[music] Heather: Some of us have lost a little bit
of motivation and are now purely exercising just to stay fit. That's me, but others have
gone to the opposite extreme and have been upping their training over the last few months.
Is that you? If so, you could be at risk of overtraining. It's a fine line between being
exceptionally fit and overtraining and one that you certainly don't want to cross. Today,
I'm going to be looking at the warning signs and helping you to prevent yourself from making
that mistake and getting overtrained. Triathletes do have a tendency of being a
type-A personality. I know that is a large sweeping statement, but of the age-groupers
and pros I know, the majority of them just want to train, train, and train a bit more.
Having a hard work ethic is definitely the way to success, but your body still needs
rest as well. We have discussed the importance of a rest day on the channel in the past,
but it isn't always as simple as just having a regular day of training. There can be several
factors that can cause overtraining, and it's usually a combination of several of these
that can lead to this horrible feeling of fatigue.
[music] Heather: Beyond skipping a rest day, overtraining
can actually materialize from the way you approach your training. Whether that's going
too hard on your easy sessions or maybe it's doing all of your recovery parts in your session
too hard. It could be simply doing really tough sessions back to back of a few in a
row. Maybe you're always adding on a little bit extra to your training or you simply just
do too much active recovery. Beyond training, there are some other factors
such as sleep and nutrition. Not having enough sleep can contribute to overtraining, as it's
a time when your body repairs, your mind as well. Then nutrition, whether that's poor
quality or not enough in the way of quantity. That'll be adding to the stress that your
body experiences. Beyond that, you've got the everyday stresses such as life and your
job. All of these will add up. You can't single out one of those factors, instead you need
to look at the bigger picture. Earlier, I spoke to an expert in this field, Dr. Jamie
Pringle, to find out what key factors could potentially push an athlete over the edge
and into a state of overtraining. Dr. Jamie Pringle: Yes. It's the key question,
Heather, for us doing normal training and knowing what your headroom is, to be able
to do a bit more and knowing where you are sitting within that. The things that potentially
can push you into that under-recovered state. That's a good way of looking at it. When you
have a rapid increase in the intensity of training, a rapid increase in the volume of
training, and the combination of the two. When I say rapid, we're probably looking in
the region of more than 10% from the previous week. From a training point of view, everyone's
got to push hard occasionally by intensified training, that functional overreaching as
it's called, and the days and the potentially weeks it takes to recover from that, but it's
getting you set up for the next phase. Going back to the original question we had
earlier on, "What can you do to avoid it?" This comes back to actually thinking about
how you are using your rest and your recovery within your training schedule as a key part.
It's not just an empty day in the box of "What I'm doing this week." It, potentially, is
even the first thing you put in your week, "I'm going to have a recovery this day and
this day," and we fit the training around it. I think the key thing you'll see with
athletes and coaches who are really good at this and good at training planning is that
they understand the value of rest, they understand the body adapts when it's resting and recovering.
They plan for rest and they plan for it before it becomes an issue. That's the thing I'll
be saying. It's not so much what causes overtraining and it's not the training, it's the rest part
of the equation. Heather: I guess the difficult part for someone
who does sport as their hobby, that often the rest day from training is the busiest
day of the week because they can't actually fit training into that. I know there is no
magic answer, but I don't know if you've got any tips or hints that an age-grouper could
optimize their rests any better. Dr. Pringle: There's a fundamental thing around
training prescription, which I would hold to and I think a lot of people would, is that
when you train hard, train hard and when you train easy, train easy. The separation of
intensity, separation of stresses is really important because the counterpoint to that
is you have lots of quite hard things going on every day. I'm not just talking about the
training, we're talking about other things that sit in and around that.
I think a characteristic of good athletes, who have figured out how hard to train for
themselves and have made a really good progression in their training, is that when it's a day
when they need to give it some, they're ready for it and they're able to do it and they're
able to recover from it. They've learned the importance of when it's the day that is meant
to be easy, keep it easy. When it's hard, keep it hard. When it's easy, keep it easy.
[music] Heather: Hopefully, by following those tips
and a progressive training plan, none of us will fall into that trap of overtraining,
but it does still happen. There are certain signs that will tell you or give you a good
indication that you might already be in that state, such as a constant feeling of lethargy
or losing your motivation, a general change in your mood or maybe you're more snappy.
Maybe it's just sleep, you are not able to sleep well or you are constantly wanting more
sleep. Could you maybe be hungrier than normal or you're just off your food altogether? Little
illnesses or niggles, that your body is constantly aching, not recovering. Maybe you're regularly
getting a cold when you didn't used to. All those sort of things are signs, but Jamie
goes on to talk more about the signs that you can look for within your training.
