This is in line with a growing body of literature proposing that physiological responses to stressors are context dependent rather than fixed, highly-repeatable responses.