Knowing Your Body's Limits
Overtraining is a serious issue among athletes and fitness buffs alike and can undermine all the good that exercise does—knowing when enough is too much is critical to adapting your workout and performance goals. If you dream of training like an Olympian, it might surprise you to learn that you’ve probably achieved your goal—by 1972 standards anyway. And if you aren’t there yet, that spunky 12 year-old girl swimming next to you in the pool most certainly is.
“To train for the Munich Olympics in 1972 Mark Spitz swam 10,000 yards a day,” notes Dr. Jack Raglin, associate professor of kinesiology at Indiana University. “Spitz’s coach received telephone calls from people expressing concern he was going to kill him, that literally his heart was going to give out. Within a couple of decades you have kids that sometimes do twice as much as Spitz did a day. Sports have progressed to the point that kids are doing what Olympians used to do not all that long ago.” Given all the benefits, it’s ironic that exercise can sometimes be dangerous to your health, easily developing into a compulsion, leading to injury, depression and possibly even eating disorders. As clinicians become more astute at identifying the signs of overtraining, it’s increasingly evident the problem is widespread, especially among young athletes between the ages of 10 and 18. “On average, kids who have been training at a high level for five or six years have already experienced staleness syndrome as we classify it,” says Dr.Raglin, former co-chair of the United States Olympic Committee and American College of Sports Medicine Panel. “That’s roughly the same percentage as we’ve seen with adult non-elite runners. I think it’s a shockingly high percentage and it’s a very consistent one. Kids suffer the same symptoms, clinical depression, loss of performance and so on as adults. Our concern is that from a developmental standpoint some of these kids may never get another chance. Once they develop staleness they may fall behind in such a way they may never get back into the sport. If you lose an entire season when you’re an 11 year-old you may never catch up.” Neuro-endocrine is the medical term used to describe overtraining syndrome, which is best defined as an imbalance. The body’s ability to repair itself is impaired, negating the benefit of rest periods. Injuries follow when obvious warning signs, such as fatigue and muscle soreness, are ignored. “The obligatory exerciser,” a term used in the June issue of The Physician and Sportsmedicine (www.physsportsmed.com), to describe athletes overly committed to training, despite its detrimental physical or psychological effects, is a modern-day phenomenon crying out for help. Among researchers, overtraining is regarded as a psychobiological condition affecting the whole body. Three very different categories emerge: Elite athletes who overtrain in a bid to improve performance, obligatory or addictive exercisers incapable of resting and young athletes exceeding their physical limits. Exercise addicts are their own worst enemy, but in the case of elite and young athletes, coaches are usually to blame. “There are coaches who simply press athletes on because that’s the only thing they know,” comments Dr. Raglin. “It’s the old-school mentality that more is better. I think coaches are afraid that if they talk about overtraining and recovery they’ll plant a seed of doubt that could ruin everything. They’re too fixated with motivating their athletes.” Physiological breakdowns are common among addictive exercisers, who are typically older and therefore more vulnerable to injury, but athletes between the ages of 15 and 25 can withstand almost any training regimen and rarely manifest strain. Science has yet to devise measurements to help them. Dr. Raglin is acutely aware of the problem: “There have been hundreds of studies done looking at overtraining from the standpoint of developing a monitoring marker, some sort of physiological or psychological measure that gives the coach an early warning sign of athletes who are doing too much. And amazingly there are virtually no physical markers that have been acknowledged, practically nothing works, and the factors and variables that may work are so exotic that hardly anyone can measure them, especially on a regular basis. We know as training load increases mood gets disturbed, so we think the psychological assessments work reasonably well, and give a good indication of athletes having problems, but coaches and athletes are often very reluctant to use these types of measures. We have athletes who are more willing to give blood samples than fill out a five-minute psychological questionnaire. We have more luck obtaining muscle biopsies.”
Once More, With Less Feeling:
You’re probably overtraining if you:
Feel chronically fatigued.
Are susceptible to colds and other viral infections.
Experience unexplained bouts of depression or moodiness.
Notice a change of sleep pattern.
Record a drop in performance level.
Sustain repeated injuries.
Are plagued with joint pain.
Notice a loss of appetite.
Become apathetic.
Avoid the pitfalls of overtraining by:
Slowly increasing exercise volume.
Alternating the intensity of workouts.
Doing a variety of exercises.
Monitoring diet, and sources of stress.
Resting during periods of sickness.
Maintaining a training log for comparative analysis.
Heeding your body’s warning signs.
A half-century ago just thirty minutes of training a day was all Roger Bannister needed to run the first mile ever recorded under four minutes, a feat that astonished the world. Overtraining was unheard of then, now it’s an ever-present threat. At it’s most serious, overtraining can result in lengthy illnesses. The only cure is rest, which should be the cornerstone of every training regime.