Overtraining

Some Thoughts on Understanding and Avoiding Overtraining

     When it comes to the state commonly referred to as “overtraining,” opinions vary. They run quite the gamut, too.  Some lifters are so bold as to declare “no such thing as overtraining exists.”  On the polar opposite, flip side of that you have the typical “hardgainer” advice that more than just two workouts—hell, maybe more than just one hard session—per week will lead to “OVERTRAINING.”  For some reason, the latter group typically capitalizes “overtraining.”  I guess that’s to show the rest of us overtrainers just how scary of a subject it can be.  The truth, of course, and you may have already surmised this, lies somewhere in between those two extremes.

     There are three areas, I believe, in which overtraining occurs.  They overlap but are still particular enough that they each deserve their own mention.  You can overtrain your movement pattern (i.e. a certain lift), a particular muscle group, or your overall system.  True overtraining, I believe, involves the 3rd sort, but we’ll tackle all of them for the sake of being as complete and thorough as possible in our discussion.

     Before we go any further, we need a definition of overtraining to use for the simple reason that, otherwise, we won’t really know what it is we’re discussing here.  So for clarification, we’ll use the great Bill Starr’s definition.  (By the way, in case you don’t know, I regard Starr as one of the few absolute pillars of truth for training information.  If he said it, then, for the most part, it’s the lifting-gospel truth in my book.)  Anyway, he said, “when you’re overtrained, you’re chronically fatigued.”  This means that overtraining, as we will use it here, refers to chronic fatigue brought about by training.

     Notice that, in the above sentence, it is chronic fatigue brought about by training.  You can be chronically fatigued for reasons other than the lifting itself.  So before we go any further, let’s discuss the factors outside of training that affect your ability to lift in a fresh manner.  Once you have these other factors in proper order, then you will be able to look at your training to see whether or not excessive training is the genuine culprit.

     Actually, for the majority of casual lifters, if you’re fatigued, it’s probably not your lifting that’s doing it.  In fact, it’s typically either poor diet or poor “rest and recovery” (such as adequate sleep) that’s the likely source of the fatigue.

     Many lifters—especially younger ones who like to burn their candles at both ends, particularly on the weekends—drag their butts through their workouts for the simple reason that they don’t get enough sleep at night.  Or their sleep is highly erratic, getting adequate enough sleep on some nights, and not enough on others.  So the solution is basic: get enough damn sleep!  To do that, you need to get on a routine.  If you get up for a job early in the morning, make sure you’re not staying up too late watching late-night tv with the missus.  Go to bed at the same exact time each-and-every night and make sure that you’re getting in bed early enough to get at the minimum 7 hours of sleep.  The more—and harder—you lift, then the more sleep you will probably need.  I think the vast majority of lifters—assuming you’re on a real program that works all of the major muscle groups, especially those of the legs and back—need around 9 hours of sleep on a regular basis.  If you can manage an additional nap in the middle of the day, or immediately after you get off work, all the better.

     If, because of work, school, or other outside influences, you can’t get enough sleep consistently throughout the week, then make a habit of going to bed extra early on the weekends, and sleep in as much as you can when you have the days to do so.  Contrary to popular opinion on the subject, you most assuredly can catch up on sleep and rest.

     Other than sleep, try your best to stay relaxed as much as possible throughout the day, and to not get stressed out, especially over small, trivial things that you know don’t really matter that much when everything is said and done.

     Let me add one last thing about sleep and relaxation before we move on to our next factor.  You need to get enough sleep, sure, but make sure that you’re going to bed early enough to allow you to wake and not begin your day in a rush.  You need to be able to wake up, take your time making a leisurely breakfast (or just having a cup of coffee if you’re fasting), and spend a few moments of tranquil silence before you head off to work or school.  If you start the day rushing to and fro, then the chances are that’s exactly what the rest of your day will look like.  Keep in mind that lifting is a stress on your body—which is the reason that overtraining causes such fatigue—so you need to minimize your other stressors.

