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Talking Overtraining
1.9k Plays4 years ago
Coaches Scott Johnston and Sam Naney discuss overtraining syndrome (OTS).
“Treading on the knife’s edge, there is no real road map.”
Key points covered are: Over-reaching verses over-training. Learning the distinction between the sympathetic and para-sympathetic overreaching; how to modulate training to encourage over-reaching and discourage over-training; recognizing red flags for over training; the pitfalls of group youth programs; recognizing a fatigue issue versus a fitness issue within the context of overtraining; the pitfalls of HRV (heart rate variability) for useful information for modulating training; how to modulate and accept mental and emotional stress; making rest as intentional as training; advice for people who find themselves in an overtrained state.
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Transcript
Introduction and Free Resources
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete Podcast. These programs are just one of several free services we provide to disseminate information about training for mountain sports. If you like what you hear and want more, please check out our website, uphillathlete.com, where you'll find many articles and our extensive video library on all aspects of training for and accomplishing a variety of mountain goals. You'll also find our forum, where you can ask questions of our experts and the community at large.
00:00:30
Speaker
Our email is coach at uphillathlete.com and we'd love to hear from you.
Understanding Overtraining and Overreaching
00:00:38
Speaker
Welcome everybody for another episode of the uphill athlete podcast. Today I'm Scott Johnston by the way and today I'm joined with uphill athlete coach Sam Naney and we're going to have a bit of a discussion about over training, something that we are
00:00:56
Speaker
intimately familiar with both on a personal basis and as coaches. And I think it's going to tie in pretty closely and well with the last talk that Sam and I had, which was about not becoming a slave to your training plan. So if you haven't listened to that podcast, you might also help shed some light on how you could potentially prevent yourself from finding yourself overtrained because as we will soon enlighten you,
00:01:26
Speaker
Overtraining is a really serious situation and we want to try to do everything we can to avoid getting you, you should be doing everything you can to avoid becoming overtrained. So welcome, Sam. Thanks a lot for joining me today. Yeah. Thanks, Scott. Happy to be here. Well, before we dive into the subject, I think we need to define it, don't you, and kind of explain what this term means.
00:01:55
Speaker
we know from our own example, our own experience that training makes you tired. And that's part of the response to that fatigue is what makes you become fitter as you go through your training program. And so, but becoming overly tired is where we run this risk of becoming over-trained. So I want to start with kind of what are really sort of the acknowledged textbook definitions of over-training and this concept called overreaching.
00:02:25
Speaker
So overreaching is a planned normal state of training whereby the athlete reaches beyond what their current capacity to absorb the training might be for a temporary period. And they expect to see a degradation in their performance that might last a few days, but that's all planned.
Physiological Impact of Overtraining
00:02:50
Speaker
Then overtraining is usually not planned,
00:02:54
Speaker
and can have several causes that we're going to be talking about. But it results in a long-term degradation of performance that can last for weeks, months, and frankly, even years. So it's a very bad situation to find yourself in. And so I think that I'll have Sam take over from there to talk some more about those two concepts and how they relate to one another.
00:03:23
Speaker
Um, you know, then I think we can, we, we are road warriors when it comes to overtraining, having both found ourselves in that position myself more than once. So, so what do you have to say Sam about some of that stuff? Yeah, I think, um, overtraining,
00:03:40
Speaker
sound, I think the term gets bandied around a lot. And so it is useful to distinguish it between that and overreaching, where, you know, overreaching is sort of a normal part of training, particularly training at a high level or trying to really maximize the gains that you're making. Fatigue is a natural part of it. And through proper recovery, then you find improved fitness. What, what
00:04:08
Speaker
we've come to understand or in certainly in the literature and instead the distinction between overreaching and overtraining in large part comes down to a neurological distinction where in overreaching we have these two parts of our nervous system the sympathetic and the parasympathetic and sympathetic being your sort of fight or flight mechanism whereas parasympathetic the rest and digest and
00:04:37
Speaker
With the sympathetic system, getting tired from training is going to result in a level of normal fatigue that's going to make you want to slow down, need to take rest and recovery, and that can be recovered on a relatively
00:04:54
Speaker
short order if you're paying attention, but not heating signals of required recovery or fatigue day after day after day combined with perhaps an inappropriate mix of intensity and training and volume, which we can talk about, can lead to a sort of breakdown disconnect in the parasympathetic system, which is basically the one which really controls your ability to recover.
00:05:22
Speaker
And so if that starts to break down and lose basically the connectivity in that system, that's where overtraining becomes a real problem. Once the parasympathetic nervous, once you get into a parasympathetic nervous system overtrained state,
00:05:41
Speaker
then you have stepped way over that line in the sand. And so the sympathetic nervous system, as Sam said, kind of the fight or flight version, what you would often see when this happens, this is what you would expect to see in an overreaching situation.
00:05:59
Speaker
elevated morning resting heart rates, elevated heart rate during the day. Maybe you're a little restless at night, you can't sleep as well because this frequent training stimulus has kind of jacked up your sympathetic nervous system so that it's sort of on guard. It's waiting for that saber-toothed tiger to jump out from behind the tree so it can save you. And that's a relatively benign type of overtraining because it's borderline overreaching.
00:06:28
Speaker
And so usually somebody who finds himself in that state, resting even just a few days to a week will allow them to return to training with even an improved performance because they'll get some super compensation from that rest. But once you've gotten yourself into a state where the parasympathetic nervous system is involved, and I'll explain a few markers for that, how you can tell when that's happening.
00:06:56
Speaker
then you're in pretty deep water. And one of the things you'll see there is because this parasympathetic nervous system becomes overactive, that you often will sleep quite well, but you'll have a low resting heart rate, maybe even lower than normal.
00:07:14
Speaker
and your heart rate response during training will be low. Yeah, suppressed heart rate. Yeah, suppressed heart rate at high, when you're at normal or higher efforts. You'll see, you know, when it's, when people, when you're measuring blood lactates, the athlete can't produce much blood lactase. In other words, they just, they don't have the top end. And that's the kind of over-training state that, you know, we, those are the sad cases that we often hear about and we get emails
00:07:44
Speaker
you know, I'm sure several a month from people who said, Oh, I found myself in this overtran state and they, they all list the same kind of symptoms, which we're going to go into some detail here so it can help you understand how to decide if you are in this overtran state. And, but it's sadly when they come to us, when they've kind of gone over the waterfall and into that parasympathetic black hole, um, all you can really tell them is, is going to take,
00:08:12
Speaker
weeks and weeks, maybe months and months to get you out of this hole, which of course is the last thing these athletes, any athlete wants to hear.
Athlete Mindset and Rest Resistance
00:08:21
Speaker
And while we're on that subject, I want to say that I think you would agree with me on this, Sam, that
00:08:26
Speaker
You've had athletes, and I certainly have, who have found themselves over-trained pretty seriously. And we've given them that message of, hey, you need to pull the plug, stop today, and rest, rest, rest. In three or four weeks, let's try some very light training and see how your body responds to that. And they will rebel. They dig their heels in, because that's the last thing they want to do. Maybe they've even got something like the Olympics coming up. And they're going to say, no, I can't afford to do that.
00:08:56
Speaker
But then they get into this cycle of getting themselves over-trained and they dig the hole deeper and deeper and deeper.
00:09:09
Speaker
both of us both experience in our in our athletic days but also in coaching have seen athletes approaching what we know is going to be an overtrained state but they're still sort of in that overreached phase and and we issue that caution and say you need to take a break now and um and i think that's the even more you know
00:09:29
Speaker
As you've said, once you're overtrained, you're toasted. The cat's out of the bag, but in the state of overreaching, I think the challenge, and when we get to talking about our own experiences, it'll become even more clear, but the challenge is that you still feel like you can do work.