Dr. Pringle: I think it's useful, personally in my experience, the way that-- when working
with athletes and their coaches, when you're looking at the training. Fundamentally, overtraining
and overreaching is a training prescription problem to solve. Now, it might become a medical
issue when it gets to a certain stage on that continuum. Fundamentally, most of us are working
in this continuum of pushing hard, recovering, adapting, hopefully. What we're talking about
here, overtraining is a maladaptation where the curve is not going up, it's going down
even though you're doing more stuff, you're doing more training. Really, it's important
that with definitions that we talk about, it's not just in spite of the training, it's
also with rest, that it doesn't then recover. To say what overtraining is, it's actually
you are talking about a long-term performance decrement in spite of a rest period. That's
how it was previously and still is defined. Of course, there are aspects of that we call
overreaching, where someone's pushing hard and they're tired, but then they recover and
they adapt. Fundamentally, when you ask, "What's the sign and symptoms?" The first one is you're
just not going very well. You know you're tired and it's just not working. The more
you throw at it, the worse it gets. Heather: It's so hard for especially age-group
athletes who've got balancing so many things and the natural reaction is if you are not
doing well, you want to push harder. How would you know if that is your situation? How long
a rest would you have to have to see if you're recovering, for example?
Dr. Pringle: Yes. Well, it used to be that sort of a two-week period was really the starting
point for that. I wouldn't say that like you would say it's definitively two weeks off
and see how you are, but a lot of people I think if you went to-- Remember, we are talking
about a medical syndrome here. When you get into that stage of the continuum over here,
that's trouble. That really is trouble. When you're dealing with this kind of just pushing
hard and seeing how your body is responding to it, a sort of two-week rest and recovery.
We're talking about almost complete rest. It will be the standard thing to say, "Well,
if you're not recovered in two weeks, we might have a bigger problem than you think here."
I think it's an athlete's skill. My take on this, having worked with athletes
and coaches over the years, where you've got aspects of this going on, but also you've
got the bigger picture of athletes just having to train hard. You often see athletes who
are very self-aware and have got experience, either by experience of years or experience
of doing it well and learning from it or doing it badly and learning from that. Then those
are the ones that self-awareness probably is the key thing that is really at play here.
I could give you examples of athletes who have spent two-three weeks fighting with that,
two-three months fighting with that, and maybe even two or three years in an Olympic cycle
fighting with this pushing hard and fatigue and so on, and they've not learned. They have
not learned and potentially, like we said before, a syndrome of reflection. Overtraining
is a syndrome that you see in reflection and retrospect. Then it might take that many weeks,
months, and years to actually learn from it, which is unfortunate, because that could be
career-threatening. Heather: Yes. You've talked so far purely
about the training and the training load. A lot of our viewers have training as almost
a second or third part of their lives. How much does your general life affect it? You
might have a coach who's coaching your training, and they don't understand why you are not
improving because they're giving you rest and that, but there's something else going
on. How do you find that balance and know if that's what's tipping you over the edge?
Dr. Pringle: That's a really good question, Heather. I know you said that this is not
a syndrome just of elite athletes and it's not just a syndrome of beginners, some people,
and so on. It's something that everyone could be somewhere on that continuum. When you've
got normal life going on and you've got the weight of life upon your shoulders as well
for whatever reasons, when a person's feeling terribly under the pump in terms of being
busy, it might be somebody else is cruising it.
That individual perception and the individual response to the life load that's going on
around them can be very significant, to the point that it can actually be really significant
at a chemical level in the body in terms of adaptation in the muscle itself. If those
things are being suppressed or other bad things elevated, whatever it might be, then they
will change how the muscle and the rest of the systems in the body adapt to the same
training stimulus. That's our challenge, an adaptation curve that's going like that or
a maladaptation curve that's going like that. Heather: I think just to round it up, hopefully,
none of our viewers have experienced overtraining, but if somebody has, how do you recover? I
presume it's rest, but is there anything else that comes alongside it that can help you
recover from something like this. Dr. Pringle: Yes. Fundamentally, rest is the
key piece there. If you went to your GP and said, "Look, I'm really exhausted by what
I'm doing," then they will be looking at you through slightly different eyes. They'll be
looking at chronic fatigue aspects and things like that, which again are just as complicated
to try and disentangle as to the why but also what you can do with it. For anyone who has
been down that path and realized or recognized that that's been the trouble, one thing is
worth saying, it's likely if you've been down that path, that you're going to see it again.
This is something where the athletes really got to learn how to manage themselves as an
athlete. That's the stresses that can actually sometimes crack you because you think, "Well,
I'm doing the same training. I'm just not getting the return from it."
Maybe that's talking about the top end of people who are making a living out of their
sport, but I think there are parallels there for anybody who works about managing everything
that's around them and how your sport and how your training sits within that bigger
picture. It's all self-awareness and if you can learn from that journey, then you'll be
a better athlete, a fitter athlete, and potentially a safer athlete because these things, the
troubles and bits that are around, you'll see them before they can come and bite you.
Heather: Yes, I think that's the key for triathletes as well because I think it's very tempting
to get into that gray zone all the time. A good piece of advice to finish on. Awesome.
Thank you. Our bodies are amazing and they need to be listened to and looked after. Overtraining
can lead to long-term serious health problems, so please make sure you train sensibly, you
build things up, and you remember to look at the bigger picture. Hopefully, it didn't
go too deep today and you've enjoyed this, give us a like if you have. Remember, you
can follow us on our social media channels. You can also subscribe to us here on YouTube.
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