At what point do you know you have overtrained?

It's difficult to answer that really.

You can be mentally overtrained if you are exhausted just thinking about "another day of hard work" and somewhat dreading training. This doesn't have to be from overtraining, and this may not necessarily be a bad thing, since some days you feel like ****, get to the gym, after your warmups things feel a lot better and you are glad you went. However you can be feeling exhausted, around a big event in your life, or have something sad happen, this is a form of mental overtraining, and you usually become rundown and fall ill. Loss of appetite, lethargy and general depression are some symptoms you might see.

Physically overtrained is usually easy to see from a lot of injuries, minor or major, accumulating over time. This can be from not using any restorative methods, bad technique, or just plain overdoing it. A lot of people just overdo it, train too much, try to do too many things, have some benefit but their performance does not improve in a fashion that justifies their training changes or increases. A good example of why training "more" or the thinking of "well somebody out there is training harder than me", is running 10 miles a day twice a day, that is "more", but is it going to help you? Sure, a bit. Is it the smart and efficient thing to do? No. Physical overtraining is usually associated with not training in an efficient and beneficial manner, and ignoring thing like niggles, output performance etc.

With a good outlook, and an intelligent training plan you can still train VERY hard and get optimal results, without overtraining, just a lot of people are stuck in their ways, refuse to try anything differently and will just get stuck in a loop, eventually not making progress in any areas. Sure, what you have been doing may have worked in the past or still work to an extent, but is it the BEST thing you could be doing?

 

if you feel great your not overtraining

 

Happened to me about 6 months ago and i just felt that, what i could do with ease or do well, i couldn't do without struggling.

30 mins into an hour session and i just couldn't go any more.

Mentally and physically i was drained.

I took a week off. In that week i ate whatever i wanted, payed no attention to fitness magazines/forums etc.

Went back the following week and i was as fresh as a daisy. Really felt revitalised.

 

This.

You think you'd be overtraining and not know it? You have no clue what overtraining is in that case.

 

Not many people will ever know this mythical "overtraining", its just one of those things that really only applies to very elite athletes or extreme cases, and most people shoulod just focus on being consistent, eating well and training hard & intelligently.

 

There is, but its such a rarity for the regular trainer that it really shouldn't be something that they worry about or fear or have in the back of their mind. "Better not train 2 days in a row, I will overtrain", complete bull****. Usually people are UNDERTRAINED when they think they are overtrianed, their bodies just aren't used to certain things and the athlete hasn't given themselves enough time to adapt and give their training program a chance to do anything. If you are a boxer, add in 2-3 strength sessions a week, you may feel a drop in performance for 2-3-4 weeks while your body adapts. Are you "overtrained" in those 3-4 weeks? No, your body is adapting. You are overtrained if you have a permanent cold, you dread the gym, you get depressed and have a loss of appetite and motivation. AND EVEN THEN, you can STILL perform at a high level. Any top level athlete who tells you he HASN'T had these symptoms at some point in his career, but continued on and things have improved, in order to achieve excellent results, then they are just plain lying or the very luckiest genetic mofos. You think Hagler in his 12 week "prison" training camps was a happy smiling man? You think he felt fresh throughout the whole 12 weeks? What about the legendary Bulgarian weightlifting team? The best coach in the world said, to a weightlifter who complained he was too sore to train, "you are a weightlifter, your body will be sore, if you were a homosexual, your ass would be sore, what do you expect". A lot of people I know take painkillers to train fully, a world record holder generally feels like turd most days but that's what got him to the top. Would other methods have worked as well if he worried about overtraining? Would he have broken world records if he listened to conventional wisdom on the matter? I have seen him pull 300kg deadlift for 3 reps, and he fully threw up at the top of every rep, but finished his set without fuss. It depends how much you want something.

Forget words like overtraining, fast twitch fibers, functional strength, that are fed into athletes the world over, educate yourself a little, find some real goals, find a plan that will lead you to these goals, and put it into action, in a consistent and focused approach. You may need to adapt things, you may need to eat more, but you will find these things out and there is no cookie cutter method for someone to say "do this it will work for the rest of your life and cover everything", it just doesn't work that way if you want to achieve any level of excellence. And if you don't, it doesn't matter what you do anyway.