00:09:50
Speaker
issuing caution to someone to say, Hey, you know, you're, you're, you're heading for a cliff. You're heading for this, this big problem over training. You need to stop now. I think the reason why so often it's difficult to heed that advice is because you still feel like you can go out and do work. You still feel like you can, you know, hammer the workouts and, and see enough, perhaps not improvement, but maintaining of the performance that you've been doing that, that,
00:10:16
Speaker
you can kind of write off that, those cautions and that advice. But then, as you said, and as we'll talk about, you do get to a point where all of a sudden the cliff is behind you and you're falling and it's too late at that point.
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, classic examples have been, um, and this is a pretty typical scenario for athletes of all stripes. And, you know, Sam and I have an extensive amount of experience working with cross country skiers. And, um, so we're going to use, we can use some of those examples and I, I won't mention any names here to embarrass people, but other than when Sam and I talked about our own screw ups, we'll embarrass ourselves. Yeah, we can embarrass ourselves, but the,
00:10:59
Speaker
The thing that you see often is a person having a whole bunch of workouts that they would grade as A workouts. You remember this skier that you competed with from Sun Valley who one summer was like, I was winning every single time trial all summer and all fall. And then he has a complete disaster of a ski season.
00:11:21
Speaker
because he was winning every single time all summer long. And he was in a constant, overreaching state. And eventually, he ran the fuel tank empty. And once that happened, the season was over. You can cry all you want about it, but it is not going to happen. Once you get into that position, a few days or even a couple of weeks of rest is not going to bring you back. Well, and that, I think, it's perhaps
00:11:51
Speaker
it's an aside almost, but it's such a good piece of advice that it bears saying now as well that nobody wins in training. And I remember you referencing, I think it was Wadsworth who made the comment one time where if you got medals for training, then everybody would just show up to the start line and turn in their training logs and be given their medal. Because it doesn't matter, but especially when you're training
00:12:17
Speaker
with a group of people or you have partners that you're used to working alongside and you're all leading toward a common goal. It's really easy to make training a performance. Every day is a performance and it feels really good and you see that progress happening and you're not really paying attention to the fact that your actual goals are still two, three, four months off and ultimately
00:12:43
Speaker
You know, the training is the work to get you there. It's not the end unto itself. And I think so often when we see over-training occur, it's not in the performance season. It's not during that time where the goals are being sought in the immediate timeframe. It's in the training leading up to it. You're seeing the gains of the training and you just can't help yourself but take bigger and bigger bites every time.
00:13:08
Speaker
Yeah, and that's one of the most valuable coaching lessons I think any coach can learn. And certainly one of the hardest lessons that I had to learn as a coach was
00:13:19
Speaker
when to say enough is enough. When to say, okay, we're done. Whether it's in the middle of a workout or from day to day and say, okay, we need some rest days. And one of my little rules that I've developed and I certainly used it when I was coaching you, Sam, was that if I started to see several really good performances in a row during a week from you, I would say, okay, we don't want that right now. We need to save that till January or February.
00:13:48
Speaker
So we're going to go back and do some really easy days here for a few days. And because you're at a new level of fitness when you start seeing those, you know, like, you know, P let's call them PR, you know, personal records during training. If you start seeing PRs during training, that should be a sign that.
00:14:07
Speaker
First of all, your body has now adapted to a new level that it has probably never been at before. And that should be like, okay, how long could I possibly stay at this level, which isn't very long usually. And so maybe I should just back off, let my body get used to this level and absorb that training, make the adaptations and then come back to it in a while. And I'm going to say that one of the, again, one of the hardest lessons that I had to learn
00:14:38
Speaker
with my own over-training case was that it's way better to be even quite a bit under-trained than it is to be even a tiny bit over-trained when you go into an important event. Under-trained and hungry versus over-trained. Yeah, if you're hungry, if you're under-trained, you can always dig a bit deeper.
Coaching Strategies to Prevent Overtraining
00:15:00
Speaker
But when you're over-trained, there's just nothing there. Yeah, it's a shallow hole. Yeah, so I think that's important to keep in mind.
00:15:08
Speaker
I give another classic example with a cross-country skier, a woman that we both know who was having the season of her life. Actually, we've seen this happen a few times with different skiers, having the best ski season that she'd ever had and was right up near the top of the World Cup standings.
00:15:29
Speaker
and right before the world championships the coach has said well since you're now at this new level let's just pile on a really hard week of training for you before the world championships comes up and failing to recognize that warning that we were just talking about that hey if you're already
00:15:47
Speaker
the finish you've ever been in your life, how likely is it you're going to get much fitter than that, especially in short term? And exactly what happened is she went into those world championship races flat as a pancake and had terrible disastrous races. It was really discouraging. And so I think it's that idea that if you feel like Superman in one of your workouts,
00:16:10
Speaker
you might want to be, I'm going to take a couple of easy days after this because most of us will react to that Superman feeling like, yes, I'm invincible. I could do anything. Oh yeah. Well, and I think, and, and again, some, so many things about overtraining are counterintuitive or, uh, you know, misleading to a type a personality. Uh, because as you said, when you're, when you're in the midst of a training,
00:16:36
Speaker
period, you expect to see improvements over time. That's the whole point is you see this kind of stair-step effect. You train, you recover, you step upward, you do it again.
00:16:46
Speaker
And so being able to distinguish between a normal improvement in training and these sort of continuous, you know, as you said, string of A graded workouts or PRs in time trials, that's, I mean, I think the reason why we can cite these examples and certainly examples of ourselves,
00:17:12
Speaker
in overtraining is because there are no big red flags necessarily waving. There are small red flags, but you kind of need to know what you're looking for. Exactly. You've got to be able to recognize those red flags. And again, to acknowledge the importance of having some sort of objectivity with your training, whether it's through using a coach or using a training plan of some kind that you've
00:17:38
Speaker
have devised for yourself so that you have a fallback in case your own enthusiasm gets the better of you. I think about that, especially with that example you just gave on the eve of the world championships and this skier who's at the top of their game, really what they should have done is sit on the couch and eaten a lot of food and slept a lot and just waited and be ready.
00:18:05
Speaker
And I think that, you know, when we're talking about this, it's one of the greatest benefits of a training plan is the weeks and particularly, you know, week to 10 days prior to a performance where you and I, this is, it's where I find using something like training peaks to be some, perhaps the most valuable is I can plan ahead for an athlete.
00:18:28
Speaker
up to that event, you know, and even to the extent of, you know, estimating the stress score of each of those planned workouts and to give myself a picture of what their fitness and their readiness might look like on the day of performance. And that gives at least a possible runway to look for. But if you're only led by the present
00:18:51
Speaker
Moment of how somebody's feeling then if their training has been going well Then they probably will be looking awesome in the seven days prior and you think gosh if maybe we Extract a little bit more if we put you they can handle it We can put one more thing in and that's gonna bump it just a bit more and and that's so often the death knell I think I think acknowledging You know one another another mantra you always spoke about that I thought was really beneficial is the idea that
00:19:20
Speaker
you know, at a certain point in the year as you're leading into your performance season, if it's races or leading into a period where you're going to be tackling a big objective, at a certain point the training's done.
00:19:31
Speaker
and you've done all the work you can do. The money's in the bank. Right. Yeah. The haze in the barn, whatever metaphor, but continuing to try and extract small portions of fitness and benefit from training becomes really detrimental and you need to shift your focus to recovering and being relaxed and ready and letting your body sort of gear up for what's going to be a huge effort.
