Compelling evidence that you are overtraining

Training for an endurance or ultra endurance event is similar to a dose-response assessment. 
The goal of this type of scientific test is to determine the required dose to produce a specific outcome (or response). Sadly, when it comes to endurance athletes, far too many athletes are doing work without eliciting a positive or beneficial response. 

As it relates to training, the right amount of stress can produce significant fitness gains but too much stress results in high risk of injury, sickness, overtraining and burnout. Not enough stress is simply exercising and doesn't induce favorable change in physiology for race readiness. Training stress shouldn't be associated just with weekly volume as the athlete training 8 hours a week can be as vulnerable to overtraining as the athlete training 20 hours a week. 

So why is it that so many endurance and ultra endurance athletes are training so much and so hard but struggling with recovery, body composition, health issues and/or performance gains?

As training stress increases (often in the form of increased intensity, frequency and volume), your lifestyle choices must also change in order to respond to the added stress on your body. 

• Energy/calorie/nutrient needs to increase
• Recovery needs to increase (ex. easy workout, rest days)
• Sleep needs to increase
• Lifestyle stress needs to decrease (work, emotional, travel, relationship)

Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. 

Endurance athletes fall victim to green-box syndrome (checking off workout so the workout turns green or pass, instead of red or fail) and will prioritize the completion of workouts at the cost of poor sleep, poor nutrition and inadequate recovery in an already stressful and busy life. It's not uncommon for athletes to sleep, eat and recover less as training volume increases - talk about the contradiction of what is needed to optimize performance and to support health!

Overtraining is a physiological state caused by an excess accumulation of physiological, psychological, emotional, environmental and training stress. With overtraining being heavily misunderstood and misdiagnosed, there are strong links between overtraining and undereating. It doesn't matter how much/little you are training - if your body is not responding well to training stress and you are not balancing your training with lifestyle stress, you'll consistently struggle to make improvements and even worse, you'll experience setbacks related to mental and physical health. 

As an athlete, you have a responsibility to your body to provide it with proper nutrition, fuel, sleep and recovery in order to support all the physiological functions needed in order to maintain optimal health. Eating enough, timing nutrition with training and utilizing well-formulated sport nutrition products are critical to the healthy functioning of the nervous, metabolic, nervous, cardiac and musculoskeletal systems - all which must be at full strength in order to encourage adaptations. 

I constantly struggle to understand the reason why as training volume/intensity increases, athletes assume it's ok to eat, sleep and recover less.

A well-planned and organized diet, with enough energy (calories) and nutrients to fuel and refuel the body is essential to overall health as you train for an endurance event. Your daily diet provides the nutrients needed to rebuild and repair muscle tissue, restock glycogen (fuel) stores in the muscle and liver, maintain immune system health and keep vitamin and mineral stores within the recommended range. Because overtraining and overfueling walk hand in hand, if you are underfueling, your  body has to work harder to complete a workout. Many cases of overtraining attribute to underfueling. 

Signs of Underfueling (which are also common in overtraining)

• Fatigue, low energy levels
• Decrease in performance or fitness plateau 
• Low motivation and difficulty concentrating
• Decreased muscle strength
• Constant hunger or no appetite
• Irritability, mood changes
• Difficulty sleeping at night
• GI distress
• Muscle cramps
• Cold intolerance
• Frequent sickness or injury
• Stress fractures
• Changes in menstrual cycle (for women)
• Significant changes in body composition 
• Low sex drive

Why do endurance athletes undereat? 

• Unintentional - Not all undereating is intentional. Lack of proper knowledge about how much food/calories is needed to support endurance training can result in undereating. Additionally, limited time for grocery shopping/meal prep, dislike for cooking, financial reasons, poor meal planning, busy schedules and a loss of appetite can all impact undereating. 
  
