As an athlete, training is probably a part of your daily life. You work hard to stay in shape and build endurance and strength. Despite your hard work, you may notice that you’re actually performing worse instead of better. This is called overtraining.
Overtraining is a condition you develop when you exercise too hard for too long without giving your body enough time to recover. Overtraining goes far beyond sore muscles: It involves an ongoing drop in performance and affects your entire body, causing chronic fatigue, sleep disruption, and mood changes. It also raises your risk for illness.
What Causes Overtraining?
While exercise is generally good for you, too much exercise can take a toll on your body. Exercise has a “dose-response relationship,” meaning the more you work out, the better your performance will be, to a point. Beyond that point, you’re doing your body harm, and you’re not getting the normal benefits of exercise.
The limit at which your performance starts declining from exercise instead of improving is called overtraining syndrome (OTS) or burnout. You can reach the point of overtraining by exercising too much without enough recovery time between workouts. You can also reach this limit by not properly fueling your body with the calories and nutrients it needs.
The first phase of OTS is called overreaching. This is when you feel muscle soreness that’s more intense than usual, but you push through and train without resting. You can experience overreaching after several consecutive days of hard workouts. Past this point, you will begin to experience overtraining syndrome as you train without resting.
Many athletes take this decline in performance as a reason to train harder. Continuing to work out while your body goes through OTS will only do more damage to your body and make your recovery time longer. Letting your body properly recover from overtraining could take weeks or months of rest without training.
Who’s at risk for overtraining?
Anyone who exercises or plays sports is at risk for overtraining. This includes kids who focus on one sport from an early age or athletes who base their performance on races or time trials, such as runners, swimmers, or cyclists.
What Are the Symptoms of Overtraining?
Exercise-related symptoms. You may experience symptoms of overtraining that are directly related to exercise, including:
- Increased muscle soreness that gets worse the more you train
- A plateau or decline in athletic performance
- Inability to train at the level you usually do
- Too much sweating and overheating
- Feeling like your muscles are heavy or stiff, especially your legs
- Injuries that keep coming back, such as muscle sprains, stress fractures, and joint pain
- Loss of enthusiasm for exercise, or feeling like you want to skip your workouts altogether
Health-related symptoms. Other symptoms of overtraining can affect your health. Some signs to look out for include:
- Repeated illnesses, such as colds or respiratory infections
- Increase in blood pressure or resting heart rate
- Changes in skin, hair, and nails that make you appear unwell
- Digestive issues, such as diarrhea or constipation
- Irregular menstrual cycles or loss of menstruation completely
- Sudden weight loss, loss of appetite, or disordered eating
How Does Overtraining Affect the Body and Mind?
OTS can affect both your physical and mental health. Over time, it can affect your overall well-being. Some of these effects may include:
- Persistent fatigue, exhaustion, or low levels of energy
- Poor sleep or insomnia caused by not being able to relax
- A decline in motivation or self-esteem
- Signs of depression, such as loss of enjoyment in activities or moodiness
- Increased anger or confusion
- Inability to concentrate, which affects your performance at work or school
“Physiologically, overtraining has been associated with changes in stress hormones, altered immune function, increased inflammatory signaling, and shifts in nervous system balance,” says Chuck Thigpen, PhD, PT, chief clinical and strategy officer at ATI Physical Therapy in Greenville, South Carolina. Overtraining isn’t just “too much exercise,” Thigpen says. It’s an ongoing imbalance between stress and recovery that can have short-term and long-term effects on your health.
Short-term vs. long-term effects of overtraining
Short-term effects may be hard to tell from usual post-workout stress. Short term effects such as muscle pain and stiffness, anxiety, and poor sleep may be your body’s warning signs that you need to take more time out between workouts to recover.
If you don’t heed initial warnings, OTS can affect your parasympathetic nervous system. This system controls your body’s functions during times of rest. It also manages automatic bodily functions you don’t have to think about or control, such as your heartbeat or digestion.
How to Recover From Overtraining
The main ingredient to recovery from overtraining is rest. This means that you need to limit or even stop training for a certain period. The time will vary depending on the sport and the level of activity, but recovery usually takes several weeks. For severe OTS, recovery can take several months.
As you recover from overtraining, you can still do a bit of low-intensity aerobic exercise to stay fit and healthy while avoiding your normal workouts. These should be short-interval workouts that are not related to the sport that you normally train for. Once your symptoms have completely gone away, you will be ready to ease back into a training schedule.
Your doctor and coach can help you decide when to get back to training and create guidelines for you. Getting back into training will be a slow process because you don’t want to push your body too hard. A good tip is to start at 50% of your normal training load and add on 10% more work each week.
How to Prevent Overtraining
There are steps you can take to prevent overtraining. “The most important strategy is to prioritize recovery as intentionally as training,” says Thigpen. “This means scheduling lighter training weeks every few weeks, sleeping at least seven hours per night for adults (8-10 hours for adolescents), and consuming enough calories, carbohydrates, and protein to match activity levels,” Thigpen says.
And, he says, wearable tech that tracks things such as your heart rate can alert you if your rigorous training schedule and recovery periods are out of whack. “Wearable devices can help identify trends. For example, heart rate variability that trends lower than a person’s normal range, or sleep duration that consistently decreases, may indicate accumulating stress.” Thigpen says that while these things aren’t enough to diagnose OTS on their own, they can be important indicators — especially if they happen with other signs of OTS, such as chronic fatigue and a drop in performance.
When to Talk to a Doctor About Overtraining
Talk to your doctor if you think you may have OTS or any other symptoms, such as low mood, anxiety, or trouble sleeping. Keep in mind that many OTS symptoms, such as constant fatigue or unexplained performance issues, may also be caused by other medical conditions. So it’s important to see your doctor for proper diagnosis and treatment.
Takeaways
Overtraining syndrome (OTS) happens when you subject your body to intense stress through exercise without giving it enough time to recover. This sets off a chain reaction throughout the body that affects you mentally and physically. Symptoms include a sustained drop in performance, as well as chronic fatigue, sleep disruption, mood changes, and increased vulnerability to illness. Recovery can take a few weeks to several months. You can prevent overtraining by scheduling lighter training every few weeks and getting at least 7-10 hours of sleep each night.
FAQs About Overtraining
How can I tell the difference between sore muscles and overtraining?
Sore muscle pain is localized and temporary. It peaks about one to three days after a new or intense workout, then gets better. Also, it doesn’t affect your performance. On the other hand, overtraining affects your whole body. It lowers your performance and may affect other aspects of your health, including your mood, sleep, and ability to fight infections.
Can overtraining affect my mental health?
Yes, overtraining causes both physical and psychological changes that can make you feel anxious, irritable, depressed, or restless.
Can overtraining affect my sleep?
Yes. Sleep is vital to muscle repair, immune function, hormone regulation, and nervous system recovery. Periods of intense training without adequate rest and recovery can affect the entire body, including mood and sleep quality.