00:19:57
Speaker
Yeah, that getting greedy, I think, is probably the primary cause of overtraining, becoming sort of hubristic, like that Superman effect, oh, I can do anything, or the coach or the athlete getting greedy and saying, oh, just a couple more of these types of workouts and this is going to put you in peak form.
00:20:16
Speaker
And I think this is often, I think folks know that I'm, and you are too, a huge fan of Renato Canova, and one of Canova's most
00:20:27
Speaker
his many, many poignant sayings. But one of the ones that really has resonated for me is in the final weeks leading into the major event, in his case would be like the Olympics or the world championships. There's very little you can do to make the athlete faster, but there's a lot you can do to make them slower. Yeah. And so I think that's a really good way to view this is that
00:20:46
Speaker
that risk reward, like is it really worth going out there and doing these things that you think are going to top off your abilities with the potential of a huge downside risk. And this leads into something that you and I have talked about before is that often when an athlete is well trained, they're on a bit of a razor blade.
00:21:11
Speaker
and they're in this sort of unstable equilibrium and it doesn't take a lot to tip them off over the side and we have seen
00:21:19
Speaker
over-training happen in one workout. When they're already in peak form, and they go out and do one particular workout, and this happened to someone we know right before the Olympics in cross-country skiing, where they went for like a few days before the Olympics, they went out for a long ski, and they never got to form back for the Olympics. It didn't come back for them.
00:21:45
Speaker
And I've seen it happen locally with some juniors. And I know you want to talk some more about juniors. But this is part of the risk of becoming a slave to your training plan or doing someone else's training, like training in a group. You can get sucked into somebody else's pace. And we see this often in teams where if you have a team, a group of runners or skiers,
00:22:11
Speaker
and they're gonna go out and ski together, you can be sure that on any given day, one of them's gonna be feeling really good, and they're gonna be out in the front setting the pace. And the guy who needs an easy day, he's hanging in the back of the pack trying to keep up, and he's just driving himself right into the ground doing that. If you do that day after day after day,
00:22:30
Speaker
You're going to end up in this position. And that's the case of, in fact, really not doing the training that's correct for you. You're just trying to train for somebody who may be even much fitter. You're training to the highest common denominator as well.
00:22:47
Speaker
And again, I think yeah, we should talk about juniors at some point because I think that's often one of the challenges with youth teams and junior teams is that it's a pretty common method that coaches will use where they will identify the strongest member of that team and they will use them as sort of the lightning rod for the rest of the group.
00:23:11
Speaker
And so the strongest member will lead the workouts and everybody else needs to have the ambition and the guts to chase them. And through that, the idea being that they'll just pull everybody up with them, which of course is a terrible idea because you might have like, I mean, we've seen this happen a lot. I remember with my college racing team and in other circumstances where the person who's
00:23:39
Speaker
you know, fifth or sixth on the team and performances, it, the best way that they can train is not by chasing the person who's currently number one, they need to train in another avenue. They may very well have that first place performance in them, but they're not going to achieve it by the same path that the current number one person follows. Uh, and, and missing that point, missing the, the, the necessity of individualization, I think is,
00:24:05
Speaker
really prevalent and detrimental in terms of junior training. Yeah, because kids are often training on teams and it's a challenge as a coach to coach a team of endurance athletes because they're going to be at all different levels. And with juniors, it's even more of a challenge because they're biologically at different ages. Even though you got a bunch of 14 year olds or 16 year olds,
00:24:29
Speaker
But some of them know some of the guys are gonna be shaving the other kids you know are just these scrawny little guys that look the same way they did when they were twelve and you put them in the same workout at the same time and that's pretty risky situation it's a challenge for the coach to manage it.
00:24:45
Speaker
But I think for parents that are listening to this, it's something for you to keep in mind. I think Sam and I have had very good success coaching juniors. Part of it's because we've been really aware of this propensity for the team situation to get out of control, especially with juniors, because junior competition is not a level playing field. I remember very distinctly
00:25:09
Speaker
when i was probably a high school sophomore and i was one of those you know hundred and thirty pound six feet tall just a little stick spaghetti noodle flowing around the pool swimming and i remember standing up neck on the starting blocks
00:25:25
Speaker
And there was this kid from a competing high school. I looked over him and he was balding and he had a five o'clock shadow. And I'm in the same race with him. This is a man. And I'm just the kid you get here. He's like, yeah, this guy looked like he could have been 35, but he's probably still a high school student. And that's one of the problems with junior competition is it's just such an unlevel playing field. And I know we're kind of going off the track here, but I think this is a really important message for
00:25:53
Speaker
parents of kids to hear is that the worst thing you can do with your kids is to push them to be like a world champion by the time they're 18. I can almost guarantee if you do that, they're going to be done by the time they're age 20. Especially in endurance sports because we know, and this is borne out across time and all endurance sports, is that
00:26:19
Speaker
athletes are continuing to see improvements and long-term gains well into their late 20s and early 30s. So the idea that you're somehow, you know, on the clock to get a young person to a peak performance and to maximize gains in a comprehensive manner when they're 16 or 17 is anathema to the whole concept of endurance training. And, you know, and I think it's,
00:26:46
Speaker
Yeah, I mean we don't we don't need to go terribly deep down this path but I think it's a really important thing not only for their physical selves because as we'll talk about over training has very long-term ramifications for an athlete sometimes lifelong and Depending on the severity, but it also has really detrimental mental and emotional effects Absolutely and and for young people, you know, that's where I think both you and I because we've been you know, we've invested so much time in coaching young people because of the
Youth Athletes and Overtraining Risks
00:27:14
Speaker
the joy that it brings and the sense of accomplishment in helping a young person sort of achieve their personal gains. And that is, it's tragic. It's tragic to see, you know, a 17 year, 18 year old who does have great potential and is sort of on that trajectory, get pushed or mistakenly go too far and have a future, you know, one avenue of their future really derailed. Yeah. The door gets closed.
00:27:44
Speaker
You know, people mature at different rates. You know, Sam and I both coached kids who were early matures and late matures. And the early mature kids appear to be, you know, supremely athletically talented. And everybody thinks, oh my God, look, this kid's going to go on to be the next great hope. You know, this is going to be the next world champion in the sport. And the late bloomer who probably won't come into their, you know,
00:28:12
Speaker
peak form until at least 25 years old, they're kind of left out in the dark by themselves and people get overlooked or they get cut from teams or they don't get selected for certain things because they're not in this advanced mature state. But often those advanced mature kids, they're kind of done by the time they hit 2021. They're just because they've had this rapid
00:28:35
Speaker
uh maturity stage where they especially the guys and develop all this testosterone and they get stronger bigger faster and then the scrawny kid who might just need a longer time often like i said they get overlooked and um
00:28:50
Speaker
But maybe we don't need to go too much more into the junior thing. But I do want to caution people to be aware of the fact when you take your kids and you put them in any kind of youth program, it is not a level playing field. And if you look at the kids that are in it, you're going to see a great deal of physical difference between, you know, even for the same age groups. It's the reason they use age groups in youth sports. It's an attempt to try to level the playing field a little bit, but it's a very imperfect one.
00:29:19
Speaker
Well, and I think to sort of segue back into talking about overtraining and in general, and maybe we can use this as a further segue to our own experiences. But I think one of the things that can be a, when we talk about warning signs or red flags, a big one is when an athlete makes a big step upward in their training. And I'm talking, you know, on a macro scale.
