Signs of Overtraining

By: Nick Soleyn, Editor in Chief

Large amounts of stress, either acute or chronic, that outstrips the trainee’s tolerance for that stress and ability to recover can lead to
exhaustion. In training terms, we tend to dub this state “overtraining,” accumulated stress that causes a negative rather than positive
response to training resulting from an inability to recover. Crossing from productive stress to overtraining is much more often the result of
accumulated fatigue. There are signs and symptoms that may signal overtraining. Paying attention to these can allow you to pivot and
manage your stress before it becomes severe.

Exhaustion – Stage 3

“If the stress on the body is too great, either in intensity, duration, or frequency, the body will be unable
to adequately adapt and exhaustion will occur. . . . In practice, this concern is most applicable to
intermediates and advanced trainees—novices usually lack su cient strength and stamina to work at
intensities and durations that would produce these levels of stress . . . .” -Rippetoe & Baker, Practical
Programming for Strength Training (3d ed. 2013)
I re-read these sentences and the discussion that follows them on overtraining while lying in the ICU. I had asked my very pregnant wife to
bring me Practical Programming to read as I recovered from exercise-induced rhabdomyolysis. This wasn’t the rst time I had read these
words, but it was the moment when I really understood them.

Exercise-induced rhabdomyolysis (“rhabdo” for short) is the big nasty brother of delayed onset muscle soreness—what you probably a day
or two after your rst barbell training workout when you had trouble sitting down and getting up from the toilet because your legs were
sore. That soreness is related to tolerable amounts of muscle damage when you train, usually associated with the eccentric, or “downward”
portion of a movement. Rhabdo is intolerable muscle damage resulting in muscle cell death. It’s painful, and it’s dangerous because when
the muscle cells break down it releases muscle enzymes into the bloodstream, including a protein called myoglobin. Enough myoglobin in
the blood can lead to acute renal failure. Rhabdo from exercise is not common it takes e ort and, absent some extenuating factors, poor
training choices.  

Like many others, I discovered barbell training, Rip, and Starting Strength through CrossFit. I had a pretty typical experience. During my rst
year, I become stronger, faster, and more generally t than I had ever been. After the rst year, I found that improvements came more
slowly. But I discovered a seemingly proportional relationship between how hard I worked, how many times a week I trained, and continued
improvements. So, I did more and went harder.

Again, I seemed to plateau a few months later. So, I decided I needed to train even harder. I joined the “competition” team at our gym to
help push me. Over the course of six weeks, I had 8-10 workouts per week, where the goal was to go all out, as hard as we could every single
workout. During this time, I lost about 10 pounds and ignored some signs of decreased performance. My lifts all su ered, and my times for
relatively low-skill conditioning tasks like rowing and running also plummeted. This downward trend continued until a particular workout
that had us performing high repetitions of heavy kettlebell swings and GHD situps.

Two days later, I was in the ER explaining to the doctor that the extreme muscle damage I was exhibiting was from a <20-minute workout.
This was preceded by the worst DOMS I had ever experienced, visibly swollen rectus abdominis muscles, and rust-colored urine (from the
myoglobin).

As I lay in bed reading Practical Programming, I was trying to answer my own questions about training. My goal had been “ tness” but
anything that lands you in the ICU is pretty much the opposite of tness. For me, Rip’s book explained exactly what happened, you could
read it in my log—increasing stress, unexplained weight loss, nagging pains, apathy toward training. When I had been a “novice” and
relatively new to every varied modality of my exercise program, going harder, doing more was ne. I wasn’t yet strong enough to hurt
myself. As I got a year to 15 months into it, I was no longer a novice, I had conditioning and strengthened myself to where I could generate
enough stress to chronically prevent recovery and to actually destroy my muscles. By ignoring the markers of chronic overtraining, I had
reached stage 3 of Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS): Exhaustion.

What is Exhaustion in the training context

“Physiologically, the purpose of any training session is to stress the body so that adaption results. Physical training is bene cial only as long
as it forces the body to adapt to the stress of physical e ort. If the stress is not su cient to overload the body, then no adaptation occurs. If
a stress is so great that it cannot be tolerated, then injury or overtraining result. The greatest improvements in performance occur when
appropriate exercise stresses are introduced to an individual’s training program” (Brookes, Fahey, Baldwin, “Exercise Physiology,” p.7 (4th ed
2005).)

Training is an intentional manipulation of the “Stress-Recovery-Adaptation” cycle. This comes from Hans Selye’s GAS principles in which he
described the possible responses to a stimulus great enough to constitute a stress. Stress can be appropriate or inappropriate, productive
or unproductive stress, meaning it can make you better, stronger, faster, or do exactly the opposite. Stress can be laying in bed for days on
end when you are used to being active, or it can be a new activity or new environment.

But positive change or adaptation is one of two possible outcomes of signi cant stress. Signi cant stress disrupts your equilibrium—
disrupts homeostasis in some way. The di erence between a disruption that leads to bene cial changes and one that leads to exhaustion
and overtraining is a matter of degree and tolerance.

Large amounts of stress, either acute or chronic, that outstrips the trainee’s tolerance for that stress and ability to recover can lead to
exhaustion. In training terms, we tend to dub this state “overtraining,” accumulated stress that causes a negative rather than positive
response to training resulting from an inability to recover. “The stress that results in exhaustion can be either acute or chronic. Examples of
acute exhaustion include fractures, sprains, and strains. Chronic exhaustion (overtraining) is more subtle and includes stress fractures,
emotional problems, and a variety of soft-tissue injuries.”

