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Reached that training plateaux? Not improving on your personal bests? Well the answer may not be that you should train harder, it may be that you need not train at all…

Overtraining syndrome is a neuroendocrine syndrome that results from the process of overtraining, where the body is not allowed sufficient recovery time to adapt to the demands of high performance training.

A person suffering from overtraining usually complains of the following symptoms:

• Persistent Fatigue
• Performance decrease (despite continuing to train)
• More effort required for a task than previously experienced
• Frequent illness
• Lowered maximal heart rate
• Decreased body mass
• Persistent muscle soreness
• Sleep disturbances
• Mood changes (high stress levels and reduced motivation)

As I said above, these symptoms result from Intense training with INSUFFICIENT Recovery time, and the body fails to adapt to the excessive loads, thus it “burns out”. This condition can take months or years to recover from..quite alarming!!

Overtraining syndrome isn’t to be confused with the term “overreaching”. Overreaching is the term used to describe similar symptoms of fatigue, decreased performance and mood changes, however it is short lived (provided you allow yourself to recover) and usually resolves within a two week period.

Elite athletes actually use overreaching to enhance performance, through intense training followed by ADEQUATE rest. What happens is that the body “super-compensates” due to the intensity of the training and this results in enhanced performance.

The mistake a lot of athletes make is that when they start feeling the symptoms of overreaching, they think they need to train harder to get over the “slump” and in so doing they run the risk of developing overtraining syndrome.

Awareness of the fact that you are nearing the point of overreaching is the single most important factor in prevention of overtraining. A way of closely monitoring this is to keep a “training diary”, where you not only record your training details (distance, load, heart rate etc.), but also things like quality of sleep, general well-being, fatigue, stress and muscle soreness.

Hopefully all of the above has highlighted the importance of recovery in your training program. Recovery can be divided into short and long term recovery.

Short term recovery (also called active recovery) occurs in the hours immediately after intense exercise. For some tips on how to enhance this, see Andrew’s article on Recovery Rules.

Long-term recovery techniques refer to those that are built in to a seasonal training program. A well-designed training schedule should include recovery days and/or weeks that are built into the training schedule. Another important factor is to change your training program throughout the year, by modifying  workouts types and varying intensity, time, distance and all the other training variables.

Sometimes you need to take one step back to take two steps forward…

Ric@PhysioPRO