00:29:46
Speaker
It doesn't necessarily have to be in terms of a significant performance that bumps them to a new level, you know, so that the cat three cyclists just suddenly in cat two after training, but sometimes it could be and I think, you know, I know this was my experience with my first over training instance and you might have
00:30:05
Speaker
Stories about this as well When an athlete makes a renewed or an increased commitment to training, you know Maybe they have more time available or they've you know a person's graduated college and now they're gonna pursue this thing full-time or somebody but but the point being that you
00:30:23
Speaker
you double down on your energies to train. And while you might mentally be ready to be doing that, your body doesn't necessarily recognize that adaptation has occurred. And so you can get the cart well before the horse in that regard.
Personal Overtraining Experiences
00:30:39
Speaker
And I think, I know my first experience in overtraining was exactly that, where I had
00:30:45
Speaker
I had been training at a relatively stable, consistent level through my college years. And then when I graduated college, I said, well, I want to become a ski racer full time. I want to chase this dream. And I had all the time in the world to train.
00:31:02
Speaker
I worked an hourly job and then I just focused on training. And so I dove in headfirst into thinking, well, I've been training 500 hours, now I need to train 800 hours. And in addition to 800 hours, I need to be including intensity and heart strength and
00:31:18
Speaker
You know all these these mistakes that we now talk about as being the classics. I made them Yeah, I looked at what the the top skiers were doing and I said well I'll do that and I'll do this and and I'll do all these other things and I wasn't nearly ready for it, but because I had a
00:31:36
Speaker
Because i had a certain degree of fitness i was able to go deep enough into that process i could fake it and even see returns me i have i have old training logs of that time where i was living in bozeman and i would be doing these time trials up to the college letter on the hill and.
00:31:55
Speaker
and a roller ski time trial. And every month I'd do these time trials and I'd see an improvement. I just thought, ah, training's working. And I was so proud that I'd figured this out. And then, yeah, the wheels fell off. It's interesting. I'm sure there was a single workout that did it. I know there were some races that I did early season that really went south, but I remember very distinctly my first conversation with you
00:32:21
Speaker
about that situation and I had no clue what was going on because again, all those signs, all those markers leading up to that point seemed positive and it synced in my mind with what I thought should be happening. I'd made this transition from college, I'd made a commitment and provided myself the means and time to train more and so in my mind, up until this cataclysmic fall, I thought,
00:32:50
Speaker
It it all made sense. It made sense that I should be performing better and doing more training and all of that and it and it's synced But but then it all fell apart. Yeah, that's and so Another one of Canova's little Sayings is that the best training is the least training that it takes to get the results and I think that especially in
00:33:16
Speaker
these types of events that, that many of our listeners are attracted to these things that last for many hours at a time and sometimes days, days long, it's hard to believe that you can actually adequately prepare by doing a little bit less training than, you know, and I think in the ultra endurance world, this whole, and I've, I've written quite a few words on this, you know, there's an article on over training on the website for anybody who's interested in reading more about it, but yeah,
00:33:46
Speaker
It's kind of the elephant in the room in the ultra endurance world, I believe, because these long duration
00:33:55
Speaker
training sessions that are necessary to some extent to prepare for long duration types of events. Those are some of the most demanding on us metabolically and on our nervous system and everything else. And they take some, they're hard to recover from. And it's hard to believe that maybe you need to do a little less of that stuff. And I think what I want to get to in a bit here is talking about
00:34:17
Speaker
how a person can monitor for over-training and be sure that their wheels won't come off unexpectedly like they did for you and for me. I think that in my case, and probably to some extent in your case, it was hubris and greed, those were the two factors that like, boy, look at this, I'm just getting better and better and better and I'm such an incredible human being that I can handle all this stuff even though I've never been this fit in my life.
00:34:46
Speaker
I'm supposed to be here. In retrospect, it seems so foolish, but at the time it seems so reinforcing and so positive that it kind of compels us to keep going down that pathway. In my experience, similarly, in the olden days, a lot of the better skiers in the US
00:35:08
Speaker
We used to venture to Australia in August and September and be on snow down there so that when we came back, we could transition very quickly onto snow back in the Northern Hemisphere. And so it was pretty, during those years, there would be a lot of the European teams would come down there too. And one summer when I was there,
00:35:32
Speaker
training the most I'd ever trained. I was training, you know, 25 plus hours a week. I was doing, you know, one or two hard workouts and some weeks I had a race in there because that's their winter time. So there's racing season down there and all these, you know, top European skiers were there. So, and I was like you going, I can't believe how fit I am. And I was beating guys from the world cup that I, you know,
00:35:56
Speaker
Never should have been beating and and I had I came away from that feeling very reinforced like oh, this is great This is going so I went home and got back into my training routine once I got home and I continued the same Thinking okay. This was the magic sauce that I've just been applying more in the center I'm just gonna keep doing that and you know, I may have told this story and if I have
00:36:22
Speaker
in public, I apologize if you've heard it before, but it scarred me for life and so I have to repeat it here. And that is that I went into that fall season and I was having the races of my life.
00:36:38
Speaker
you know, top five and all the big tryout races and qualifying for World Cup races and that sort of thing. And that was the, the pre-Olympic year, the year before the Olympics. And they were, they usually have a big race at the Olympic venue for everyone to test, check out the courses. And I qualified for that team. And so leading into that, I was doing really well. And then there was a Christmas break before we went up to Canmore in Canada, where the Olympics were going to be held. And, um,
00:37:07
Speaker
By the time we, excuse me, before we went to Canmore, no, we went to Canmore and I had just completely crap races. I couldn't get out of my own way. I was just way off the pace and I couldn't figure out what was going on. And then we went to US national championships, which was going to be the selection for world championships. And my best finish was 47th place.
00:37:32
Speaker
And so I had gone from being a superstar to being, you know, and also ran cannon fodder. Yeah. Uh, in a matter of like two weeks. And this is something that we see with athletes when the performance starts to drop away, they start to notice a decrease in their performance. They will often think, Oh, something is missing from my training. You got to double down.
00:37:55
Speaker
more intensity, more volume, whatever it is, that it's just a fitness issue. Well, it's not a fitness issue anymore. It's a fatigue issue. And that's the problem. Trying to recognize that. And that doubling down you were just mentioning is the problem. And I've seen it happen. We both have seen it happen many times with athletes where they or their coach don't recognize the symptoms of over-training. They think this person is actually under-trained.
00:38:20
Speaker
And that they just, let's do a couple more time trials this week, you know, before the race on the weekend, because that'll just whip you into good shape. And instead it just, you know, the bottom falls completely out. And so I think that, you know, these, these types of, what we're trying to give people here is some context to over-training, like what we've experienced, what we've seen, things you should be monitoring for you that are listed in listeners and what are they, um, what kind of stuff did we notice?
00:38:48
Speaker
you know like the fact that we were feeling invincible yeah and then literally with often within days you will go from having some of the best performances of your life to wondering what happened i can't even get out of my own way now
00:39:04
Speaker
And I think that's such a shocking thing that for many athletes, when that happens, they, they're unwilling to admit that they might be in this overtrained state, that that might be what's happened because the consequences they know are for pretty dire when this happens. And so they'll, they'll try to fake it, try to keep, you know, coming back. I mean, this happened to a mutual friend of ours, you know, just a few years ago, trying out for the Olympics.