     Proper nutrition will also help you to recover, and it will also help to minimize stress, training or otherwise.  Poor nutrition will do the opposite.  Many a busy lifter has sabotaged his gains by not prepping meals—or even having a meal plan to begin with—and then resorting to fast food when hungry during the day or other poor dietary choices.  One, maybe two, meal(s) like that are okay on occasion, but they shouldn’t be a regular part of your diet.

     Have a meal plan and stick with it.  It doesn’t have to be complicated.  Cook a large batch of chicken on Sunday night—you can grill it, bake it, steam it, or boil it—enough so that you’ll have your protein for a few days.  You can make some rice if you rely on carbs, or something else that goes well with chicken and that you can make in a large quantity that will last several days.  And if you don’t like chicken, you can prep beef or pork in much the same way.  Keep some protein powder and milk on hand, so that you can have a post-workout shake, and you can also supplement any meals you might miss with a protein-heavy milkshake.  If you get enough calories daily, enough protein, and make sure you take care of post-workout nutrition, then you should be in relatively good shape to recover from your lifting sessions.

     In addition to sleep, rest, and nutrition, there are a few other things that can affect your ability to recover from hard training.  Student athletes often feel overly fatigued when preparing for finals.  If that’s you—or if you have some other, similar stress at a specific time of year—then look at how it impacts your training during those weeks.  Some people will be able to immediately tell that it's a negative stressor on their bodies.  If this is you, then try backing off on your training during weeks where you encounter this kind of stress.  You don’t have to take off from training completely.  Just cut down on the amount of overall training you’re doing.  That should be sufficient to help you recover.  When you’re finished with finals—or whatever the particular stress is—then you can resume your regular program.

     Change in weather can affect lifters, for both the negative or the positive.  Some lifters actually thrive when the weather shifts from either hot to cold or cold to hot, whereas others need a break just the same as if they had been overtraining.  This is an area where it’s important to know your body, so pay attention to how your training feels when the weather turns.

     Lastly, personal relationships can be a very common stressor, especially a bad break-up or even a divorce.  Now, I must admit that I have met a few people who actually thrive in their training during such times, but they tend to be in the minority.  I’ve been through a couple of divorces myself, and a couple of really bad break-ups.  I certainly didn’t thrive during such times.  In fact, my training would pretty much be god-awful at times such as those.  So when relationships take a turn for the worse, know yourself.  If you know you can continue to handle the hard training, stay at it.  If you know you can’t, then still go to the gym, but use it for more active recovery sessions or just to “play” around with some different enjoyable regimens, if nothing more than to get your mind on other things.

     Now, finally, we can turn to the training itself.

     At some point or another, I can guarantee you that you will end up doing too much work in the weight room or the gym (or the garage, if you’re like me).  This is a natural occurrence for every serious lifter or hardcore athlete (of any kind).  Matter-of-fact, you need to push yourself to the edge at different times in your training.  The problem with that edge is that, to quote Starr again, “sometimes the athlete slips right over it!”

     Let’s look at how the athlete “slips right over it” when it comes to the three ways we can often overtrain: by overtraining a particular movement pattern, by overtraining a certain muscle group (or groups), and by overtraining the system overall.

     When it comes to overtraining a movement pattern or a muscle group, there are different “rules” for different lifts or muscles.  As an example, if you’re a powerlifter, it’s easiest to overtrain your deadlift, the hardest to overtrain your squat, and the bench press falls somewhere in between.  You can squat almost every single day of the week and not overtrain that lift, assuming the programming is correct.  The deadlift is a different matter entirely.  It can be, and perhaps should be, trained very infrequently.  Most lifters’ deadlifts will go up, up, and up by training it once every two weeks, so long as they’re putting plenty of work in on squats and other “pulls” (such as the quick lifts).  The bench press can also be overtrained if done too often, but it can generally handle a couple of training sessions each week, so long as one doesn’t go all-out at both workouts.

