“Am I Overtraining?”

There is a fine line that divides a good training program, which applies an appropriate amount of stress on the body to allow for physical adaptation to take place, from a program which will push an athlete over the edge resulting in “burning out”. According to T.R. Baechle and R.W.Earle (The Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning) overtraining can be defined as excessive frequency, intensity or volume of training which leads to illness, extreme fatigue or injury. Basically it is a result of weeks of pushing the body’s physiological boundaries. Athletes that are most susceptible to overtraining are endurance type athletes.

Causes of overtraining:

• Your program: The factors which cause overtraining are lack of rest or recovery. If your training program increases volume, intensity or duration too quickly then you are highly susceptible to becoming burnt out. When designing a training program it is very important to remember that we must give our body’s sufficient time to adapt to the current training stressors before increasing the loads. Typically an endurance athlete has five to fourteen training sessions a week and accumulates 800-1000 training hours in a year. Only 20% of that time should be spent in a heart rate training zone of greater than 80%, otherwise the athlete has a high chance of falling victim to overtraining.
  
• Nutrition: It is essential that athletes have large amounts of post exercise carbohydrates and energy to replenish the body’s glycogen stores. The less time your body spends depleted of these energy stores, the less chance you have of burning out.
  The average individual that is training more than five days per week should be having between 3000 – 3500 calories per day. Calories are units which express the amount of food you are having. These 3000 calories are made up of proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Ideally your daily meals should be comprised of 55% carbohydrates, 15% protein and 30% fat; however, everybody’s recommended daily caloric intake differs according to their size and the amount of exercise done from week to week. To calculate your own recommended daily caloric intake visit the following site: www.calculators.hpathy.com/calories-need.asp
  
• Recovery: To minimize the risk of overtraining, you should include at least one rest day per week and one recovery week for every four weeks of hard training during the climax of your training program. Your recovery week must include similar training frequencies (number of training sessions) but of lower intensities. It is vital that you are getting at least seven hours sleep a day.
  
  International travel, lack of sleep and personal life stressors accelerate the overtraining process.
  
  Markers of Overtraining:
  
  Emotional and behavioral changes
  
  
• Mood disturbances – anger, depression or irritability
• Sleeping disturbances – falling asleep easily, waking up abruptly and finding yourself taking a nap later in the morning are signs associated with overtraining
• Prolonged general fatigue- occurs throughout the day
• Athlete does not look forward to competitions
• The athlete cannot progress in his/her training program
• Loss of appetite
• Loss of libido
• Increased fluid consumption at night
  
  Physical changes
  
  
• Heart rate – if an athlete takes longer than five minutes to reach his resting heart rate after exercise. Resting heart rate (taken upon wakening, before getting out of bed) has increased by 10% for several days in a row. A rise in the athletes sleeping heart rate and a rise in heart rate for particular exercise is a sign of over training
• Physical complaints- diarrhea, a sore throat and sore muscles are signs of overtraining and the athlete finds that he/she keeps on getting ill. This is because the immune system is weakened in the over trained individual.
• Gradual loss of weight
• Loss in menstruation in women
• Decreased physical performance
  
  Tests:
  
  Hormones: Exercise laboratories can conduct tests where they collect blood or saliva samples and look for unusual ratios of particular hormones such as estrogen, testosterone and cortizol.
  Blood lactate: Concentrations are tested during and after maximal exercise. This also shows whether or not an athlete is over trained.
  Nervous system: Heart rate variability (the time measured between each heart beat) is recorded. The time between beats in a fit and healthy individual does vary during exercise, where an individual who is burnt out will have consistent times between each heart beat.
  Questionnaire: Owen Anderson uses a short questionnaire to monitor performance status of the athletes. Each morning the athlete assesses themselves against the following six questions:
  
• I slept well last night
• I am looking forward to today's workout
• I am optimistic about my future performance
• I feel vigorous and energetic
• My appetite is great I have little muscle soreness
  

They rate each statement on the following scale:
1 - Strongly disagree
2 - Disagree
3 - Neutral
4 - Agree
5 - Strongly agree
If their score is 20 or greater then they have recovered enough to continue with the training program. If their score is below 20 then they should consider taking a rest or an easy workout until their score rises again.

Treatment:

An over trained athlete needs to take three to six weeks off training and pay special attention to his/her diet. If overtraining occurs within the athletes in season (the competitive phase) then the athlete must train at 70% of his maximal heart rate [(220 – age) X (0.7)] but doing a sport other to the one concerned. For example, if a canoeist has burnt out then he/she should put the canoe away for three to six weeks and include running or/and swimming into the training program. To summarise- a training program should make you train, not strain.

Clinton
Sport Scientist