00:39:31
Speaker
And, you know, he came to me in an over-trained state and I said, boy, this is what you need to do. He didn't do it. And what he did, he rested for like 10 days or something. And then he went right back into the same hard training program he had been doing that had gotten him in an over-trained state before. And he found himself in an even worse over-trained state very quickly. Well, and I think that, yeah, and I think it's important to reiterate
00:39:57
Speaker
because we're now with the, with the benefit of hindsight, both for our own foolhardy experiences on ourselves and also in coaching other people, it's, it feels remarkably clear. You know, I, I'm not to say that I'll never fall into that trap again, neither with myself or with another athlete. I hope I don't, but I think that the reason over training syndrome is such a pervasive, uh, threat in endurance training is because the,
00:40:25
Speaker
The symptoms and and the decisions that you need to make to prevent those symptoms are it's really nuanced and and it's not it's not clear. So because we're talking about so this idea of overreaching, you know, the the more friendly cousin to over training is is a
00:40:43
Speaker
relatively normal part of training, you know, you basically expect that you're going to be in an overreach state periodically through a macro cycle. And, you know, and we talk a lot about rest and recovery and, and that's, that's well understood. And I think for most athletes, it's acknowledged that, yeah, I need to rest at times and I'm a responsible athlete. So I think then when we talk about these circumstances with athletes that we know of or ourselves, where,
00:41:12
Speaker
we recognize my race results plummeted for a week or my performance is dropped i should take a rest that's us following the path that we're making those decisions based on the heuristics that we're used to but with over training it.
00:41:30
Speaker
It's almost like the damage has been done at that point. And I think that is really the challenging and insidious nature of it. There's a reason why we still don't have, we know somewhat how to prevent it to a degree, and it's basically behaving conservatively. But treading on the knife's edge, there's just no real roadmap because
00:41:55
Speaker
Once you have that week, you say you had the performances up at Canmore that suddenly dropped you from top five to 40th. You were done. At that point, you were done. The towel was thrown and a week or two weeks of rest, we're not gonna bring you back. And I remember- It took me three months. I finished off the-
00:42:18
Speaker
The season at the end of the season, I had one or two good races, but I basically rested for almost two or three months, of course. And this is another thing we should talk about. Maybe I want to let you finish your thought process. But something I want to touch on is when you have to stop training because you're over trained.
00:42:35
Speaker
you are going to lose fitness. And that's the double whammy of this whole thing is not only coming into this being really tired, but if you have to stop training for three months to get rested again, once you come back, you're not going to be very fit. Right. It's not pushing, you're not pushing pause. And I think it's
00:42:55
Speaker
I remember I remember you telling me I think the first, you know, that first round when I when we connected when I had no idea what was going on and you very succinctly told me I was overtrained. I think I remember you reassuring me and saying, look, you need to stop now. You can't you shouldn't do anything. You should you certainly shouldn't go to US national championships in two weeks, which I did. And prove me right. Yeah. I love being right.
00:43:20
Speaker
acted like a three-legged donkey in deep slush. But I do remember what you said is like, look, you know, all this training that you did, it's not all a wash, right? Like, you know, there was still down the road when you are recovered.
00:43:37
Speaker
there will still be gains sitting under the surface that you're not gonna be your best self but don't despair as if the whole year is shot and i think that's another thing that that were.
00:43:51
Speaker
that we are compelled to push forward in light of is this idea that if we don't keep going, if we don't keep charging ahead, that we're going to lose the ground we've made. This Sisyphean task of training just seems like the only thing that matters. And if we falter and stop, then the rock rolls back over us. Yeah. Well, and I think that comes with
00:44:13
Speaker
you know, I use, I mentioned this to a lot of the folks I coach and talk with, is people who are attracted to endurance sports are type A personalities. They want more. I mean, more is almost always going to be better for them. You know, they're perfectionists. They're looking to achieve these really high goals. And that is a dangerous personality type to mix with this. It's like mixing, you know,
00:44:37
Speaker
Whatever, nitroglycerin or whatever. Things that explode. Yeah, exactly. It's like we're putting fire, putting the gasoline in the same container with all the matches here. And it just is easy for those folks to ignore the signs, be hubristic, be greedy, and all of those kinds of things that can lead you into this state.
00:45:01
Speaker
We as a culture we as an endurance athlete population that are pretty much predisposed to being type a We have to be especially aware of this I think so that we are on our toes Which is why you know, we've written so many thousands of words on this while we're doing this talk right now Because we see it so often and it's you know, I was reading There's actually for people who are really really interested in over training There is a essentially a textbook called over training and sport
Prevalence of Overtraining in Endurance Sports
00:45:30
Speaker
It's available on Amazon. It's 480 pages of all the research that's ever been done on overtraining. Sadly, there's no secrets are revealed in there. While it's interesting reading for somebody who's into the details of the technical stuff, I don't recommend it for bedside reading. You're not going to find the answers in there about what to do when you're overtraining or even how to prevent overtraining. You can't shed any light on that.
00:45:59
Speaker
Talking about how common this is, in that textbook I was just talking about, there were a number of studies done to look at the prevalence of overtraining in endurance sports and among elite runners, 65% of
00:46:13
Speaker
elite runners have experienced overtraining during their career. And I would say that's comparable. Um, this was elite distance runner. So from middle distance to the marathon there, that's the population they were looking at. But I would say from our anecdotal experience, that's probably pretty close to the same thing in, in cross country skiing. And I would bet you that in ultra running, it might even be higher. Yeah. Cause the, yeah, the requirements or the perceived requirements to perform in ultra distance events,
00:46:43
Speaker
are huge, the volume alone.
Challenges in Detecting Overtraining
00:46:46
Speaker
And if you combine trying to do that level of volume that you believe is appropriate with any deviation in appropriate intensity, not keeping the easy days easy and the hard days hard, or just running kind of hard all the time.
00:47:03
Speaker
you know, social running or whatnot. There's yeah, talk about knife search. Yeah. That'll put you over for sure. Well, let's talk a bit about, I mean, we know that the whole point of endurance training is to make yourself tired because that will force your body to adapt to this fatigue.
00:47:20
Speaker
That's what makes distinguishing proper training from improper training so difficult is this balancing the fatigue budget. I would guess I would call it here in and I think that there are some useful tools that I think we can give folks besides these.
00:47:39
Speaker
hindsight red flags that we've talked about, you know, like if you feel like Superman, you better take some days to go really easy. Um, if you're, you know, you're having these PRs and your workouts over and over again, that's another, another sign, um, that you're starting, you're, you're having to hit the cliff yet. So that's a good thing. It's better to put the brakes on a bit early. And, you know, like I said, much better to be slightly under trained.
00:48:05
Speaker
or a bit under trained than it is to even be tiny bit over trained. But some of the things, people will try to use, and we certainly have attempted to figure out, is there some metrics that we can apply? Some things we can measure, not just how we feel that's very subjective, but are there things we can use that we can measure?
00:48:29
Speaker
And so one of the things that falls into that realm is heart rate variability. And disappointingly, because I would love it if heart rate variability would work for this purpose,
00:48:46
Speaker
Unfortunately, it doesn't. If you're interested in reading more detail about that, there's also quite an extensive article on why we don't recommend people rely on heart rate variability to control or monitor their training.