Keep in mind that overtraining is not synonymous with injury. While overtraining can result in injury and injury can come from things other
than training stress. Acute exhaustion can result in a fracture or strained or torn muscle. But those same injuries may be the result of
dropping a plate on your foot. Exhaustion from training is when the intended stress overwhelms your tolerance. This makes acute
overtraining most common in particularly grueling environmental or competitive environments.[1]

Crossing from productive stress to overtraining is much more often the result of accumulated fatigue. There are signs and symptoms that
may signal overtraining. Paying attention to these can allow you to pivot and manage your stress before it becomes severe.
 Photo: Nick Delgadillo

The level of a lifter’s training advancement is one of the main organizing principles of programming. The minimum threshold for productive
stress in someone who has never lifted before is very low. Novices get stronger with relatively low stress.

Novices also aren’t really strong enough to overdo the stress. For a novice, we can choose the most stressful lifts, those that use the most
muscle mass over the longest range of motion, allowing us to lift the most weight, and use a relatively high volume and high-intensity
program like the novice linear progression. Why? Because in this case “high intensity” is only relative to the person’s abilities, not their
capacity or potential. This makes the novice linear progression a convenient training and data-gathering tool. By starting light, and gradually
changing one variable—the weight on the bar—we can nd the level at which the lifter adapts to training, and we can nd the level at which
they’ve begun to accumulate fatigue that lingers beyond a single workout.

During the novice phase of training, the lifter’s critical threshold moves steadily upward; it takes more stress to make you stronger the
stronger you get.

Your tolerance for stress also changes with your level of training. We’ve discussed the body’s amazing capacity to return to homeostasis
through di erent environments, micro-controls, and the use of energy. Your body not only adapts to survive stress, but it also adapts to
recover from stress as well. So, as your critical threshold for stress moves steadily upward, so does your ability to recover.

The problem is your recovery ability is uid and unique. How well did you sleep last night? How much protein did you eat? How’s your work
life? How’s your marriage? What other hobbies do you have that tax your ability to recover? Sometimes it seems as if almost everything you
do will draw on your overall recovery capacity. No two people will experience or react to the same stress in the same way. So, at the upper
end of our training zone, we have to explore your ability to recover and be on the lookout for signs of excessive accumulated stress.

Fortunately, overtraining is not a problem for novices or even most intermediate lifters. Productive training stress isn’t like walking a
tightrope. You aren’t either training just enough or too much. For novices, the zone is broad enough to not be of much concern unless the
lifter has a signi cant amount of training history to draw from. Then, they are a conditional novice, but even then proper management of
the novice program is preventative. The zone narrows as you become more advanced. The margins for improvement are narrow at the
expense of a lot of training stress and both the ability and the risk of overshooting is possible for advanced lifters. You are working very hard
for relatively small gains, you are strong enough and well-trained enough to exceed your own levels of tolerance.
For non-competitive lifters, the dangers of overtraining come from the recovery side, rather than the stress side, of training. We talked
about this a little bit regarding the danger of “Burnout” with training. When you have outside or unproductive stress that a ects your ability
to recover from training stress you run the risk of physical and mental exhaustion.

Fortunately, a training log and a little bit of information can help you adjust as you observe possible issues. There are physical and
psychological symptoms of overtraining that you should watch out for, especially if life outside of training has changed signi cantly. Below
are a few recognized symptoms of overtraining. You should note, however, that each of these can come from other underlying issues that
may require professional medical help:

1. Increased resting heart rate: Some sources indicate that a prolonged increase of 5 beats per minute in your resting heart rate, is a
typical sign of overtraining.
2. Unexplained weight loss: For the competitive lifter who pays close attention to what she eats, unexplained weight loss is a sign that
your body is no longer reacting to the stress of training in a predictable manner and can be a sign of overtraining.
3. Prolonged or excessive thirst: Changes in your nighttime uid consumption. And a lack of perspiration during workouts when you
usually would sweat a lot are changes that should be noted.
4. Alteration of sleeping patterns: Disruption of normal sleep can be both a cause and a symptom of overtraining.
5. A “general psychological malaise”: It takes a lot of drive and passion to get to the competitive stage of lifting. If you are suddenly
unable to maintain your training schedule or exhibiting apathy toward your strength training, this is a sign that all is not well.
(Johnson, Thiese, “A Review of Overtraining Syndrome Recognizing the Signs and Symptoms,” Journal of Athletic Training Vol 27, No.4
(1992))

The best way to treat overtraining is through prevention. Minimum E ective Dose changes to your program over time are a great
preventative measure because they keep from changing too many variables or changing the overall stress of your program suddenly and in
ways that you cannot handle. If you have experienced recent increases in unproductive stress, however, and then exhibit the signs above,
NOW is a good time to talk to your coach or self-assess whether your training is helping or hurting your adaptation to the stress you are
experiencing.

Follow your own progress and identify when you may or may not be crossing into levels of stress that you aren’t able to handle. More is not
always better. Stress increases over time, but you need to be conscious of those increases, measure and observe them and make good,
minimum e ective dose, changes along the way.

[1] Practical Programming notes another situation of acute overload: Previously trained athletes returning from a layo :

“Athletes with even an intermediate training history have developed a neuromuscular system that is far more e cient than that of an
untrained individual; this athlete can still recruit a high percentage of his available motor units, although they are not prepared to be used
very hard. . . . Extreme cases of soreness, to the point of loss of function, disability, or even rhabdomyolysis . . . can and certainly do occur.”

Related Content

LISTEN: The MED Toolbox

WATCH: Programming 101
READ: Avoiding Burnout
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