The gyms of today are littered with treadmills and elliptical machines. Some even have movie rooms filled with them! Should this have happened? Is that really the best way to exercise? The answers are no and no.
Over the past few decades exercise has moved into the realm of extremely low intensity and extremely high volume. So high that you can sit through an entire movie at the gym while walking in place. This type of workout has one major advantage for the common man: it’s easy. Apart from the massive time commitment, nothing has to be sacrificed. For the majority of adults it means you get to check off your “I worked out today” box. A major issue we see is all of this new research on exercise that applies to untrained, sedentary adults being applied to elite athletes. For athletes, it means training sessions become longer and longer. Perhaps we have just figured out that that’s the best way to increase performance and longevity. Or perhaps we have just strayed so far away for so long that nobody questions it anymore.
As the culture moves further and further from doing hard things and toward as much comfort as the latest technology affords, high volume, low intensity exercise sounds great. Organizations are telling people to just do something, no matter how simple it is. Many health professionals understand the importance of intense exercise, but they also understand that the average person is unable to psychologically get themselves to do it. Therefore, the professionals just attempt to throw something out there to at least get people moving. Unfortunately, this idea has become the framework for health today. It is dragging the athlete along leading him/her to psychological doubt, decreased performance, and injury.
Athletes competing at any level need to have a refined mental focus and a powerful drive within them. They should be confident in their training and trust it is slowly bringing them to their desired goals. The notion of more being better and ever increasing training volume is a recipe for a disaster of the mind.
Time is a valuable asset indeed. Even the most committed, even professional, athletes are unable to give every waking moment to training for their respective sport. There are responsibilities and obligations that will (and should) often come before a workout session. Absolutely nobody can be training all of the time.
When I was in my senior year of high school, I was overtaken by the concept of training volume. I didn’t know what to call it then but I could not stand the idea that someone out there was going to train more than me and therefore, be better than me. That idea haunted me so much that I would wake up at 4:00 AM and go for a lactate threshold, submaximal intensity run every single morning before school. Looking back on it, it’s certainly a story of grit and determination, but it also most certainly did nothing good for my performance.
The idea that all that mattered was that I worked more than everybody else caused me to limit my sleep substantially and left my mind in a constant state of paranoia. It is not helpful for the psyche and can ultimately lead to far worse consequences. However just because something is not good to think about or can make one paranoid, does not mean it’s not good for performance. Next we’ll see the physical harm that too high of training volume can do.
The practical goal for any athlete is to perform as well as possible. To align all of the stars of previous hard work to be at one’s absolute best on the day of competition. So does training as much as possible increase or decrease performance. A single training bout per day was previously considered sufficient, but today’s athletes regularly train twice a day or more. Consequently, the number of athletes who are overtraining and have insufficient rest is increasing.
Studies are showing that, in the past few decades, there is an uptrend in a dangerous imbalance between exercise and recovery. This imbalance in turn leads to muscular fatigue and staleness. Staleness is a dysfunction of the neuroendocrine system that may occur when physical and emotional stress exceeds the individual’s capacity.
Our relative stress levels when compared to the effectiveness of our recovery is what ends up determining our ability to train at exceptionally high volumes while maintaining the intensity required to actually show physiological improvement. There is a rather fine line between overtraining and maximum adaptation. However, If you cross that line, it means time away from training– a major setback for any elite athlete.
But if fatigue is the only real problem, then we can all just rest a tad more and be back at it in a day right? Wrong. Fatigue and staleness alone can last far longer and require more intervention than a couple more hours of sleep. However, the true killer is injury; any athlete’s worst nightmare.
Overtraining syndrome is a term for all of the problematic aspects of overtraining. The largest, by far, is increased injury. Some examples of overuse injuries are the following:
These are extremely common injuries as the average athlete has not been well educated on how to train and rest most efficiently. Increases in volume and intensity without a proper foundation cause unexpected loads on the bones and tissues. This is where chronic injuries arise and they often go unnoticed for quite some time until they become a major trouble. Remember, the issue is not strictly volume. It’s a high volume of high intensity without adequate recovery. Elite athletes do require more volume than an adult who likes to play pickup on the weekends. The difference between injury and improvement is in the balance of training and recovery.
Constant injuries marked my athletic career all the way through college. Among others, a major reason was overtraining without a proper understanding of recovery. Each person’s needs and capacities are different so there is no one size fits all solution. Listen to your body and look for signs of overtraining syndrome we discussed.
It’s not about how long you train. It’s about the quality of your training. Many coaches are training their teams with the correct intensity, but pushing the volume way too high. The body needs time to rest to adapt to the training stimulus it was given. If it’s always being forced into another session, it will inevitably cause acute and chronic injury
The athlete needs to constantly be training at intensities that are significantly more intense than their competitions while allowing ample time for recovery. Otherwise, the body will not be adapting to improve at the competitive level.
We founded Archai with the hope of educating and directing athletes toward a better understanding of their bodies as they were designed in order to maximize athletic performance. If you want to learn more or would like to speak with us about your goals and current situation. Feel free to reach out.
Laursen, P.B. (2010), Training for intense exercise performance: high-intensity or high-volume training?. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 20: 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0838.2010.01184.x
Kenttä, G., Hassmén, P. Overtraining and Recovery. Sports Med 26, 1–16 (1998). https://doi.org/10.2165/00007256-199826010-00001
Kuipers, H., Keizer, H.A. Overtraining in Elite Athletes. Sports Medicine 6, 79–92 (1988). https://doi.org/10.2165/00007256-198806020-00003
Pryor, Olivia. “Overtraining Syndrome: 10 Signs That May Suggest You’re Training Too Hard.” Greater Chesapeake Hand Specialists, 23 Dec. 2020, https://www.chesapeakehand.com/2020/12/23/overtraining-syndrome-10-signs-that-may-suggest-youre-training-too-hard/.
