Know Your Limit

American Fitness, March, 2000 by Dwayne II Hines

Is your workout motto "go hard or go home?" Do you push hard throughout your full routine? Training hard is great for bringing about positive body changes. However, any tough training routine should come with a warning against exertion. Yes, you can push your physique too far. In fact, it has become such a common occurrence that the problem has earned itself a title: overtraining.

Overtraining occurs when you push your body past the point of full recovery for the next workout. When you exercise, you tear your body down to some extent and it needs sufficient time, rest and nutrition to recover. If you push too far and too hard before your body is ready to handle the next workout, you can cause injury or illness in a variety of ways. Also, if you work out for too long or too frequently, you can also become injured or lapse into a drained and depleted condition.

One of the most dangerous aspects of overtraining is that it can occur subtly. Often the bodily stress caused by overtraining is not evident, especially to a person who is vigor-ously working out in an effort to reach their next goal. The overtrained state slowly creeps up on the body. A person may continue to work out on a weekly basis even when they are starting to slide down the slippery slope into an overtrained condition. This only makes the condition worse, deleting the benefits that would normally occur from the workout. The more run-down your body becomes, the less you gain from your training activity. Overtraining subtly erases the gains from your routine. Worst of all, overtraining can even reverse some gains--a nasty state of affairs for anyone striving to get ahead.

Overtraining is a particularly undesirable condition because once you reach the overtrained state, you are basically performing your workouts in vain. The progress you anticipate is negated by the lack of recovery. Since overtraining can be so devastating to your fitness program, and eventually to your health, it is important to identify overtraining and respond to it as soon as possible.

Identifying Overtraining

Do you know when you are starting to fall into an overtrained state? It can be a common occurrence. Mark Jenkins, M.D., and NCAA Team Physician at Rice University, estimates that 10 percent of athletes may be overtrained at some point during a given year. Exercise physiologist Doug Gambrel has also indicated that about 10 percent of the people who work out experience overtraining during a given year. Among athletes who work out on a regular basis, the percentage may be even higher. That is, hard-core athletes work themselves into an overtrained state more frequently than recreational athletes do.

What is overtraining? Jim Brown, Ph.D., and executive editor of The Penn State Sports Medicine Newsletter, notes that overtraining is an imbalance between exercise and recovery in which the stress of the person's training program exceeds the body's limits. This may seem somewhat subjective, but there are plenty of indicators that often point toward overtraining. Gabe Mirkin, M.D., lists several signs of overtraining in The Sports Medicine Book:

Muscle Symptoms--persistent soreness or stiffness in joints and tendons; heavy leggedness

Emotional Symptoms--loss of interest in training; nervousness; depression; "I don't care" attitude; inability to relax; decreased academic work or performance

Warning Signs--headache; loss of appetite; fatigue and sluggishness; loss of weight and muscle size; swollen lymph nodes in neck, groin or armpit; constipation and diarrhea

When these symptoms begin to occur, it is time to consider whether you might be pushing your body too far. The signs are not confined to the external. They are a mixture of both mental and physical problems. In checking whether you are pushing yourself into an overtrained state, it is critical to consider the emotional as well as the physical signs. The physical symptoms are more readily noticeable because the emotional symptoms often get attributed to other causes. However, when they turn up in tandem, the cause is often overtraining.

Dropping Your Guard

Overtraining can also cause the immune system to weaken. When the immune system is weak, it is susceptible to illness and other problems. This often leads to a more obvious breakdown of the body's health. Overtraining depletes the bodily reserves, so when a flu bug or other illness starts making the rounds, the body is not ready to fight it off. Some make the mistake of attributing the problem to a sickness that is circulating In actuality, however, the illness may have been avoided had the immune system been stronger.

Overtraining can be caused by all types of activity. High-impact exercise can be as much a cause of overtraining as resistance training. Doctors Michael Ballas, James Tytko and David Cookson note that "approximately 45 percent to 70 percent of runners are injured each year." An overview of injuries among 860 runners pointed out that all of the injuries, except ankle sprains, were the result of overuse.