  
• Desire to lose weight - You must fuel your current body, not diet in an attempt to try to achieve the body you think you should have. Forcing your body to lose weight from food and sport nutrition restriction adds extra stress to your body. By eating enough to fuel your specific training needs, you can make sure your body has what it needs to adapt to training and to rebuild during recovery. 
  
  
• Social pressures - Similar to the desire to lose weight, body dissatisfaction can increase the risk of disordered eating patterns. It's important to remember that the so-called "ideal" body doesn't exist. Bodies come in all sizes and shapes. Don't let social pressures to look a certain way cause you to undereat. 

Why do athletes overtrain? 

• Unintentional - Busy schedules and stressful lives leave little time to recover well from training. Remember - adaptations from training occur through recovery. Just because you complete a workout, this doesn't mean you are "gaining" anything from the session. If you are not making time to adequately fuel, hydrate and recover from your workouts, it will be very hard for your body to adapt.
  
  
• Training program - When a training program is appropriately designed, it will allow for gradual progression of volume/intensity and consistent adaptations. This will likely result in meaningful performance improvements. However, if training is rushed, developmental steps are skipped or too much volume/intensity/frequency is loaded on the body at once, the athlete has not built up resiliency and tolerance to training and thus, overtraining may result from too much training stress and fatigue. 
  
  
• Personality - Athletes who have a compulsive and perfectionist personality type are driven to work hard. While in moderation, these traits are beneficial to staying motivated to train, the concern is when athletes go to extreme. Additionally, a preoccupation with body image, food and exercise obsession can cause an athlete to push the body beyond healthy limits. 

Self Assessment

Do yourself a favor and look out for your mental and physical health. As an athlete, you are nothing without your health. Because overtraining (and burnout) is heavily linked with undereating, here are a few questions that may be helpful for a weekly check-in: 

1. Are my energy and mood levels stable throughout the day? 
2. Am I sleeping well (falling asleep quickly and sleeping restfully throughout the night)?
3. Is my HR elastic when I train (can easily increase and decrease dependent on the effort/intensity)?
4. Am I able to be present and focused to life outside of training (ex. work, family, relationships, etc.)?
5. Am I relying heavily on caffeine to stay alert throughout the day? 
6. Do I constantly feel hungry or no urge to eat throughout the day? 
7. Am I increasing my recovery, sleep and nutrition to support my increase in training load?
8. Am I enjoying my training load? 
9. Am I enjoying foods that I normally enjoy eating? 
   
10. Do I feel deep fatigue/soreness which is affecting my ability to execute workouts as planned?
11. Am I taking my recovery and easy days seriously? 
    
12. Is my mood significantly affected by my training?

An increase in training load requires changes to your lifestyle choices. Don't wait until it's too late to give more attention to your daily diet, recovery and sleep. 

Leaving sport due to burnout

 

As a long-distance triathlon coach, I realize that there will be a time when an athlete will no longer need my coaching services. When this time comes, my hope is that my athlete is not leaving the sport with resentment but instead, due to a new life chapter. It's also my hope that the athlete continues to swim, bike and run, even if it's not to be competitive or to participate in events. Far too often I hear of athletes leaving the sport of triathlon on bad terms. Instead of reflecting on all the great experiences, accomplishments and memories when moving on to the next chapter, the athlete sees triathlon as a waste of time/money/energy, the athlete sells all equipment/gear and family/friends are very bitter about how time/money/energy was spent over x-years/months on a "lifestyle" hobby. 

As a collegiate swimmer, I experienced a bit of burnout before my senior year.  I didn't hate the sport of swimming but mentally I needed a change. I picked up cross country running for one season and realized two things: how fun it was to run off road and how much I missed competitive swimming. I ended up finishing off undergrad with four years of collegiate swimming. All I needed was a short break to realize how much I loved swimming. Still today, I love to swim. I've been swimming for almost 30 years and have never gone more than 2 weeks without swimming. 

