Over Training and How to Avoid It (Recovery Workouts?)

Oddly enough this article was not completely inspired by my experiences cycling. I’ve had many clients coming in over the past month complaining they feel they have either plateaued or are beginning to experience setbacks in their chosen sport/exercise (be it running/cycling/swimming/tennis/golf etc).

When I ask them how they are training/exercising to support their goals more often then not I find out they are training intensely 5 or 6 times a week. Maintaining this type of intense workout schedule where one is chasing “personal best” performances in each and every workout leads to overtraining.

Common signs one is over training are:

• feeling chronic fatigue (tired with a general lack of energy)
• general muscle soreness
• pain in muscles and joints
• inability to sleep (not sleeping through the night or getting up early)
• chronic headaches
• becoming ill more easily (colds, flus etc)
• decreased performance during training
• lack of enthusiasm for your sport
• compulsive desire to exercise

Over training can often lead to chronic/overuse injuries such as:

• tendonitis
• bursitis
• stress fractures
• torn muscles

An easy way to tell if you’re over training is by taking your resting heart rate in the morning when you wake up and keep track of it in a log book. If you notice your morning resting heart rate is starting to become elevated over time, it is a good sign that your body has not had enough recovery time after your last workout and you need to back off to give your body the time it needs to regenerate.

If you feel you are over training make sure you:

• give yourself time to recover, either take time off or reduce the intensity of your workouts
• hydrate to make sure you body has the fluids it needs to function optimally
• examine your diet to make sure you’re getting enough calories to support the level of training your doing, ensure they are healthy calories from foods filled with lots of vitamins and minerals
• get a massage to help the tissue relax
• try picking up an other exercise you enjoy as cross training

Recovery Workouts

When I was rowing at a competitive level both through university and at a club level one of the most effective ways my coaches used to help ward off our over training was to include “recovery workouts” in our weekly schedule.

There were many advantages to recovery workouts:

• psychologically they allowed us to feel we were still working to improve our physical conditioning
• they increased circulation to our muscles reducing inflammation and speeding the healing processes in our muscles
• they allowed our cardiovascular systems to develop a very strong aerobic base so when it came time to push ourselves into anaerobic states we could rebound from them more quickly

Typically speaking, our recovery workouts were 60 to 90 minutes of steady state exercise keeping our heart rate at about 60% of our max.

I am always encouraging my clients to pay attention to all aspects of their exercise routines to make sure they are not falling victims to overtraining as well making an effort to include gentler steady state workouts in their weeks.

I hope this information is useful and if you have any questions please feel free to get in touch.