Overtraining: Prevention and Treatment

Too many triathletes get into to trouble by believing “More is better.” Train smart… not just hard!

Overtraining is a state where your body does not adapt to your training program. For training to be effective, you must create some stress and then recover from that stress to create a new level of fitness. That is why running the same five-mile loop just doesn’t cut it when you are trying to run faster. You need to occasionally run longer, to improve your aerobic endurance and also run faster to improve your anaerobic capacity, power and speed.

How to avoid overtraining and still progress. To improve your endurance, you need to increase your weekly long distance (or overdistance) session slowly. A good rule of thumb to use is the 10% rule: increase the time or distance of your long session by no more than 10%. Significant increases in workout duration and/or intensity set you up for injury. The point where an individual over-trains is hallmarked by a lack of recovery. In pushing your envelope, a few days of rest will be enough to allow the body to recover from the stress. In overtraining, even weeks of rest will not be enough to allow your body to recover.

When you train for endurance sports, the workouts that you perform do not make you better. You only get better when you recover from those workouts.

The importance of recovery

If you don’t recover, you won’t get better – period. Keep in mind that your lifestyle: nutrition, sleep, and daily stress affect your ability to recover. When my clients are having trouble adapting to their training, the problem is not the training that they’re doing ... it’s an increase in work stress, family responsibilities, or lack of quality sleep and nutrition. Be wary of these often-overlooked points when you begin to feel a little stale or over tired. If you slack off a couple of days early in your training program, you can avoid weeks of poor performance.

Using a training log is extremely important. You should record not only the objective time/distance/heart rate of your workouts but information about your sleep, nutrition, and other stressors including an overall subjective rating of how you are feeling in your log entries. Too much high-intensity training often pushes athletes into over-training. Once you start throwing in anaerobic and sprint intervals, the possibility of overtraining really starts to increase.

The list below includes some of the symptoms associated with overtraining. It includes performance, physiological, immunological, biochemical, and psychological factors.

 Symptoms of overtraining:

• Change in resting heart rate (increase or decrease 10% from normal values)
• Loss of coordination, decreased motor skills
• Consistent decreases in training or race performance
• Significant increase or decrease in training heart rate
• Lack of motivation
• Sleep disturbances
• Loss of appetite
• Muscle soreness or feeling of “heaviness”
• Significant decrease in body weight
• Increased susceptibility to colds/flu/allergies
• Decreased libido
• Decreased self-esteem
• Menstrual dysfunction (females)
• Loss of sense of humor

 Prevention is key

Once you’ve reached the point of true overtraining, your season is pretty well done. Luckily, it is difficult to reach that level of overtraining, and training sensibly is the best way to avoid it. Improving performance and avoiding overtraining is the goal of a periodized training plan. In general, first you need to increase the volume of training (ie time or distance) and then, cutting back the volume, increase the intensity (speed) of your training. As you come close to race time, it’s best to further reduce training volume while maintaining your intensity as you taper for a race. In too many instances, athletes try to combine high volume of training and high intensity with disastrous results. Be realistic and plan your training in advance. First with the head… then with the heart!

Author Neal Henderson is an XTERRA PRO and the Coordinator of the Sport Science program at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine. He can be reached atnhenderson@bch.org