00:49:01
Speaker
And I'll try to summarize it here briefly. And that is that if you were collecting data in a real world situation and you found a 95% correlation between the data and the two sets of data, you'd say, wow, that's an amazing correlation. We should rely on this data set. But the problem in the real world with overtraining is,
00:49:26
Speaker
That 95% correlation is looking backwards in time, and you need to know whether you should train today or not to train today, or rest, take it easy, whatever. And 95% isn't good enough, because as we know, heart rate variability will produce quite a few false positives and false negatives. And it will tell you you should rest when you probably don't need to rest, and it will also tell you
00:49:53
Speaker
not to rest when you know you need a rest. And so even though in hindsight, in retrospect, it's pretty darn accurate, it's not accurate enough to make a decision from day to day. Yeah. And I know my own experience with using a metric that involved heart rate variability was when
00:50:15
Speaker
uh when we were working together and I was I don't it wasn't full and over train over training but it was a it was a period of pretty significant fatigue and we were using a basically a heart rate variability an orthostatic test uh that was built into the heart rate monitor that that we used and it essentially involved waking up in the morning and
00:50:36
Speaker
Laying in bed putting on your heart rate monitor and running this test protocol and you would you'd be laying down and it would measure it for one or two minutes and then it had you stand up and it measure the orthostatic response right the
00:50:49
Speaker
the sympathetic response to going from a prone to a supine to a standing position. And depending on how significant that response was, it would then give you this score and say, you're in a sympathetic state of fatigue, you need to rest or you're good. It wasn't too terrible of a response and you can go train
00:51:14
Speaker
And the whole, the premise of this test was that you were supposed to go through a several week baseline period of, you know, during a low period of training, you would be doing this test every day. So that had a data set to build off of. And the problem that I experienced with it was I brought too much of my own neuroses to bear on the test because, you know, we would use it and it gave us, it gave you a numerical value to your day. So, you know, typically I think.
00:51:41
Speaker
Number two, men, you're fine to go train. Number three, men proceed with caution. Four, as you're really tired. On the other hand, one, men, you're incredibly rested, go out and have a- It's a good day to go hard, a good day to race. Yeah, go get it. We would record those diligently, but when I was in that state of fatigue, I was so nervous and anxious every time I took that test in the morning because
00:52:06
Speaker
It was, I was so consumed with the need, the desire to want to train, to improve. I felt like I was falling behind. It was the fall and we're leading toward this racing season. And I'm pretty convinced that that skewed that test every single time I did it because my anxiety would result in a sympathetic response in my body. And that would in turn be read in the, by the, by the test. And so I was, I was disrupting it every time at the human element.
00:52:34
Speaker
was overriding any potential benefit I could have drawn. I mean, if you would have monitored me without my knowledge, then that might have given some relevance. But that, I think, is a really significant problem with these measures is that
00:52:50
Speaker
in a very controlled environment, they can derive some benefit. But when you bring the human person to bear, and particularly when you bring all the stresses and anxieties and challenges of being that type A person that you're talking about and trying to maximize and wanting to get back out there, it's really difficult to get useful information. Absolutely.
00:53:19
Speaker
I think the problem, I mean, I'm no expert on heart rate variability having, I've read a lot about it. I've used it quite a few times with different people, myself, even trying to figure out if I could make it work. And my supposition as to why it's not particularly effective for the way we would like to see it used is that it's only looking at the nervous system.
00:53:43
Speaker
And there are a lot of mechanisms. One, Sam and I are going to do another talk before too long on fatigue and how it manifests and all these different types of fatigue you can undergo. But the nervous system should be the first system that's affected, but it's not the only system that's affected. And as you just pointed out, anxiety, which is a nervous response, nervous system response is going to affect this test.
00:54:09
Speaker
net badly because it's going to skew the results one way or the other. And, um, you know, you mentioned being blinded to the test and that was, you know, even the U S ski team tried this with, uh, you know, one of the most advanced heart rate variability, um, tools that's out there. And I won't mention there's several brands of these. I won't mention which one it was, but they, um,
00:54:34
Speaker
they had the skiers wear their heart rate monitors while they were sleeping. So the data would be recorded, but the coach was the only one that could see the data. And I was at a coaching conference a few years back, where the coach of Jesse Diggins, an Olympic gold medalist, they were in a series of races called the Tour de Ski, which is like a mini version of the Tour de France, where they race every day for 10 days, I believe that one day off in the middle.
00:55:04
Speaker
Um, and so it's a very, you know, physically and emotionally stressful week for them. Um, and one day, uh, the Jesse's coached coach and, and again, she's an Olympic gold medalist. So right at the top of her game, he noticed that, you know, like all the signs were red. Like this girl should not even get out of bed today, let alone go race in a world cup race that day. She won the race.
00:55:30
Speaker
And he at that point, he just said, we can't use these things. This is the kind of misinformation they're going to give because they're only looking at this one sliver. I mean,
00:55:40
Speaker
She's the kind of person who had the capacity, obviously, to overcome a huge amount of fatigue on that given day because she's mentally super strong. And when you look at this, if anybody's interested in looking at the article, we present scientific data and evidence of studies that have been done that show the ineffectiveness
00:56:00
Speaker
athletes trying to use this as a tool so again I wish I didn't have to be the bearer of bad news but I would not go out and spend extra money on a heart rate variability machine I would not try to use the one that's built into your watch probably I just I think there are other ways you can monitor for
00:56:20
Speaker
for over training that orthostatic test that sam mentioned a little bit ago you can do a very simple we we often i often send have people i've worked with do this test very simple step test you know you know what your body feels like going up and down the stairs every day
00:56:37
Speaker
you know, can you bound up the stairs two at a time and get to the top and feel really fresh? Or when you get to the top, you know, are you plodding up the stairs and you get to the top and you're a little short of breath and your legs are flushed? Like, okay, that's a pretty good test right there of your current state of fatigue. Another very simple test, the one that I was encouraged to use by a USD team doctor
00:57:01
Speaker
many years ago was a similar step test that we'd step up and down onto. It doesn't matter what it is. It can be a stair or a small bench or stool, whatever, for a minute or so until your heart rate gets elevated. Again, it doesn't even matter how much. It's just going to go from resting up to 110, 120. You're not trying to do something hard, but you're trying to
00:57:23
Speaker
see what's going to happen when you do introduce a little load and then when you get the heart rate up to let's say it stabilizes at 110 you're stepping up and down off of this stair you immediately turn around and sit down and see how fast it recovers you know a minute later what's your heart rate and if you record that as sam was pointing out if you do that in a early season or when you're really in a west rested straight state for several days you get a good baseline of not only what you're you know what that
00:57:52
Speaker
one minute drop heart rate will look like then you can use that later when you're in a more fatigue space line and see oh man i'm normally a drop fifty beats in a minute and now i'm only dropping thirty that's right there is a simple sign little red
00:58:10
Speaker
flag for you that maybe you should take it easy for a couple of days here because you're probably in some kind of slightly overreached state right now and this would be a way to control that and make sure you don't just keep hammering away with that low-level fatigue. And again it warrants an entire different conversation or additional conversation about fatigue but I think that a takeaway here it can be that there
00:58:40
Speaker
there is no one panacea to identify, you know, in terms of identifying, certainly over training, but even in some cases overreaching, it's about having this collection of data points or flags that you can look to. And that's what coming, you know, with experience, with, you know, observation of your own or a coach or someone to keep track of that and be looking at all these different factors.
00:59:10
Speaker
But i think i think it'd be good you know maybe a couple of takeaways for this in terms of preventing over training before the over training occurs and also i think we should i want to give i know we have a list of symptoms in the book.
Strategies for Sustainable Training
00:59:24
Speaker
and in that article on the website. But I think a quick rundown of a few of the symptoms that if you've got more than one or two of these symptoms, you should probably be considering that you need to take a bit of a rest. But yeah, so go ahead with any other takeaways you might have. Yeah. Well, so one I thought of when we were talking a little bit about
00:59:47
Speaker
You know workouts and training and taking big steps upward is as a kind of general rule I think in turn if you're planning your own training or if you're you're operating off a training plan is to take small bites and you know, I think when Certainly when I've found success in coaching people and I think the successful method that we found when you were when you were coaching me is
01:00:09
Speaker
Is that it you don't need to have this shotgun approach of five different high quality workouts high quality being you know intensity or rigorous strength routine in a week you know it.
