Key signs that you are over training

Key signs that you are over training

Over training can not only be counter productive to your training and racing goal, but also your long term health. So how do we know when enough is enough, to stop us from over doing it? On this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, Lindsey tells you what to look out for.

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Transcript

Brad Brown: Welcome back, this is the Ask Coach Parry podcast, I’ve got Lindsey Parry with us once again. Lindsey, a question in from Ashvanka who is a member of our online community. You can get to coachparry.com/join if you’d like to join as well.

Ash wants to know, as a Comrades Marathon novice, how do you know if you’re over training? Ash says things get a bit nervous sometimes and we wonder if we’re doing enough, which could inspire us to do more. How do we know when is too much and enough is enough?

Three obvious signs of over training

Lindsey Parry: It’s a slightly long answer, but it’s a good question. I guess guys listening to this podcast need to just bear with us a little bit. Essentially there are three really obvious signs that you are over training. The first is pain. If you’re sore, and I’m not just talking about injury pain. I am also including injury pain, but stiffness, sore muscles from over exerting, that’s a sign of acute over training.

That would be from a specific exercise dose, either your training run on the weekend was too long, so you built up too quickly. Or it was too hard or your speed work was faster than it should have been. That will induce stiffness and that’s a clear indication that you’re over training and you need to back off and rest for a few days and allow everything to settle down.

Then obviously the more chronic form of that would be over time you slowly increase just a bit quicker than you should and you pick up like a little, like you’re not sure, is this sore or not sore. Should I run, shouldn’t I run, but you carry on with that and then it very definitely does become sore. That would be more in the injury domain and again, injury is a symptom of over training. So that’s telling you, I need to stop, I need to rest.

Excessive fatigue is a major sign of over training

Slightly more subtle, but if you are paying attention, still quite obvious, you will be pretty tired. That’s normal when you’re training for something like Comrades, you’re pretty tired, you look forward to sleeping at night. If you’re really tired but you’re struggling to fall asleep or the sleep is quite restless.

Or if you’re waking up in the middle of the night and you really struggle to go back to sleep, that’s very indicative of having quite high cortisol levels. Which is a great stress hormone to help us get through short term stress, but it’s not a great long term hormone and it is an indication that you aren’t coping and that you are over training.

Lost your appetite? Oh no

Then the final thing is your appetite. You should be hungry, you should be hungry. You’re training hard, your training is increasing all the time, your bodies demand for energy is increasing, so it’s normal to be hungry. If you don’t really have an appetite and you’re forcing yourself to eat, that’s another classic symptom of having raised cortisol levels.

The hormones are designed, so that in periods of extreme stress, for three or four days you can get by with minimal sleep and minimal food. But you don’t want that to go on for a prolonged period of time.

Finally, what you can do is you can influence a strategy of monitoring your heart rate on a daily basis and over time it’ll probably come down a little bit. Depending in what sort of training state you are when you started training for Comrades, it may go down a long way. But eventually it will settle on a fairly lowish number, which will be different for everybody.

If you take it every day and you start noticing an upward trend of that heart rate, that gives you a clue that you’re starting to go into over training. It shouldn’t fluctuate by more than about four beats per minute per day, so once you get over four and particularly once you get into eight beat fluctuations, then you know, hang on, I’m overdoing it, I need to back off of it.

BB: There you go Ash, I hope that helps. Lindsey, thank you very much for that answer, pretty comprehensive as well. Don’t forget, if you have a question you’d like to ask, just head over to the website, coachparry.com, you can get them asked there as well. If there’s something that’s pressing that you’d like an immediate answer on, the Coach Parry online community is probably the best place to do that, just get to coachparry.com/join. Until next time, from the two of us, it’s cheers.

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