     One common way that lifters overtrain their movement patterns is by attempting to “max out” at every workout.  A lifter will go to the gym, decide to hit a max on their bench press.  They like the way it feels, so they return to the bench at their next pressing workout, and do the same thing.  And, lo and behold, their bench is even stronger!  They then—quite erroneously—assume that maxing out at each session is the way to a bigger bench.  It works for maybe another workout session, perhaps two, but then comes to a grinding halt and starts to regress.  It’s not that the muscles are overtrained, or that the lifter’s nervous system is overtrained.  But the movement is definitely overtrained.

     The most common question when it comes to overtraining muscle groups is, “how often can I train each muscle?”  The answer is, well, it depends.  First, it depends on how hard, heavy, or voluminous your workouts are.  Obviously, the less volume and intensity (“intensity” here could refer to either percentage of your one-rep max or how close to momentary muscular failure your sets are), the more frequently you can train.  But for particular muscle groups—and the lifts associated with those muscle groups—there are certain rules.

     The muscles that can be trained the most frequently—because of how much work they can handle and their fiber “type”—are the quads, calves, shoulders, abs, and triceps.  This is the reason the “Bulgarian method” of maxing out at each training session works because it involves the Olympic lifts.  The Olympic lifts and their assistance movements almost unanimously use those muscle groups.  It’s also the reason bodybuilders will often train their calves and abs on a near daily basis even when they train other muscle groups much less frequently.  The calves and abdominal muscles can handle it!

     You should train your chest, lats, biceps, and hamstrings with less frequency than the above muscles.  Or, if not less frequent, they should be trained with the same frequency but for less intensity and/or volume.  These muscles are often called the tonic muscle groups.  They’re responsible for posture and holding the body (and weights) upright.  (The muscle groups in our previous paragraph are all made for movement, which is the reason for their ability to be trained with more frequency.)  Tonic muscles tend to be slower twitch and, more importantly, involve a deeper stretch to activate their muscle fibers.  The deeper the muscle can be stretched during sets, the less it should be trained.

     Finally, the muscles of the lower back take the longest to recover from a hard session.  Especially direct lower back work.  This is the reason that not just deadlifts should be trained infrequently, but any other movement that works the lower back directly and hard.  Even casual trainees often discover this when their lower backs take a long time to even feel good after becoming sore.

     At this point in our essay, some might conclude—and I could, arguably, be one of them—that none of what I presented above is actual overtraining.  Not if we’re talking systemic stress over our entire body and nervous system.  And we’ll get to this point in just a moment, but let me add one other thing before continuing.  Systemic overtraining of the whole body typically occurs because of too much training (over weeks) of the muscles of the lower body and the back.  Sure, you can squat each-and-every day, and your muscles can recover, but it will start to take its toll on your nervous system, and will certainly lead to chronic fatigue if not programmed correctly.  But for the vast majority of your average gym-goers—and I’m mainly thinking of guys here—they are most likely to overtrain the muscles of their upper bodies, particularly their chest and arms, and not devote enough time to heavy lower body and back work.  Their system is fine, but their chests, biceps, triceps, and (maybe) lats are chronically fatigued.  They would do well—and you would if this is you—by reducing all upper body work to just a couple of sets once or twice-per-week, but then train the legs and back hard with squats, power cleans, snatches, rows, and the like multiple times-per-week for a few weeks.  This will give their “beach muscles” enough time to recover while also enhancing overall muscle growth by training the legs and back.

     If you train your entire body hard each-and-every week, if you eat reasonably well, and get plenty of growth-producing rest and sleep, it’s then that you can start really paying attention to chronic fatigue and overtraining.  If you do this properly, you will see gains like never before.  This is because when everything else—the correct exercises, sets, and reps; the correct diet; the correct rest and “recovery” procedures—is “in order,” it is at this point that you can really monitor your training, and ensuring that you’re never doing too much or too little.  (It’s for another essay, but undertraining can be equally as bad as its counterpart; yin and yang need proper balance.)  And when you do this, you really start to make good gains because you have learned to program for you.