Every athlete has his/her own threshold when the rewards are not enough to maintain the effort. Burnout is a response to the demands and stressors of a sport without appropriate physical and mental rest and recovery. Burnout is not the same as overtraining although overtraining can play a role in burnout. Sure, sometimes your heart just isn't into it anymore or you need a change but far too often, athletes let things build up for far too long (too much of the same thing) and instead of making small changes, it all comes crashing down.  Unfortunately, many athletes experience signs of burnout like staleness, fatigue, reduced interest, and lack of focus, drive and motivation but an acquired resilient and mentally tough mindset can prevent the athlete from recognizing that there is a problem.  Instead of taking a step back and making small changes for better life/training balance, the athlete quits the sport all together. It's not uncommon for sport to harm an athlete's well-being. 

Endurance athletes are known to put too much on the daily plate and fail to value rest and recovery. Most endurance athletes do not get enough sleep to feel rested and do not prioritize nutrition to be well-fueled and nourished. with so much going on in life - family/work/social life/extracurriculars/travel - training for sport is usually added to an already busy lifestyle. There are also endurance athletes who become fully consumed by sport as a way to fulfill or reinvent identity as an athlete or to escape the stressors of life or to feel a sense of control and a training passion turns into a training obsession. And what once started as a fun new active lifestyle of growth, development and exploring your capabilities can easily spiral into burnout due to perfectionism, high expectations, rigid standards, inadequate rest and recovery, inadequate energy intake and overexertion. Regardless of the reason, many athletes begin a sport with good intentions but leave on bad terms.

To reduce the risk of sport burnout, here are a few tips: 

• Don't rush the process. Stay patient and always remember why you started the sport. 
• Focus on yourself and your own journey. Don't compare or try to keep up with the training of another athlete. 
• Focus on the process, not the outcome. 
• Have hobbies/activities/friends outside of sport. 
• Don't set high or unrealistic expectations.
• Avoid a perfectionist mindset. 
• Communicate with your coach. 
• Enjoy short breaks away from sport. 
• Take care of yourself physically - rest doesn't not mean you are lazy. 
• Take care of yourself mentally. 
• Stay passionate, not obsessed. 
• Don't feel pressure to look a certain way (ex. change your body image). 
  
• Address self-talk. 
• Find ways to feel satisfied and accomplished. 
• Involve others/socialize when you train. 
• Keep training fun. 
• Work with a sport psychologist.

It's normal to lose interest and motivation in your sport, to take an extended time off from training or to move on to a different sport. But more often than not, I find that triathletes will leave the sport due to burnout - too much accumulated too quickly.

Take care of yourself mentally and physically and remember, sport is fun.  If you find yourself obsessing over outcome goals, training with a perfectionist mindset or holding yourself to high personal standards, there's a good chance that you are increasing the chance for sport burnout. Sport should add value and meaning to your life without compromising your mental and physical health. 

Overtraining - more than training hard or long

It may come as a surprise to many athletes but when you are on a mission to get faster, training long and fast is not a safe combination.

Many times, this leads to overtraining as there is an imbalance between training and recovery.

Be mindful that training beyond your body's ability to recover is not correlated to a specific number of training hours.

As examples....

 "But I don't train 20 hours a week, I only train 8 - how can I be overtrained?" 
"But I train much less intensity than I use to train, I don't understand why my hormones are all messed up?"

If your body can not recover, adapt or tolerate your given training load, your body is going to give you signs that you are overtraining.

When your hormones are out of whack, your bones are becoming weak, your mood is unstable, your body is becoming fragile, you find yourself constantly sick, your appetite has drastically changed, your weight has unintentionally changed, your sleep is disrupted/restless, you are in a constant state of fatigue, you are constantly experiencing GI issues (which have never been an issue in the past), your energy has dropped and your performance has declined, taking one day off from training or searching for a quick fix through medicine or supplements are not simple solutions to a serious problem.

