Negative Effects Of Overtraining
You've been exercising and training regularly at
the gym for several months now, however it seems like you are not getting the
results that you wanted or worse, not having any improvement at all although
at the beginning, you may have lost some weight, gain muscle tone, strength
and endurance while feeling wonderful after every exercise session.
You stayed on a healthy diet,
supplemented with vitamins and minerals and everything seems to be going on
very well at first. But somehow, you always feel tired and exhausted nowadays.
Your enthusiasm for your workout sessions seemed to have waned. You even feel
irritable and all stressed up.
You know something? If you find yourself dreading
your exercise sessions or dragging yourself through the day, you may be
pushing yourself too hard. These are the symptoms of overtraining. Training
plateaus are signs of your body's need for rest. It is time to now take a rest
and recharge your body.
Why Do People Overtrain?
When it comes to getting into shape, most people
expect too much too soon. Usually they would push themselves too hard at the
beginning in order to get faster results. But what happens then? They feel
tired, exhausted, moody, easily irritated and so become depressed and lose the
desire and enthusiasm for the activities they used to enjoy. Isn't that such a
waste?
Overtraining happens when the
physical stress of training is not balanced by adequate rest and nutrition to
allow the body recuperate and repair itself. The Unites States Olympic
Committee (USOC) and the AmericanCollege
of Sports Medicine defined overtraining as "untreated overreaching
that result in chronic decreases in performance and impaired ability to train".
Medically, the overtraining syndrome
is classified as a neuro-endocrine disorder where the normal fine balance in
the interaction between nervous and hormonal systems is disturbed and the body
is so tired that it now has a decreased ability to repair itself during rest.
So if you consistently push your
limits without giving your body a chance to recover, your entire engine may
just break down. This is because most of us think that if a little exercise
can do wonders to your body, more exercise must be even better. That is why we
tend to put all the energy into every workout and push ourselves expecting to
reach the set goals sooner.
Some of us will even hit the gym almost
everyday for hours at a time. This is wrong! More is not better in this game.
It is true that in order to make improvements, you
will need to challenge yourself out of your comfort zone. That means that you
may want to squat heavier or run more miles than you did last month.
Progression is the way you can make improvements towards your specific goals.
The only problem is that your body adapts to
the same exercises and stops responding. This is the dreaded plateau every
athletic fear. Hence there should be a delicate balance between exercise and
rest.
Exercising is great for your body and mind,
however if you start feeling tired, fatigued and irritated, then you may be
creating a very unfavorable physical internal environment. Physiologically,
repetitive training alters your hormone levels, weakens immunity and triggers
emotional instability wreaking havoc on your mind and body.
How do you know if you are overtrained?
Inability to sleep well, elevated resting heart
rate, lack of appetite, decreased motivation, lowered sex drive and a lack of
progress are all symptoms of overtraining.
The first thing most people do which leads to
overtraining is performing too many sets of different exercises in their
workouts. From what I have observed in the gym, most people do between 20 -30
sets per workout.
Have you asked yourself is it
necessary to do so many sets? Did you find out how many sets you must do to
get the optimum results? What are you trying to accomplish by doing so many
sets? Do the extra sets make your muscle
stronger and bigger? Are they getting you leaner? Are they helping you to
recruit more motor units? Are you stretching the fascia and inducing
hyperplasia? Why does everybody just blindly follow what everyone else is
doing?
If you are really training hard, it
is very difficult for most people to perform so many sets and still be able to
recover. So reduce you sets.
The next mistake is that people train
too long in the gym. Workouts, not including warm up time, should never exceed
an hour. When you begin training, your anabolic hormones are immediately
elevated. After a while they will reach a peak and then start to decline.
They eventually return to normal baseline and if
you keep training beyond that point, they will dip down to below normal
levels. This is when cortisol, which is a stress hormone that eats muscle and
stores body fat is produced more abundantly. This is bad news if you want to gain
bigger muscles and lose body fat.
You also get over trained by training
too often. You must know that training does not stress just the muscles but
the entire body including your nervous system. If your nervous system has not
recovered, you cannot train again.
You can try, but you will not make any
progress at all and will just dig yourself deeper into overtraining. If you
are training five or six days per week, you are probably overtraining.
So if you are not seeing results and
is suffering from overtraining symptoms, give yourself a 2 to 4 week break
from exercising and let your body recover fully before you hit the gym again.
Don't be surprised that when you are back, your muscles will be shocked into
new growth and the fat
starts melting away again.
Best Wishes
