Overtraining

It’s no secret for athletes, that in order to perform at your best, you need to work hard.  Equally important as all your hard work, is your recovery.  Your body relies on recovery periods to rebuild the muscles used during your workouts. 

Overtraining occurs when adequate recovery time is not given, preventing regeneration of the muscles to occur. In other words, muscles are not able to repair and recover sufficiently between hard workouts. If this imbalance continues and is not altered, the result is a decline in performance. ‘Overtraining syndrome’ is a term used to describe the symptoms of overtraining that have been present for several weeks to several months.

The most common and noticeable symptom is fatigue.  Tiredness after a workout is normal, but fatigue, as it pertains to overtraining, will last beyond the allotted recovery time.  The over-trained athlete may lose their competitive drive and desire for the sport.  Constant aches and pains, insomnia, drops in performance, depression and irritability, and increased number of injuries are also common symptoms.  On the other side of lack of interest for the sport, some over-trained athletes may experience a compulsive need for exercise.  Seeing their performance drop can be disheartening, so some feel they need to exercise even more to compensate for it.  This is a dangerous symptom as this will only exasperate the overtraining and serve to weaken the athlete even more. 

If you’re experiencing any of the above symptoms, it’s possible you are overtraining.  Pay attention to your routine.  Your muscles generally need about 24 hours between intense strength workouts.  Are you allowing for that?  (This does not mean you can’t exercise every day, just that if you did a killer chest workout on Monday, you shouldn’t do one again on Tuesday).  Make note of your levels of fatigue and your performance.  A training log will help you notice trends in your workouts, how you feel, and if there’s any drop in performance. Be as detailed as possible when entering information into your workout log.  Include time of workout, intensity of the workout, what you did, what you ate before and after (and during if it’s a long endurance workout), your levels of sleep, mood etc. 

Another way to tell if you may be overtraining is to track your resting heart rate. Take your resting heart rate each day at the same time, preferably when your first wake in the morning.  Any significant increase (higher by more than just a few beats per minute) could mean you are not fully recovered.

Many athletes have experienced overtraining at one point or another.  In trying to achieve that balance between exercise and recovery, we sometimes push it too far.  The important thing is that we learn from the limits of our body, and take steps to alter our exercise programs to stay within those limits. If you are currently overtraining, the best thing you can do is rest and recover.  Easier said than done, I know, especially for those who, like me, love their sport. Understand that this rest and recovery is going to ultimately bring your performance back up and keep you injury-free.  Be sure to stay hydrated and maybe get a sports massage.  This will help loosen up sore, aching, overworked muscles as well as relax the mind.  Cross training is another possible way to help treat overtraining.  It will prevent you from continuing to overwork certain muscles by using them in a different (and most often non impact) way. 

It’s hard to assess when one is overtraining (and therefore it’s hard to prevent) because everyone responds differently to exercise and everyone can handle difference volumes of it.  Every athlete pushes their body and tries to find that limit of how much they can handle without going too far.  The best advice I can give is to listen to your body, schedule recovery periods into your program and vary your workout.