Less is sometimes more: training too hard. Too short recovery can lead to overtraining. What is behind it, you can find out here.
Overtraining: How it happens?
Although you have trained harder than ever in the past few weeks, you are no longer making any progress. On the contrary: you feel tired and listless, maybe your performance even decreases. Such a scenario could indicate overtraining. You get into this state of chronic exhaustion and reduced performance when you put too much strain on your body. In concrete terms, this means that if the intensity of the training is too high in combination with too much training. Too short a period of recovery threatens overtraining. This can happen to you in both endurance and strength sports.
The process is gradual. After each strenuous training session there is a so-called functional overreaching, a deliberate overuse of the muscles. That is normal. In order to avoid non-functional overreaching, a permanent overstraining, the regeneration after the sport is so important. However, if this is omitted due to false ambition or is too short, you are at risk of overtraining.
Some athletes dismiss overtraining as a myth. But this is a serious condition, which in the worst case may even have health consequences. So listen to your body, which will warn you when it's too much. More is not always better!
Early warning system: Watch out for the symptoms of overtraining
Your body sends you signals when you stress it too much. Watch for the following signs that may indicate overtraining:
Symptoms of overtraining at a glance:
– unusually strong and long-lasting muscle soreness – drop in performance or plateau – muscle loss despite training – increased susceptibility to infections – increased resting pulse (deviation from normal measured value: increase of more than ten beats per minute) – reduced maximum lactate values – leaden fatigue – mood swings or depressive moods – inner restlessness and nervousness – loss of appetite – sleep disturbances
Do you feel flabby? You do not feel like moving? Then listen to your body. Mostly he is trying to tell you that he needs rest. Sure, there are days when you have to fight your inner badass, and others when it's worth fighting it off. But often such days are also signals from our body, which cries out for recovery.
As an endurance athlete, you should be especially alarmed if you measure your exercise and resting heart rates and the values are higher than usual, but the maximum heart rate (maximum pulse) does not reach its maximum values. Leaden fatigue can also indicate overtraining in endurance athletes.
In weight training, overtraining can often manifest itself through restlessness and nervousness. By exercising too much, you overstimulate and overtax your nervous system. So if you are nervous and can't concentrate, take a break!
Unusually severe and prolonged muscle soreness can also indicate overtraining.
Sometimes, however, overtraining is not so easy to diagnose because organic causes such as diseases or infections can also cause these symptoms. Therefore, it is only spoken of an overload of the body when exhaustion and reduced performance last longer than two to three weeks and organic causes can be excluded. The drop in performance in this case is five to ten percent. Minor abnormalities are difficult to distinguish from ordinary diurnal fluctuations.
Attention: the health consequences of overtraining
If you don't pay attention to your body's early warning system, overtraining can even have severe health consequences for you. For one thing, it is believed that the risk of injury increases with prolonged, excessive exertion. On the other hand, there is a risk of damage to tendons, ligaments and muscle tie. You should take this risk seriously. If you have suffered a serious injury due to overtraining, you may have to stop training for weeks or even months.
The psychological component of overtraining should also not be taken lightly. Because the overuse can take away your long-term enjoyment of the sport you were previously passionate about – and you certainly don't want that to happen.
The body's own defense mechanisms are also weakened by excessive training. Your immune system is too weak to defend itself against viruses and bacteria, leading to a higher susceptibility to infections.
Also affected by too much exercise is your hormonal balance. Too many training sessions and too few regeneration phases can lead to a hormonal imbalance. Your body is under constant stress. Releases too much cortisol. Heart disease, high blood prere, insomnia, and immune system dysfunction are also commonly associated with elevated cortisol levels.
Yoga can be helpful for overtraining as a restorative measure. © iStock.com / Pinkypills
Treatment: What to do in case of overtraining?
If you fear that your body has reached the state of overtraining, you have to act fast. In the best case, the symptoms can disappear completely within one to two weeks – if you give yourself a sufficient break from your sport. Stop exercising for at least three days. Give your body time to regenerate.
If the signs of overtraining are acute, a longer break of up to ten days is appropriate. During this time you should sleep a lot. Regenerative measures such as gymnastics, yoga, sauna visits or massages can also be helpful.
If you absolutely want to do sports in the meantime, it's best to do physical activities that have nothing to do with your usual training. How about swimming or cycling for example? In any case, make sure that you do not carry out these activities with too high intensity or to too great an extent.
A visit to the doctor, including a thorough medical check-up, can't hurt either, to make sure that the symptoms really come from overtraining and do not point to an illness.
How to prevent overtraining?
To avoid overtraining in the first place, it's best to protect yourself and your body from too much stress in advance. You should take a critical look at your training plan and check whether it really corresponds to your performance level in terms of training intensity and scope and offers enough variety. You can determine the training intensity with the help of two methods. You can either rely on your own perception – at high intensity you sweat after a few minutes, breathe deeply and quickly and are hardly able to speak more than a few words during the sport. Or you determine it by a heart rate monitor, also called pulse or sports watch. Different models from basic to high-end devices are available from Garmin. If you don't want to trust your own body sensation, the second option is a reliable solution to avoid overtraining.
In general, you should make sure that you do not increase your training by more than ten percent per week. Focus on either volume or intensity, but not both at once. And try to do no more than a quarter of all sessions at maximum or submaximum intensity. For post-workout recovery periods, use the following guidelines:
Avoid overtraining with recovery time between sessions:
– Light training: 5 to 8 hours break – Intensive strength training: 24 to 36 hours break – Long strength endurance training: 24 to 48 hours break – Training to exhaustion: up to 72 hours break
Of course, the way you organize your everyday life also plays a role. At least seven to eight hours of sleep per night and a healthy and balanced diet can help you and your body recover quickly and prevent overtraining.
How to help your body recover quickly
Calculate training pulse: What role the pulse plays in sports
Higher, faster, farther – but training too strenuously can be harmful to the heart. Unless you keep an eye on your training heart rate. And so it goes.