Overtraining occurs when a person exceeds their body’s ability to recover from strenuous exercise. Runners & coaches need to be aware of the signs of overtraining so they can prevent it and avoid injuries that will potentially sideline them for weeks or even months.
The first step is knowing the signs of overtraining. There’s many, but here’s a list of the top seven.
- Increased perceived effort during workouts. Not only can overtraining decrease performance, it can …
- Increased injury. Getting injured or re-aggravating old injuries more often. Pain that does not subside in two weeks (or so) should be classified as injury.
- Excessive fatigue. A few days of “heavy legs” is expected at times. However, fatigue can accumulate in a body that never has a chance to fully recover from previous workouts.
- Agitation and moodiness. Overtraining allows fatigue to accumulate in the body and never give it a chance to fully recover from previous workouts.
- Declining Performance. Probably the #1 sign of overtraining. Overtraining results decreased agility, strength and endurance,despite an increase in training intensity or volume.
- Decreased motivation. Because of the sum total of all these signs of overtraining, a runner may simply lack the motivation to train. Bottomline, when you add up all these signs, the athlete may find it difficult to find the desire to train.
- Loss of Appetite. Usually increases in training will stimulate more appetite, but the physiological exhaustion from overtraining can actually lead to appetite suppression.
In this post & video, I discuss some proven strategies To Help You Run Further. As you can see, it’s essential to slowly increase mileage. This follows the above strategy.
The following article actually goes into a lot of details about symptoms & prevention of overtraining.
How to Avoid Overtraining – from Houston Methodist Hospital