Five Signs You May Be Overtraining

For every athlete there is the perfect volume and intensity of training that allows them to be the best athlete that their physiology will allow. It would involve doing enough work to maximize adaptations, without leaving anything on the table, and without overdoing it. The idea of attaining this perfect balance is a goal to which all athletes and coaches continually strive.

The Mirage of Perfection

However, this balance seems like a mirage in the distance, continually changing with every athlete, goal, age, and training cycle. As of now, and for the foreseeable future, there is no single measurement that can predict with certainty that an athlete is maximizing their physical potential. Instead, we rely on an educated trial and error where we stay within the bounds of what we know is significantly undertraining while also taking notes of the numbers, feelings, and intuition garnered from the times we pushed it too far. Since this is a learned experience, understanding yourself or your athlete takes time (which is part of the frustration, as time is the one thing that all athletes are working against).

So, what are those variables that can help us to cut down that learning curve and identify when our stress and recovery are not balanced? As athletes, we can monitor our training with countless forms of technology to measure: power, acceleration, heart / pulse rate, hemoglobin, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, and more. However, which of these indices has the capability of acting as the much-needed canary in our overtraining coal mine?

The Science