Disclaimer: This information has been sourced from qualified practitioners and evidence-based scientific sources.
This week for EUOC wellbeing I’m diving headfirst into overtraining. As runners and orienteers we can push ourselves a little too hard, and often it’s not completely our fault. We’ve grown up being fed messages such as ‘no pain, no gain’, ‘no days off’ and that training longer/harder = better results. The pressure we face is sometimes a little overwhelming, our coaches may push us too hard or not guide us enough, we often stick to our plans too religiously and do not allow ourselves to have a flexible approach to training. Added to this, perfectionist or obsessive attitudes surrounding training are usually praised in the running world – wrongly so.
Overtraining syndrome, or OTS, can best be defined as the state in which training has repeatedly stressed an athlete’s body to the point at which rest is no longer adequate to allow for recovery. It is the name given to a collection of emotional, behavioural and physical symptoms that occur as a result of overtraining and have persisted for weeks to months. This is different from the day-to-day variation in performance and post-exercise tiredness that is common in conditioned athletes. Overtraining is marked by cumulative exhaustion that persists even after recovery periods and often precedes over-reaching symptoms.
It’s not always easy to identify OTS. Although the list of symptoms below can guide you, you may not exhibit them all. That said, there are several ways in which you can objectively measure it. One such method includes documenting your heart rate at specific training intensities and speeds over a period of time. If your pace at a given intensity starts to slow, but your heart rate is increased or your resting heart rate increases, or the perceived effort doing an easy session is consistently higher than it should be, you may be heading into over-reaching. If you ignore the signs of over-reaching, you can develop full-blown OTS.
Some signs and symptoms may include:
· You feel overly sluggish. When you’ve over trained, your parasympathetic nervous system becomes overly stimulated. This leads to an increase in your stress hormone cortisol, which leads to both mental and physical fatigue.
· You’re restless at night. If you are over trained, your sympathetic nervous system can remain excited at all times. This will lead to restlessness and, with an inability to focus, your sleep will be disturbed.
· Muscle soreness, general aches and joint pains
· Sudden drop in performance
· Headaches
· Decrease in immunity, leading to more colds.
· Decrease in training capacity/intensity
· Low mood and irritability
· Increased incidence of injuries
· A compulsive need to exercise
· An increase in resting heart rate by 10 percent or more.
-If you do feel any of these symptoms, do NOT ignore them.-Many of these symptoms also align with anaemia and Lyme’s disease – a quick blood test from your doctors can check for problems such as these. You may have to push them for a Lyme’s disease test, just make sure you tell them you’re often in terrain swamped in ticks 
And if the symptoms persist and you’ve found that resting is not helping, look into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
How to recover from overtraining
Your whole body has been damaged; your muscles, your hormones, your immune system, and your nervous system. Research into OTS shows that getting adequate rest is the most important thing to overcoming it. Total recovery can take several months, or even years, and some athletes may never fully recover their original athletic form. Undertaking proper rest, avoiding stresses, and adopting a non-restrictive nourishing diet will all aid recovery. On starting training again, a Graduated Return to Play, ideally supervised, should be followed.
How to deal with mental health struggles while recovering
This is a tricky one, and something I’ll do a full post on soon. I think it’s important to know that it’s okay to feel disappointed and angry. You’ve trained so hard – and you feel like you deserve to do well after putting in so much hard work. When your purpose is taken away, and you miss out on training camps, summer trips and races, it’s very easy to struggle. On top of that you have to deal with the symptoms all on your own. I’m not sure anyone has a magic answer of how to keep positive, but here are a few tips of my own that may help:
· Remind yourself of the big picture. The amount of time you’re out of training is such a small proportion of your whole life.
· Control the controllables (your eating, your sleeping etc).
· Avoid looking at other people’s training logs too frequently.
· Maintain your feeling of productivity/ purpose with something else filling the time when you would usually train.
· Focus on all the things your body CAN do, not what it cannot.
Strategies to prevent overtraining in the first place
· Listen to your body and recover well after training.
· Do not increase your training load too much too soon. Consistency is key.
· Do not compare what someone else is doing to what you’re doing. Do what is right for YOU.
· Alternate hard days and easy days – and make sure your easy days are easy!!!
· Aim for minimum 8-9 hours of sleep per night.
· Plan in at least 1 rest day per training week, and make sure you actually REST.
· Periodise your training into blocks, and make sure to plan in times of the year when you have a physical (and mental) break from training.
· Monitor HR when resting and training.
· Nourish your body with a balanced, enjoyable diet.
· Manage other stresses in your life, (ie reduce your training load when your workload gets too high/ too stressful).
· Have a flexible approach to your training plan – adapt, change, cancel sessions and runs on how you feel and relax in the knowledge you’re doing the right thing.
I hope this has been useful! Renee McGregor and Kriss Hendy delve into this topic in their podcast. I’ve linked a relevant episode here called ‘No Pain, No Gain, really?’.https://podcasts.google.com/…/dHJhaW5icmF2ZXBvZGNhc3Quc…As usual, here to chat when anyone needs 