Your workouts should be challenging -- pushing your body is the only way to see progress. There is, however, such a thing as pushing too far. A good training program should have rest periods scheduled just like workouts are scheduled, or you risk overtraining. Overtraining can derail your fitness plans, leaving you fatigued, depressed and fatter, with stagnant progress.
Reduced Strength and Endurance
When you push yourself too hard for too long, you eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. Training stresses your body, and without adequate time to recover, your energy gets directed to healing and restoring tissues rather than powering your workout. You may find that you are no longer able to beat last week's best time or heaviest weight, which means you won't get as much from your workout. This translates into fewer calories burned and less lean muscle mass built, which frequently translates into weight gain.
Mental Fog
Overtraining wears you out mentally as well as physically. Your sleep cycle suffers, and you feel fatigued with much less activity than usual. You may suffer from a general malaise that leaves you unmotivated to work out, or may even slip into depression. It's your body's way of forcing you to slow down to give it time to heal, but the short-term effect can be weight gain. Skipping workouts or being too tired to put in the necessary effort all detract from training, and your progress may begin to reverse if it goes on long enough.
Cortisol Increase
Physical stress is just as harmful to your body as mental or emotional stress, and overtraining certainly qualifies. When you push your body too hard, your body produces more cortisol, a steroid hormone. Under normal circumstances, cortisol regulates your energy levels and directs your body to take fuel from different nutrients as needed. When stress kicks in, cortisol can rise to levels that stimulate cravings for fatty or sugary foods and influence other appetite-influencing hormones, which works against any fitness plan. Additionally, cortisol can cause circulating fat or other fat stores to move around and become deposited in the abdomen, contributing to obesity. Muscle degradation can occur, which means that your body will burn fewer calories, which can also induce weight gain.
Pain
Overtraining leaves you at a greater risk of injury. It's partly because you are not as focused, and can easily make a careless mistake -- but the majority of the risk comes from weak, tired muscles and slowed reflexes that are unable to react in time to respond to a potential danger. Instead of compensating or sending you minor pain signals that damage is about to occur, the muscles respond inadequately and the damage occurs. Pain from injuries can keep you away from your workout from days to weeks depending upon the severity, and some can even keep you temporarily immobilized. Inactivity leads to loss of muscle tone and reduced calorie expenditure, which leads to weight gain.
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