Could YOU be overtraining?
The dreaded word; OVERTRAINING that no one likes to hear.
Sometimes it creeps up on us and before we know it, we have an injury, pain or illness as a result.
Early intervention and knowing what signs to look for can greatly increase recovery and reduce risk of injury, if you know what to look for. Rob Kirkby takes us through some common signs of overtraining to watch out for.
Overtraining is a hot topic particularly amongst the adolescent sporting population. Many kids play multiple sports, each of which typically have high weekly demands. The paradigm of training load versus the physiological capability of an individual is an important concept to understand, in order to assess for risk of potential injury. In clinic we see this time and again in people training for a particular goal or those involved in a team sport or multiple sports; commonly, people doing more than their body is able to cope with. Overtraining, defined as training excessively or not recovering from training sufficiently, can affect performance and be a big risk factor for future injury and illness. However, being aware of signs and symptoms of overtraining early can help mitigate risk, preserve performance and keep you or your child active and able to compete in their sport or activity. Being self-aware and looking at how you are feeling after sessions, whether you feel you are recovering post training, if you are performing at your best, and your motivation levels can provide insight into whether or not you could be overtraining.
“No matter how talented you are, you can’t really succeed at the highest level unless you train the best possible way.”
Before we dive in, let’s firstly acknowledge that the following points are on the assumption you’re sleeping eight hours per night, eating enough food to fuel your recovery and sessions and you’re hydrating adequately every day. If you feel you’re not achieving these aspects, you may want to spend time mastering these first before worrying about overtraining. These should be the ultimate mainstays for any aspiring athlete or active individual. So, let’s walk through some common signs you could be experiencing which indicate you could be overtraining…
1. Feeling generally fatigued/sluggish: everyone has a limit of how much activity their entire body systems can recover from. If this limit is beginning to be exceeded by your activity, you can often start to feel extremely fatigued and sluggish either throughout the day, during activity sessions, or both. This can be a sign your entire body is not getting enough of a chance to recover from the entirety of your sporting commitments. The body needs time to rest, digest and recover physiologically from physical activity and if this isn’t happening it can highly increase the chances of becoming injured or unwell.
2. Muscle soreness not recovering before the next activity: global muscle soreness is quite a normal response after an intensive or new activity. However, your body should have the chance to recover from this soreness in order to adapt and become stronger. This doesn’t apply for when you’re sore in your upper body and your training session involves mostly your legs. A good example is feeling moderate soreness in your hamstring muscles and you’re about to go for another run. This suggests your hamstrings need more time rested to be able to recover and adapt.
3. Deep bone pain worse during activity and the mornings after: bones, like muscles, have an ability to withstand a certain amount of load. When your activity load is very high and exceeds your bone capacity, the bones can become quite painful. This can be early signs of a bone stress response which, if continued to be loaded, can develop into a stress fracture. Usually this will be activity dependant and be quite sore the morning after. These are symptoms that need to be respected and should be discussed further with your physiotherapist. To read further about this in respect to adolescent bone stress injury, head over to our previous blog for further information.
4. Constant niggles: Now this is a contentious point because niggles (or soft-tissue irritations) can come from an imbalance between your load capacity of your system and the external load you subject it to (being your activity). The reason this is contentious is because we can skew this balance from high external load but also low load capacity.
For example: long distance runners typically perform high volumes of running that would be considered high external load. However, if they are experienced, well trained and adapted to that load, meaning their load capacity is high, they are less likely to experience niggles when compared to someone who is not at strong, or has had less time training.
I highlight this point not to suggest you need to play through niggles and ignore them but to reiterate the importance of having a robust and strong system capable of training. It is worthwhile making a note of your weekly activity schedule. If this seems well balanced with rest periods, it may not be the training volume but rather your strength capacity could be less than the required amount needed to meet the demands. However, if you’re week looks jam packed with multiple sports and minimal rest between sessions/games it could be contributing to your constant niggles.
5. Motivation/enjoyment levels: if you’re dreading every session. If you’re not having fun doing the things you used to love and it has become a chore, it could easily be a sign that activity or sport has run its course for now. However, before jumping to this conclusion consider this:
How excited do you feel to go to work or go for a run when you’ve had five hours sleep? Not very, right? Well, the same mechanisms can be at play when it comes to overtraining. When your body isn’t coping with the demands of your weekly volume it can go into “survive” mode whereby you have global fatigue, soreness and your energy to meet the demands of the next activity is being spent on surviving and attempting to recover.
6. Performance is suffering: this can apply to those recording some metric of performance such as running times or those noticing their output on the court or field diminishing. This could be a by-product of your system not being able to produce the required physiological output to achieve the performance you’re accustom to. This results from an imbalance between your total weekly volume output and the time and resources used to recover and adapt from these sessions. When this is skewed more towards the output rather than recovery your body doesn’t have sufficient time or energy to adapt and therefore results in reduced performance. Our bodies are clever creations and will always prioritise survival over achievement so will spend energy on recovery, sleep, digestion and surviving. This can have a significant impact to your enjoyment and motivation because now your outlook on activity is about surviving through sessions, nor actually enhancing your fitness.
“Listen to your body. Don’t try to push through just because the training session says so.”
It is the beast of seeking the middle ground or sweet spot of what an optimal training load looks like for each individual. This is ultimately where training sessions are challenging enough to create adaptation and therefore improve performance, and simultaneously not be too much in terms of load, difficulty and back to back sessions. It’s the fine line of knowing when too much may be causing more harm than good. Ultimately, we want to get this balance exactly right in order to maximise performance and reduce risk of overtraining which can then lead to injury, illness or pain. To train for long term performance at our best, it is important to be self-aware, listen to our body and assess whether or not we could have the balance of training load versus our physiological capability wrong. If you need guidance, support, help or have questions about anything regarding injury, training load, overtraining and are concerned about what to do, you can contact our team at Back to Bounce.
At Back to Bounce, our mission is to help people get moving, achieve their goals, and BOUNCE BACK to their BEST
We are a passionate team of physiotherapists who love supporting our community on every step of their rehabilitation journey with expert knowledge, care, guidance, and support. If you need help, or need further information, you can call our clinic on (07) 5378 1571 or book online for an appointment here.
Written by Rob Kirkby
Back to Bounce physiotherapist Rob Kirkby is passionate about helping patients with overtraining related injuries. To learn more about Rob, his experience and special interests, you can learn more here.
