Overtraining occurs when you exercise so much your body can't recuperate, causing your performance to dip. Undertraining involves performing below your potential in workouts. The first is a syndrome that can affect serious athletes, while the second might sound all too familiar to anyone who owns a little-used gym membership card. That said, undertraining poses no health risks, while overtraining can lead to illness and injury.
Overtraining
Training is about getting your body to adapt positively to physical stress. When the balance is right, the build up of new, strong tissues outweighs the breakdown of existing tissues caused by the workout. However, when you overtrain, you break down more tissues than you build up. This can happen because you're exercising too intensely or for too long, and you're not allowing enough time for your body to recuperate between workouts. Other contributing factors can be a lack of sleep and poor hydration and nutrition, particularly a failure to load up on carbs after a session in the gym.
Symptoms and Management
Symptoms of overtraining include a loss of endurance and competitive flair, a suppression of the immune system, giving rise to colds, and a tendency towards niggling injuries. If you think you might have overtrained, stay away from the gym for a few days, catch up on your sleep, drink fluids and eat some solid, balanced meals. Depending on the severity of the syndrome, it may take a week or longer to get back to your old dynamic self.
Undertraining
When you undertrain, your body is in its comfort zone and doesn't have to make any positive adaptation to handle what you throw at it. There is little or no buildup of new muscle mass. Undertraining can happen because you don't make it to the gym as often as you'd like, or because once there, you don't exercise with enough intensity. Maybe you're too fond of gossiping with your neighbors, or you've stuck with the same workout for too long and you need to change it up. If you leave the gym without having worked up a sweat or raised your metabolism, then you're probably undertraining. If that's the case, try to get to the gym more regularly and revise your workout to make it more exacting.
Under or Over
With training, it can be extremely hard to tell whether you're doing too little, enough or too much. For a sportsperson or a competitive athlete, this can be a particularly vexing question. Some experts recommend erring on the side of caution, as in the sporting adage, “It's better to be 10 percent undertrained than 5 percent overtrained.” The reasoning is that, when you are overtrained, you put yourself at risk of injury, illness and depression, while the undertrained individual still has some spare capacity within himself to draw upon. The best advice is to listen to your body.
Member Comments