As an athlete, your drive to succeed pushes your limits mentally and physically. That same drive that causes you to challenge yourself can also lead you to take it over the edge. Overtraining hurts your performance more than it helps. Overtrained athletes risk injury, illness and burnout.
Recovery
As an athlete, for your muscles to repair and rebuild stronger, you need to allow adequate recovery time between your workouts. For strength training, you should allow 48 hours of recovery between working the same muscle groups. If you are a triathlete, your training might include swimming, biking and running in the same day. Tune into your body and listen for signs of fatigue. Your muscles need time to repair the microtears and replenish glycogen stores after your workouts. Allow plenty of time between endurance activities. If you have a long run in the morning aim for shorter biking or swimming training sessions as your second workout of the day.
Sleep
Adequate sleep helps you avoid overtraining. When you are sleeping, your body is rebuilding your glycogen stores. Lack of sleep interferes with effective glycogen storage. Sleep also lets your body completely relax, which alleviates psychological stress. Sleep deprivation leaves you feeling drowsy and unable to effectively execute your workouts.
Training Volume and Intensity
Increasing your training too much too fast puts you at risk for overtraining. Regardless of your activity, you never want to go from sedentary to super active in a short period of time. The Principle of Adaptation explains that your body gets used to performing the same activity at the same rate and will plateau as it adapts to the stress levels. Make incremental changes. Do not simultaneously increase intensity and duration. Instead increase the length of time that you exercise and then focus on turning up the intensity.
Signs and Symptoms
Pay attention for signs of overtraining in your mood, your physical performance and your muscle soreness. Inadequate recovery causes you to become agitated and irritable. You also have trouble sleeping and have a higher than normal rate of perceived exertion during workouts. Physically, your muscles and joints may ache continuously. You may have a weakened immune system if you are getting sick more often. An abnormally high resting heart rate is another sign that you are training too much. Make a habit of checking your heart rate as soon as you wake up. If you notice that your heart rate is getting higher rather than lower as your training progresses, you may want to take additional rest.
References
- American Council on Exercise: Top 10 Signs You're Overtraining
- "Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise"; Monitoring Training In Athletes With Reference to Overtraining Syndrome; Carl Foster; July 1998
- American Council on Exercise: Too Much of a Good Thing
- "Sleep Medicine Reviews"; Metabolic Consequences of Sleep Deprivation; Kristen Knutson, et al.; June 2007
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