At this time, you must come to the realization that your methods of improving performance or preparing for your upcoming event are no longer working.

When you find yourself struggling to train for a streak of a week or more, knowing that you just don't feel like your normal self, this doesn't mean that you need to harden up, suck it up and push through.

 A smart approach is to discuss your current training plan with your coach so you both can figure out why your plan is not (or no longer) working for your body. Don't simply look into training hours but also consider the layout of workouts throughout the week, recovery routines, sleep habits, stress management, diet, fueling and anything else that could help you train smarter.

Training smarter does not mean training easy.

If you haven't dug too deep of a hole, you may just need 3-5 days to reboot your system with some good R&R and light activity before returning to normal training - which is slightly modified with a smarter training approach.

During this time, consider reaching out to a sport dietitian to give a birds-eye view on your diet, as many athletes struggle to train consistently due to haphazard fueling and hydration strategies and poor planning and nutrient timing in the daily diet.

If you are classically overtrained, you need to be respectful to your body during this time. There should be no timeline to "get better" by x-date or race as this is the time, more than ever before, to put your health before performance IF you want longevity in your sport. 

As an athlete, you should always be on a mission to learn how to train smarter in order to maximize performance with the least amount of training stress. This means constantly evaluating how you are training and being open to change.
Simply training hard, fast or long are not key words you need to use to reach your performance goals.

Whenever you train for an event, consider your lifestyle requirements (family, work, commuting, travel), your current level of fitness, your past history (illness and injury) and your short and long term goals so that you can follow a well-designed raining plan, in safe, fun and healthy way.

The point of diminishing returns: Part II

                              

Sports are not for everyone, especially endurance sports.

Successful age-group, elite or professional athletes and those who seek or crave endurance training carry specific traits and characteristics that are found in highly ambitious individuals.

If this speaks loudly to you, ironically, the same traits that help you stay dedicated, committed, consistent and goal-focused in your sport may also help you function at a high capacity in life, with your career, relationships and family.

As every endurance athlete and coach understands, there is a specific type of training stress that needs to be applied on the body to encourage physiological changes to improve athletic performance.
As a coach with a background in exercise physiology, I can't stress how important it is to place repeated stress on the body in the form of specific workout frequency, intensity and duration at the appropriate times and phases throughout the season in order to ensure smooth progression throughout the season.

However, a careful approach must be applied as every athlete handles training stress differently and this isn't specific to an athlete's fitness level (ex. newbie vs. veteran). Many top, elite or professional athletes prescribe to a training and eating plan that works for their body and individual goals.

It can be blatantly obvious or unbeknownst to the athlete that he/she is not adapting well to training. Sometimes, a plan or approach is risky before initiation whereas other times, it takes several weeks or months of repeated stress for an athlete to exhibit signs or symptoms that the lifestyle he/she is living or the training regime (or a combination of both) is causing too much stress on the body.

For the committed, dedicated, goal-focused, hard working, mentally tough and determined athlete, change is extremely (did I say extremely, I meant VERY extremely) hard, especially when you fear losing your identity as an athlete, which you feel also "makes you" who you are as a human being.

We all know how great it feels to have a great workout and even better, how awesome it feels to be consistent with training. But when/if you find yourself exhausted, injured, unhealthy, depressed, isolated and continuing down a path of diminishing returns, it's time for a serious conversation with yourself (or your coach) to determine a smarter training regime that will provide you with favorable results in fitness and health.

The following list describes some of the habits that may post a threat to your health and athletic development. The more risks that you take, the greater chance that you may experience a point of diminishing returns. 

