Are you exercising too much? You hear the word “overtraining” used often, but what does it really mean? Most people completely misuse that word.

That’s what I’ll shed some light on in this article.

We’re going to cover:

  • What overtraining is, and what it isn’t

  • The benefits of overreaching

Original source: here.

What Overtraining is and What it Isn’t

Overtraining syndrome is a serious medical condition caused by too much exercise and not enough recovery over a prolonged period of time. The emphasis is “prolonged.” In other words, you’re already experiencing some symptoms, but completely ignoring them, and you keep pushing hard in your workouts, and not recovering enough.

True overtraining requires almost complete bed rest for a period of weeks (on the low end) to several months. It’s almost like having a combination of fibromyalgia, and depression in one.

Very few people have the unique combination of work ethic and stupidity to dig themselves into a hole that deep.

What are some of the symptoms of overtraining? They are:

  • Decreased motivation to exercise

  • Exercise that used to feel easy or moderate now feels hard

  • Depression

  • Weight gain, without trying

  • Slower reaction times

  • Increase in blood pressure

  • Increase in resting heart rate

  • Puffiness/water retention

…and others.

Overreaching is a step before overtraining. You’re purposely pushing yourself just hard enough (for a period of 2-4 weeks), and then you pull back, to allow the body to supercompensate. Wait, what? Supercompensate? What’s that?

I’ll quote myself from my article on How to Speed Up Your Recovery:

You know this intuitively, but you exercise to get stronger, faster, have more endurance, etc. So you stress your body, make it get worse for a short period of time (anywhere from an hour to 2- 3 days), before having a “rebound” effect, and getting better than the last exercise session. However, if you either don’t wait long enough to recover, or wait too long to recover before your next workout, you don’t get any better. You stagnate.

Here is a graphic representation of what it looks like.

So basically, with overreaching, you purposely dig yourself into a hole, but not so deep that you entire system just shuts down.

How do you know you’re overreaching?

Here are a few different ways to know:

  • You’ve purposely and suddenly increased your work volume, by more than 10-20%.

  • You’ve maintained that for at least 2 weeks

  • Your joints are aching

  • Your performance is decreasing over that period of time

Just as all those signs start to happen, you suddenly cut back on the volume done in your workouts, by as much as 50-80%, for a period of 1-3 weeks, and at the end of that “recovery” period, you exceed your previous performances, and those signs (achy joints, decreasing performance, etc.) go away.

For most people overreaching is completely unnecessary. But for the few people for whom it’s actually a good tool, it shouldn’t be done more than 1-2 times per year.

Then there’s the “workout hangover.” You do one hard workout, and the next day, you’re feeling a little beat up.

  • You’re sore

  • Maybe a bit puffy

  • Your joints are a bit stiff

  • You might have a headache

  • You might have a hard time sleeping

That is NOT overtraining. That’s just one hard workout. Get over it, you wimp. Use some of the strategies that I talk about in my article on How to Speed Up Your Recovery.

And the last part of “what overtraining is NOT” is getting injured. Yes, overtraining and overreaching do increase your risk of injury. But for it to be called “overtraining” or “overreaching”, it must be accompanied by the other symptoms mentioned earlier.

If all that’s going on is you got injured, but experience none (or 1 or 2) of the symptoms mentioned earlier, you weren’t overtraining or overreaching. You were just on an improper exercise program. Either you exercised with the wrong technique, or you had muscle imbalances that you didn’t address before you started your program. In both cases, you need to improve your technique, and correct underlying muscle imbalances. If you’d like to identify what your muscle imbalances are, you can get an assessment. Feel free to fill out this form to see if you qualify for the assessment of your muscular imbalances.