An example of genuine overtraining, is a top level athlete, trying to output top level results constantly, throughout every single training session, and at some point hitting a wall mentally and physically. Ever notice how students get ill around exam times? This is partly because they are probably not eating, sleeping or taking care of themselves enough, but mostly it is just the mental fatigue and their system's exhaustion, and it manifests in immune system being weakened. I get tonsilitis, my wisdom teeth flare up, I get acne, I feel a bit depressed when I am in this state. It has nothing to do with my athletic activities though as I am nowhere near the limits of my body's capabilities currently and I know this. Soreness and general tiredness and lethargy have nothing to do with overtraining. Forgot those words and achieve excellence.

Bit of a ramble but just my thoughts on the matter.

 

I heard the best way to check if you're overtrained is abnormalities in your heart pulse rate, if it's unusually low or high this can be a symptom. Especially in the mornings it is the best indication..

 

I think that's a problematic way of determining if you're overtraining. Let's say your resting heart rate is on average around 55bpm. Then after six weeks it goes down to 50bpm. Was the decrease in resting heart rate due to your body being more fit after six weeks of training or was it due to overtraining?

Plus resting heart rates (taken just after waking up), at least mine, fluctuates so much that is not really clear cut. I'd have to prepare an excel spreadsheet and do some regression calculations and all that jazz. Plus it would probably take so many days just to notice a statistically significant deviation.

It's probably just safer to follow certain rules-of-thumb like putting in rest days in between strength/conditioning days, not running too many miles, or not putting too many hard sparring days, making sure you get enough sleep, eating clean, etc. etc. And then tweaking these rules as you go, depending on how your body responds to your particular training regimen.

 

its actually pretty hard to overtrain, most people confuse motivation with overtraining.

 

My brother’s fiancee started to go in gym and after two weeks, told me that she was overtraining and gyms fitness coach didn’t know what she was doing.

She told me that nobody should train more than two-three times per week or they risk overtraining.

 

Tell that to any successful athlete, ever.

First off its nice to read someone really motivated and giving it his all. Good job on keeping up training 5 times a week for 3 months, it takes a bit of sacrifice to do that and stay consistent.

This is a point that I was discussing with some other homeboys recently.
If you need to "switch on" beyond concentrating on the task at hand, every single time you train, in order to train well, i.e you need to psych yourself up, yell a bit, slap yourself, go balls out, EVERY single time in order to set a personal record etc, you won't be setting records for very long.
An athlete should not need to do any of these things in order to train well and get the results he needs. These things are for absolute emergencies, just like taking ephedrine, caffeine, energy drinks, listening to music, etc. The athlete should be focused and ACCEPT that what he is going to do is going to be tough, but its just a matter of getting it done. And during training, nothing is going to be perfect, otherwise why would he be training, it would be straight to competition.

I don't like that Kai Greene vid that is making the rounds, about having to be a "bad mother****er" to lift big weights, that's a very "dependant" way of training. Like people that need to get angry at work, or be pissed off with something, in order to train to their capacity. What happens when they are happy, relaxed? They don't train as hard? Also you find yourself not getting yourself psyched up for your sessions, because you realise you can't psyche yourself every session for years on end. I used to be the same, crazy focus on improving, this is what I want, lets go, etc etc and after a few months of that, you realise that it just doesn't work like that, it takes a lot longer than you may have thought, and you usually can't be as switched on as you were in the beginning all the way through. You have that inner fire and motivation, but this doesn't mean you have to have groundbreaking sessions every time or its a waste. Usually its the sessions that you get through when you are not feeling your best mentally or physically that count the most, where others would maybe skip the session or take a week off for some reason or other that really isn't an affecting factor.

You will not and cannot improve every session, if that was the case everyone would be a champion in their given sport in a year or two. The body needs time to adapt, but the mind must remain strong throughout with an unwavering focus on the ultimate goal, whatever it may be.
You seem to have a somewhat naive approach to this in that you have to improve on something EVERY session, this is fine on paper, but eventually this will become rare when you reach a decent level in your given sport. Have you competed? My suggestion to you is start competing in the sport you want to compete in, what sport is that anyway? It gives you a lot of perspective and is good for your motivation. A lot of people say they want to be top boxers, spar a few hard sessions and somehow they become more distant from boxing and eventually stop.

 

Yeah I said that to her, but when she gets something in her mind, it’s impossible to change that. :-(


But seriously speaking, I agree that overtraining is something only elite athletes have to worry about.

I would recommend keeping one rest day/very light training day per week, to give body change to recover from training but otherwise wouldn’t worry too much about overtraining