Risky business
-Getting less than 7 hours of sleep per night, inconsistent sleeping schedule or restless sleeping
-Starting a workout within 20 minutes of waking and not properly warming up before a workout
-Not fueling or hydrating around most workouts
-Not fueling or hydrating during longer workouts
-Knowing that you are not eating enough
-Knowing that you are eating too much
-Struggling with an unhealthy relationship with food, the body and/or exercise
-Constantly feeling rushed - going from one thing to the next
-Never feeling caught-up in life
-Never feeling like you can follow (or keep up) with your workout load/training plan
-Feeling like life is passing by too quick yet you can never slow down

-Constantly feeling underfueled and/or dehydrated
-Obsessing about total miles completed, never feeling like you are doing enough
-Barely getting by during workouts (especially long or intense workouts)
-Constantly metric driven
-No/little strength training
-No/little mobility work
-No/little time to food prep and/or to eat on a schedule
-Unhealthy eating habits
-Obsessive eating habits
-Not flexible, strict to specific paces/watts to hold for most workouts
-Working out no matter how you feel (sleep deprived, sick, injured, etc.)
-Exhausted during the day, struggle to fall asleep at night
-Rewarding good, intense or long workouts with normally "off-limit" food (or restricting specific foods around "bad" workouts)
-Overly stressed from work/life
 -Bringing work/life stress to a workout
-Constantly skipping workouts, little structure or frequency for training
-Not following a plan, haphazard training

-Trying to make up training hours/workouts on the weekends
-Squeezing in too many workouts (or training hours) in one day
-No/little understanding how to fuel and hydrate before/during/after long workouts (or ignore practical advice)

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Sadly, many athletes won't admit or come forth when there is a problem (like the ones mentioned below) because athletes may feel it shows a sign of weakness, failure or giving up.

Something isn't working for you
-Chronically fatigued, exhausted or tired
-Constant achy or sore muscles
-Chronic sickness or upper respiratory infections
-Sever mood disturbances (anxiety, depression, irritability)
-Loss of appetite
-Uncontrollable appetite
-Unintentional weight loss or gain
-Hormonal issues
-Adrenal fatigue
-Anemia
-You are showing signs/symptoms of an eating disorder in order to control weight or to improve performance
-Stress fractures, tendon or ligament injuries
-Nausea/dizziness
-Cardiovascular issues - heart racing or altered normal heart rate during rest and exercise
-Painful joints
-Headaches
-Loss of energy, speed, stamina or power during workouts
-Gut issues
-Constipation, bloody stools, diarrhea, vomiting around workouts (or during the day)
-Loss of motivation/ambition
-Decrease/loss of sex drive
-No energy
-Metabolism changes
-Poor recovery
-Exhausted during the day, trouble falling asleep or sleeping well at night
-Your body can not match your drive/passion
-Loss of excitement for social activities
-You've made an extreme change in life with your job, family or friends and have become a "different" person in order to train more/harder
-You feel unhealthy or constantly run-down
-You've lost your joy, passion and love for training and/or racing
-You always feel injured
-You feel isolated

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Despite the body yelling at you to stop, get help and make a change, you ignore the signs and symptoms and try to get by.

Trying to get by
-Loading up on caffeine and/or energy drinks to get through the day

-Loading up on caffeine and/or energy drinks to get through workouts

-Restricting food to try to lose weight
-Using diet drinks, laxatives or pills to curb cravings or to lose weight
-Overexercising or pushing hard, intentionally, to try get fitter, faster
-Reaching for sugar for pick-me ups throughout the day
-Relying on sleep aids to try to sleep at night
-Excessively (more than 3 times a month) using NSAID's or other anti-inflammatory medications to heal aching muscles/joints
-Using alcohol or other drugs/medications to get through life (or to relax)

In part III of this blog post series, I will talk about how you can make changes to train smarter in order to train harder without compromising your health. 

Avoid overtraining and burnout

As a coach, I find that my hardest job is telling athletes to rest. Certainly, my athletes are not seeking an expert to tell them how to take a day off from training but instead, to give well-designed, challenging and well-placed workouts in a periodized, individualized training plan in order to take their fitness to the next level. 

When an athlete begins to adapt to training stress, the consistency in training can be very motivating. 

