Visiting the gym every day of the week and working your hardest shows dedication, but it can also lead you to overtraining. Yes, overtraining is a real thing. When a person trains too much, without giving the body adequate recovery time, the body can plateau and performance can decrease while the chance of injury increases.
When submerging yourself into an active lifestyle, it’s absolutely necessary to give the body time to regenerate. Muscles are meant to break down, but also to rebuild. Overtraining actually places chronic stress on the body and its effects are just as great as not exercising at all. So in this case, less can actually be more. If you’re experiencing any of the below indications of overtraining, it may be time to prioritize a regeneration routine.
Common signs of Overtraining
1. Has your body stopped improving, even with all of the hard work your putting in? You’ve plateaued. This is one of the most common indications of overtraining. You’re constantly ripping your muscles apart without giving them a chance to repair.
2. Injuring yourself more and more these days? Overtraining means training in a weakened state because again, you’re working on a muscle that hasn’t had a chance to repair. Injuries that are a result of overtraining usually happen in areas of the body that have been injured before.
3. Experiencing an unusually high or low resting heart rate? Your resting heart rate can be measured through a heart rate monitor or by counting your pulse before getting out of bed in the morning.
RELATED: Active Recovery: 3 Things You Should Be Doing On Rest Days
4. Feeling ill or fatigued? Illness doesn’t fit into a healthy lifestyle, but your immune system weakens when your body is put into a constant catabolic state, meaning the natural process of muscle tissue growth and repair won’t take place and it will instead eat away at itself in order to find energy.
5. Good sleep is often associated with a good workout, but in the case of the over-trainer, it could be insomnia instead. All systems are being overtaxed, including the nervous and endocrine systems.
Placing stress on these systems, especially in combination, can lead to dysfunction of the adrenal glands. This not only affects sleeping patterns, but is associated with mood swings, anxiety, and depression.
6. Is your soreness lingering? Delayed Onset Muscles Soreness, or DOMS, is a wonderful thing. It almost validates our workouts, but muscle soreness should not extend beyond 72 hours after your workout. Muscles that remain sore are not healing.
If you think about it, when working out, we exert ourselves and exhaust all of our energy systems. We are depleting ourselves. When you’re constantly making time to deplete and none to restore, you leave yourself with nothing. Focusing on regeneration means giving your body more than what’s being taken away.
We all work out expecting to see results and some type of improvement in our bodies and our mood. Without a proper diet, a complete night of sleep, and actual plans for recovery, you won’t see much change at all.
Just as you plan your workouts, you need to plan (and prioritize) your regeneration; after all, your body grows while resting, not training. Some ways to actively regenerate include deliberate time spent on stretching and mobility, foam rolling, meditation, massage, ice baths, and eliminating alcohol from your diet. Taking it easy is essential, but resting is key, so do your best to get a full 8 hours of sleep each night.