     Before we continue, let me add this: you need to train too much on occasion.  You should have workouts, and even entire weeks of workouts, where you push your body to the point of almost being overtrained.  Most great programs—and great strength coaches—take advantage of this.  A good program should push a lifter to the point that, if she were to continue to do the program for much longer, she would enter a state of chronic fatigue.  The good coach can take a lifter right to that point, and then back off.  It’s when the “backing off” transpires that the gains will really happen.

     What are some signs of true overtraining?  Bill Starr said that the first sign of overtraining, and the very best clue as to whether or not you’re doing too much work is how well you’re sleeping.  If you’re not sleeping very soundly, and if you’re waking up much too tired despite the fact that you’re already taking all the “sleep precautions” that we mentioned earlier, then you may need to start making some adjustments to your training.  This is particularly true when you feel this way even after backing off for a while from a period of more volume.  In this case, either you didn’t back off enough or you simply did too much during your higher-volume weeks, and need to continue with another back-off week or two before resuming some harder sessions.

     Starr said that another guarantee of overtraining is when you are constantly dreading going to the gym or getting in a workout of your chosen sport.  You may on occasion, of course, simply not feel like going for a workout, maybe two, but if you are dreading it constantly, even though you typically love your lifting sessions, then you’ve probably veered into the realm of overtraining.

     The 3rd “sure sign” of overtraining per Starr is when your appetite drops off so much that it leads to a loss in weight.  As with motivation to go to the gym, your appetite might wax and wane, but if you reach a point where you never seem to have much of an appetite, then it’s probably time to back off and make some training adjustments.

     Once a lifter reaches a point that he knows he’s overtrained, the question is what should he do?  Should you take time off when you’re overtrained?  Or should you simply back off and do a week or more of “light,” active-recovery style workouts?  As with other questions throughout this essay, once again, it depends.  If you have trained to a point that you have been in a state of overtraining for not just weeks, but for months(!) then you absolutely should take some time off.  If this is you, it might be good to take off a full 2 weeks.  Don’t do any lifting during this time.  You can still stay active.  Go for a walk in the park or around your neighborhood.  Play a pick-up game of basketball here or there.  Do some gardening.  Just make sure it’s nothing too intense that will cut into your ability to recover.

     If you’ve been in a state of overtraining for around a month, then still take some time off, but a week should suffice, perhaps even just 4 or 5 days.  But in this case, don’t do anything during that week—or 4 or 5 days, however much time off you take.  Take a week vacation, and do little other than sip on pina coladas and relax by the pool side.  Get plenty of sleep, and take long naps.

     If you’ve only been in an overtraining state for a few weeks, then I wouldn’t advise taking any real time off.  If you’ve been training 3 or more days per week, cut your training back to 2 days, and make one of them a light workout.  Do full-body sessions during this time even if you had been on a split program.  One heavy workout and one light workout, with little other activity done during the week, should be sufficient to get you out of your overtraining phase.

     You can also keep your training days the same but just drop the workload.  Starr’s easy solution for doing this was to simply have his athletes drop their assistance work.  They simply did their “core lifts” (bench presses, overheads, squats, deadlifts; whatever they were) but dropped all auxiliary movements.  Just concentrate on the big lifts and then leave the gym.  This will probably cut as much as 30 to 45 minutes from your training sessions, allowing you to recover much easier.

     Finally, Starr said that, when it comes to overtraining, as it does with many things in life, it’s the little things that make all the difference.  I hope this essay has helped you to hone in on some of the little things that might be holding back your training and not allowing you to recover completely.  Overtraining shouldn’t be a daunting or complicated subject.  But it should be understood and combatted.

*All views of Bill Starr’s that are espoused in this essay come from his article “How to Avoid Overtraining” in the April, 2001 issue of IronMan magazine.