Athletes know that to improve fitness, there must be a consistent load placed on the body and often with intensity and at an uncomfortable volume. 

So in addition to rest and recovery days, I now have a great respect for rest in the off-season. 

And this doesn't mean a few weeks of swim,bike, run workouts without gadgets or group workouts "just for fun."

For the past 6-weeks I have done minimal exercising. Less than an hour a day and much of it was not related to swim, bike and run. 

Lucky for me, I had a partner in crime for our extreme, but needed, lazy routine
Karel joined me on this 6-week off-season break. 

After IMWI, I thought that 4-weeks was enough to properly recover from the race but also from competing (and racing) in 4 Ironman distance triathlons in the past 14 months. 

But then I started thinking that perhaps  I needed more time, like 6 or 8 weeks. 

Never have I taken more than 4 weeks off from structure before (but even if week 5 was still light it was still structured in some way) so I wasn't sure what I was expecting in this LOOONGG off season break.
(really, it wasn't all that long as we have been super busy with our coaching and nutrition business)

We will not be returning to hard-core training tomorrow but instead, following our very structured foundation plan (which will be available for purchase here in a few weeks). Our big race isn't for another year so certainly there is a lot more skill/strength/drill work to do now (as oppose to bricks and long runs and bike workouts) as we do not need to be building a base without the foundation in place.
And just like 2014, we do not plan on racing any running races in 2015 but instead, dedicating all of our training and focus to our key triathlon races. 

As for what is happening starting tomorrow.....

First will be two weeks of intro which we will transition from our non-athlete lifestyle to athletes again. That means more attention to our diet, sleep habits, stretching and anything else that can contribute to consistency with training. This new lifestyle will take some time for our bodies to get use to, even though our minds are really ready to return to structured training.
We are involving a few new experts to assist in our personal Kona 2015 journey this season so we are both super excited about what's to come. 

But first we must slowly re-introduce training stress as our bodies are a bit out of shape....

 but that was our entire plan. 

I remember when I started training for endurance sports. Everything was so fun and new and it seemed to come so naturally to my body. My body had only years of competitive swimming behind me so the introduction of bike and run training was very welcomed. 

I can honestly say that I have never experienced burnt out since becoming an endurance athlete and over the past 1.5 years I had no injuries that created any setbacks for me.
I love training and racing just the same now as I did when I started training/racing although now my priorities often change as I have a lot more to balance on my life-plate. 

So as a coach and athlete, I like to be proactive. And 6-weeks was the appropriate amount of time to ensure that mentally and physically, I would be setting myself up for a great 2015 season. Even though I felt very recovered about a week after IMWI (and certainly on a high knowing that Karel and I were going to both be racing in the 2015 IM World Championship), little did I know how run-down, mentally and physically exhausted and tired I was in the inside. 

And the only way I discovered that was giving my body more rest than it needed. 

Getting fitter, faster, stronger and more powerful is simply the result of a training stimulus. 

It's very easy to fail to consistently perform to our best ability, when we do not have a body that can adapt well to training stress.
And thus, the training may still be checked off the daily to-do list but sadly our risk for burnout, injury and sickness increases and we reduce the many opportunities to achieve peak fitness. 

Little does a competitive athlete recognize the continued fatigue that lingers around week after week, month after month and even year after year. Although athletes may perhaps feel as if they are fresh and healthy here or there throughout the season (better think twice if one or two days off a month is really "recovery"), it is extremely hard to know if your body/mind is truly recovered if you don't give it more rest than you think it needs. 

Not too much rest that you get sick and unhealthy but enough rest that you lose a little fitness to adapt quickly to training stress and you can train consistently with more intense motivation and excitement. 

As an endurance athlete, I see my body as a bank. I am constantly making withdrawals and investments with every workout. I always strive to make more investments than withdrawals so that I can cash out on race day. But, there is always the appropriate time to make a few withdrawals that are well-timed and needed. 