01:00:24
Speaker
And you, you talked about this with Luke Nelson on the podcast where you really, there was a lot of reliance on this muscular endurance workout. And that's all I gains. I think for, for me, we found, you know, this, you know, one or two really targeted intensity sessions were enough to get the, get the load that we needed. And then the rest of the training was really supporting that. And, and I think if, if there's, if there's a takeaway in terms of planning ahead for people is to consider that.
01:00:52
Speaker
You don't need to throw in everything in the kitchen sink into your training plan to try to get the benefits. So much of what you need is just time. Endurance training is a long process and a quality workout done progressively over time.
01:01:09
Speaker
will exceed in gains that which can be gotten in the short term doing three or four high intensity sessions where you might see those short term benefits and see employment increases but it's not going to last and it's probably going to push you deep. It has that risk of pushing over the edge pretty easily for sure.
01:01:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think that certainly one of the things that we, you and I discovered coaching when I was, we were joined at the hip when I was coaching you basically. And we saw that, you know, sometimes we might not repeat a workout for 10, 12 days and you'd come back and you'd feel so good in that next workout. We might have, we were, we tended to do two types of intensity. We had one,
01:01:53
Speaker
super high short duration or short and short duration very high intensity speed work then we had one that was more high intensity endurance type work and what we found is there was kind of a Symbiotic effect one of those they each seem to help the other and so that if we hit you know One of those every ten days We seem to see we got really good gains out of that and that was an eye-opener for me because I had been
01:02:22
Speaker
kind of of that kitchen sink school of belief that we got to, if we don't do one of these every week, it's going to really, and we're not going to have this kind of correct training stimulus. So we got to have one of these and one of these and one of these all in the week. And pretty soon you got way too much hard work in one week and then you are going to, you know,
01:02:41
Speaker
At some point the wheels will come off if you if you keep on that route So I think that's a that's a very good point sound to bring that up. That's again part of the greedy thing, right? No, it's just you get greedy. We think oh you go I can you could do this or I can do that So I think that's that's another You know way to avoid getting yourself into an overtrained state. I think what you mentioned about progression You know our bodies don't like
01:03:08
Speaker
dramatic big changes. But if we give them very gradual increments of change, they will adapt to it given enough time. We're really good at adapting to things, but we don't like being hit between the eyes of the sledgehammer. This is one of the problems with the weekend warrior type training method is that you go out on the weekends and you just
01:03:31
Speaker
hammer big, go really hard, way more than you really have the capacity to handle, and then you're destroyed for five days in between, and then you go back out and do it again the next weekend. You do that over and over and over again, and you're probably going to get less fit, not more fit from something like that because it's just a shock to your body, your system. Yeah, you're a tough guy or a tough person.
01:03:53
Speaker
You can handle it. You can go out there and do two, eight hour days on the weekends, big climbs, big runs or whatever. And you feel like, I'm tough. I can do this. But are you getting better? Are you progressing? That's probably not very likely using that system. Yeah. Yeah.
01:04:09
Speaker
Yeah. And I think like so much else of what we talk about, much of this can be distilled down to the basic premise of you keep your easy days easy so that you can have your hard days be hard. And if you abide by that principle and the principle of making those hard days
01:04:30
Speaker
you and but robust in number then you're gonna have long term success it's not being greedy it's being patient with the process it's knowing that.
01:04:42
Speaker
The bulk of your training as an endurance athlete, 80 to 90% of your training is going to be that easy, low heart rate, sustainable work. If you feel like you look back at your last several weeks and you think more of that training was hard than easy, then that's a big red flag. If you're looking at workouts, whether they're planned or whether
01:05:04
Speaker
Just you look at what the intention of that workout was meant to be and you realize that it's not in sync with the execution, you know, so I think I and I and just a pot I think that's a that's a good approach to is to have a plan for each workout Not just I'm gonna go run for an hour But I'm gonna go run for an hour and the intent of this workout is to be is to make it feel good I want to end feeling like I could go for another hour
01:05:28
Speaker
And just adding that little bit of intention at the end of the sentence gives you some guidance that will help buffer against being overzealous or meeting a friend halfway through the run and goosing the throttle a bit and pushing hard and realizing you overdid it that day because one day is not a big deal, but eight of those in a row, three or four of those in a row starts you on this path that could be long-term detriment.
Overtraining Symptoms and Medical Challenges
01:05:54
Speaker
And sadly, you know, I know we've mentioned this earlier in passing, but we have, we have both witnessed career ending overtraining problems for people. I mean, they literally never regained their fitness. And I think in that article on the, that's on our website, I got help from Mike Foote and Luke Nelson, both from my coach who have been a long time elite,
01:06:22
Speaker
Ultra runners and have lots of experience knowing all these other people in the ultra running world and they got some Really sad stories out of some of their friends got they wrote some some little Vignettes of how they got themselves into over trained states and I said some of them never came back from that And so I think that's it's this is we're playing with fire here it can you know
01:06:45
Speaker
It's not your normal, this is not your father's, your dad's fatigue. This is a new kind of fatigue you probably have never experienced before and I can promise you, you don't want to experience it. But a couple, real quickly, let's talk to some of the symptoms that maybe you've had that I know are common, but certainly,
01:07:06
Speaker
Interrupted sleep, poor sleep is one of the first, I think, giveaways. Irritableness, moodiness, sort of lowered sex drive.
01:07:19
Speaker
Either being really overly hungry or having no appetite. Those are other symptoms of overtraining But others that you know, yeah, I think you know kind of you know You can sort of umbrella a lot of it under the just malaise, you know, I think when we think about
01:07:36
Speaker
Short term fatigue overreaching, you know this this this idea of sympathetic Overreaching or fatigue that is often accompanied by the opposites of what you just mentioned so you might be ravenous and and You you know you're you have sort of localized fatigue in the muscles perhaps but but with over training I remember it was just this
01:08:02
Speaker
sense of total malaise. It wasn't that my muscles were sore, they just had no pop. I couldn't go out and make myself go fast or hard. I just wasn't able to do it. And I remember when you described to me that first go around what was actually happening, because I had no clue, I can't remember if you described it this way or if it just sat in my mind as this idea of it being a real,
01:08:31
Speaker
neurologic fatigue and I sort of created this image in my mind of these neural pathways basically being fried. So the signaling from the brain to the given muscles to do work, the phone lines weren't connected and that's exactly what it felt like. You tell me to jump up three feet in the air and I'm going to jump one foot because I just cannot create that effort.
01:08:58
Speaker
I think one symptom or maybe a set of symptoms to look for is just that inability to exert and then accompany in that certainly I think the mood and just emotional gloominess is a real prominent one as well.
01:09:22
Speaker
that we too often attribute to other things and need further introspection to realize that it's stemming from a common cause. Yeah, and one of the interesting things that often happens with people that are over trained is they'll go to their local doctor, their primary care physician, and they'll
01:09:45
Speaker
That person, an over-trained athlete, is fitter than 95% or more of the people that that physician sees on a regular basis. So they're going to do all the normal tests and they're going to say, there is nothing wrong with you.
