How many people do we see training hard day in and day out? Is it true that better performance is achieved with more training and intensity? Unfortunately no, over-exertion over time can cause the body to fail to recover properly and performance to plummet. If you are training hard and not only do you not improve, but the sensations are worse, you may have entered a state of overtraining that, if you do not fight it, can give you many problems.
How do I know that I am in a state of overtraining?
Overtraining syndrome is common in almost all sports and physical activities and occurs when an athlete performs more training than his body can recover, to the point where performance declines.
The symptoms are very varied and nonspecific , and it can be confused with a bad day or a day that we have not rested well, but if all this is felt in a habitual way, we are probably in a state of overtraining.
Symptoms of overtraining
Some symptoms that are commonly identified during overtraining are as follows.
Performance reduction
Those 10 km races in which you ran at 4 min / km and with which you had such good results are no longer repeated, on the contrary, and despite training hard, it is too difficult for you to finish the races within your usual time.
Weightloss
Another symptom of overtraining occurs when you continue to maintain the same diet and have not drastically varied your training , but you continue to lose weight.
Fatigue
You feel tired for most of the day , even the simplest activities cost you more than normal.
High resting pulsations
If you have a heart rate monitor and suspect that you may be overtraining, you should take your pulse when you get up. If you notice that the heart rate is higher than usual , you may be in a state of overtraining.
Sleep disturbance
Is it hard for you to sleep? Despite sleeping many hours do you wake up tired? Overtraining is the cause of insomnia and bad sleep you suffer from.
Muscle pain
Having pain in the muscles in a timely manner may mean that you have overdo the training, but if this pain does not go away and manifests itself on a daily basis, you have to start worrying.
Humor changes
You can be irritable without knowing why, but the truth is that, in a state of overtraining , the body says enough and does not respond properly.
What are the causes of overtraining?
The cause of suffering from a state of overtraining is continuous excessive physical work. People who start with a physical activity are usually the perfect victims, since many do not usually plan a training, but go out to train every day without taking into account the duration or intensity of the session, nor do they value the necessary importance of rest for the body.
How to prevent a state of overtraining?
Prevention is through eating properly and getting enough sleep for the body to recover. If you know yourself and know how you respond to training, you can plan your sports sessions correctly, mixing mild days with more demanding ones.
The first step to avoid overtraining is to monitor yourself for the symptoms mentioned above and react immediately if they appear:
- Start with three full days of rest or very little activity, or more if you’ve had symptoms for a while.
- If you’ve been overtraining for several weeks, plan to take 10-14 days off.
- Chronic overtraining can require several weeks or months of rest .
- If your overtraining is due to excessive training volume or intensity, reduce the frequency of your high intensity workouts by 50% and minimize the duration of your workouts by 50% until you are fully recovered. Then start your sessions over very gradually.
A tip: not by training longer you will do better, the key is to adapt the body to the planned training.