Ultimately, I don't want to be broke and wishing I would have saved my money come race day and many times, athletes are very unwise when it comes to banking workouts with their body. 

The problem with many endurance athletes is that there are way too many withdrawals that are seen as necessary, normal and needed. But the truth is that the body can only tolerate so much training stress until it can no longer adapt. 

And then comes an even bigger issue of burnout and overtraining. 

BURNOUT

Burnout is not as serious as overtraining but it is certainly not something that a competitive endurance athlete wants to experience. 

When an athlete gets burnout, he/she lacks the motivation to train. He/she sees little satisfaction in continuing training or even racing and the previous excitement and focus for training is gone. 

Athletes who are burnt out may find themselves depressed, anxious or fatigued and a burnout athlete feels as if there is little purpose to training, often saying "I don't care anymore."

The positive to  burnout is many times an athlete just needs a break from training. Many times, volume or intensity is too high and the athlete just needs to rest. Perhaps the athlete needs a change of distance, scenery or schedule...just something to switch up the "routine" that has become stale. 

OVERTRAINING
Here lies the bigger issue which can occur if a burnout athlete continues to push because "no pain is no gain".
Overtraining may be common among the following athletes:

-Athletes who balance a lot on their plate (families, work, life, etc.)
-Athletes who are new to the sport and tend to do a lot of fear-based training (ex. worried that he/she is not ready for the distance so there is a rapid increase in volume in a short amount of time)
-Athletes who are obsessive with eating and exercising, often too rigid with structure and lack of flexibility as life changes

-Endurance athletes - the best reason I can make is that endurance athletes have to train with a higher training load than short distance athletes and on top of this, they are balancing a lot in life, may struggle with body composition issues and may underfuel

-Athletes who never (or rarely) take time off, down time or beaks in the season
-Athletes who race too much
-Athletes who do not follow a well-designed, periodized training plan and do not have a team (sport dietitian, coach, sport psychologist, massage therapist) to provide expert advice

Overtraining is serious and I feel many times it is so overlooked by athletes and coaches because as I mentioned before, dedicated athletes know they need to consistently train and are not afraid to take risks and to push the limits for performance gains. 

So what is overtraining? 

Well, beyond a decreased or impaired performance, there is also extreme fatigue that affects the athlete in life and in training. Unlike burnout when an athlete may just lose motivation and enthusiasm for training for a short period of time, there are many physiological, psychological, nutritional and immunological issues that can occur. 

-A rapid change in HR and blood pressure

-A change in reproductive hormones (estrogen, progesterone or resulting in amenorrhea) or a change in testosterone (for men)

-Headaches/nausea
-Changes in cortisol, thyroid, pituitary hormones
-GI issues
-A decrease in strength/power/speed
-Inability to perform or meet personal standards for the time/effort that is committed to training

-Insomnia

-Decrease/change in appetite
-Unintentional weight loss/gain
-Prolonged recovery, abnormal muscle soreness, joint aches

-Mood changes - depression, anxiety, exacerbated stress

-Decrease in motivation

-Decrease in self esteem and compassion for others

-Suppressed immune system - more frequent sickness or more time to recover from sickness
-Increased injuries

-Loss of enthusiasm for the sport and little desire to continue

For the respect of your one and only body, the worst thing you can do as an athlete is be motivated, passionate and hard working and not reach your goals because your training plan is not well-designed and your mind is not accepting of rest and recovery. 

So much time, energy, sacrifice and effort is needed, day in and day out, for you to peak appropriately at your key races but overtraining is not going to get you to where you want to be.  

The ultimate goal is not to seek ways to train harder or longer but instead, learn how to train smarter. 

Maybe you don't need 6-weeks like we did but I'm pretty sure that your body can benefit from a little time off from structure as you thank your body for what it allowed you to do last season. 

Happy training...and off-season!