01:10:00
Speaker
Because why is your heart rate so low? Yeah, exactly. And you're, you're wondering, well, doc, you know, I was out to try to do my intervals today and my legs just wouldn't move. I didn't feel very good. And they're going to go, I'm worried about my patients who can't get up and down the stairs. And you're talking about being able to do intervals. So get out of my office. I don't even want to talk to you. And, and not only are they going to be, you know, maybe they're not, they're going to be sympathetic. Perhaps they might not be very sympathetic because you're so healthy, but
01:10:27
Speaker
They're not well trained in this kind. This is not their area of expertise. And often the kind of medical tests that would need to be done are, it's not normal. They're not gonna take, they're gonna not do a normal red blood cell count and find out anything. And even if they did something like a testosterone to cortisol ratio test,
01:10:52
Speaker
if you don't have some history of it, if you don't have a long data set of what that might be for you. And we were talking about this before the call, or before we started this, that I've had athletes who will be in what ended up being short-term fatigue state, but they would, out of concern, they would rush to their physician and have a testosterone check or testosterone in cortisol. And then they would present me with these numbers
01:11:19
Speaker
And they would compare them to a range that they were given, you know, the range of a healthy male ages 40 to 49. Right. And they'd say, well, I'm somewhere, I'm on the low end of this range. What's wrong with me? Well, we have no reason to, you know, to expect that you would be, you know,
01:11:36
Speaker
there versus here in this range without knowing where you are, just like with the orthostatic or the step test. You don't have a baseline. What's your baseline when you're healthy and rested and at a functional base state? It's really difficult to draw any solid, reliable assertion from that. And that's why I think this talk has kind of wandered all over the place and we're talking about how to
01:12:02
Speaker
First of all, identify over training and distinct from overreaching. We're talking about how to monitor your training so you don't get into an overtrained state. And then we should wrap this up by talking about what to do once you find yourself in an overtrained state, if you should unfortunately find yourself there. But the reason where this has been such a wandering conversation is
01:12:24
Speaker
There aren't any hard and fast, you're not going to go to your doctor and have them diagnosed. There's no easy diagnosis. Unless they have been involved with high level athletes a lot in their career, they probably will have never seen overtraining. They won't, you know, I've dealt with primary care physicians working with different athletes that I've coached who've never even heard of it, heard of it. They don't even know what it is. So they don't know what to look for.
01:12:50
Speaker
There's all these other things like chronic fatigue syndrome and rhabdomyelosis and Rett syndrome. There's a lot of things that result in fatigue, but this is one that it resulted in this low energy chronic fatigue state.
01:13:10
Speaker
but this is one that comes almost exclusively from training stress. Although we should point out that stress is stress in one's life and your body's reaction to that stress, if it's work or home life or whatever it is,
01:13:27
Speaker
that's going to compound on top of the training stress. And so just changing in the training stress though is the one thing you probably have the most control over.
Recovery and Return to Fitness
01:13:38
Speaker
You know, if you're, if you have work stress or other life stresses, in many cases, a lot of that is going to be out of your control. You know, you have to go to work or you have these obligations with family or whatever it is.
01:13:53
Speaker
Whereas with training you can on a day to day basis go, you know, I think I need to take it easy here for a day or two. You can eliminate that stress right away. And that seems like, yeah, when you talk about, okay, what, here you are, you have arrived at an understanding that you are over-trained. What is the first thing you can do? You can stop. You can just stop. There's training will, training will no longer help you. Uh, the best thing you can do is, is to rest and, and right alongside that, cause I think your point about,
01:14:20
Speaker
Mental and emotional stress is really crucial you can As cliche as it sounds you can accept the fact that you acceptance is the first step you know you you are over trained and and find
01:14:35
Speaker
develop strategies that can help you stay relaxed about how you're going to move forward in recovering from that overtraining. And there are myriad things that you could consider making rest as intentional as your training. And we'll talk about this when we talk about fatigue in another podcast, but
01:15:02
Speaker
We often view recovery as the absence of training, but I think it actually needs to be other way around. I think we need to really focus on recovery as being a very intentional process. Active recovery, something you're doing intentionally, right? Right. You always drink this amount of water, at least during the day, and you eat this well, and you focus on getting good sleep. All these things, you can
01:15:26
Speaker
you can accelerate to a degree the recovery from over-training by being positive and intentional and systematic about how you go into that phase of recovery. Yeah. And so maybe in closing, but if we've got other things to talk about, I'm fine with that. Advice for people that are in an over-trained state. My
01:15:52
Speaker
just like I told you that time when you came to me over-trained stop, just stop training. And that's what I tell everybody. And I can't tell you how many since uphill athlete got going. I'm sure I have interacted with a hundred people who have found themselves or think they're an over-trained state. And my first advice is stop. And the reason you need to stop your training right now or yesterday is that
01:16:20
Speaker
your body is no longer in a position to be able to absorb any of that kind of training stress. What was once a perfectly absorbable training stress is no longer tolerable by your body when you're in an overtrained state.
01:16:35
Speaker
So no, you know, that's why you have to stop and even you might even be going for a walk is too much for you if you're really over-trained and you need to bed rest almost and you need a very low level of activity. Um, often very low intensity, like, you know, 20 minute walks and things like that can be a good, uh, regenerative activity for even for a healthy trained athlete.
01:17:03
Speaker
But even for people who are in an overtrained state, that can be a useful thing. But you need to decide that and nobody's going to be able to help you with that by yourself. And how much stress can your body handle during this overtrained period? Because I want to go reemphasize this.
01:17:19
Speaker
you can't tolerate training stress anymore. So trying to sneak, I've had lots of people say, well, can I sneak out, you know, like, can I go out and you know, every other, it's been four days. I feel I, maybe I'm better. Yeah. What if I just did, you know, three days this week of training and say, no, you're no training is all you can handle right now.
01:17:38
Speaker
Yeah, and this is once you've gone over the cliff and you find yourself in an overtrained state. We've tried today to talk about how to keep away from the edge of that cliff. We try to stay well back from the edge of that cliff in our coaching by having people be a little undertrained rather than overtrained. But in terms of what you can do, I think Sam's right, you've got to accept it. You have to
01:18:07
Speaker
You find another hobby, find something else that you can put some energy into that's not physically demanding. And just realize that the faster and harder you rest, the quicker you're going to get back. And there's no, you know, people will often ask me, well, how long is this going to take? And I all know when they're in a pretty bad state, I will tell them you need to give it at least a month and then begin to reintroduce a tiny, tiny sliver.
01:18:37
Speaker
If something you would never have considered training, you know, maybe you're going to go out for, you know, a 30 minute brisk walk and then see how you feel the next day. Yeah. And then, you know, maybe rest a day and then try another 30 minute brisk walk. Do that a few times. It's like, okay, I'm, I do, this isn't making me particularly tired. And then you might say, okay, try a little bit of a run this day, but you don't want to be jumping back into training, like where you left off or anything like that, because,
01:19:05
Speaker
even you won't be prepared for it. You might not be in shape for it. You probably won't be in shape for it, but also you could just push yourself right over the cliff again. You might be approaching a recovered state and then you go out and do a couple of real workouts.
01:19:21
Speaker
and you go right back into that fatigue state. So proceed with extreme caution with this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Take it, take it slow. And I think be optimistic that when you are intentional with your rest, you can and will recover and, and you can get back to where you were and you'll, and you'll know more for it. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Once you've been into that over train space, you will do everything you can to avoid it. Um,
01:19:52
Speaker
Well, if folks have questions about overtraining and they can always write into the forum, we're happy to try to help folks
Conclusion and Support Resources
01:19:59
Speaker
because we both have very soft spots in our heart for people that find themselves in this position. Very, very empathetic. So we'll do what we can, but all that we will probably be able to do is tell you to stop. But you might just, you know, you mean maybe you need to have
01:20:17
Speaker
an authority figure tell you that, that's fine, we're happy to help. But good luck with your training, everybody, and hopefully we don't get those emails and phone calls and messages on the forum from you. Yeah, yeah, be safe and smart. Alright, thanks everyone. Talk to you next time. Thanks for joining us today. For more information about what we do, please go to our website, uphillathlete.com.