 Okay, so in this episode of Mind Pump, we tackled a problem or an issue that a lot of people run into. Overtraining, overtraining is when you're working out too much, your body's ability to recover, get stronger, adapt, is compromised because you're just throwing too much at your body. And a lot of you who are listening right now are in this category and a lot of you don't even realize it. You think you're just going to the gym? It's not just for athletes. Oh yeah, you think you're going to the gym, you're busting your butt, you're sweating, and you're like, oh everything's going great, but if you listen to this episode and really examine yourself, you may find that you're doing too much and this is good news because doing the right amount will get you faster and better results. So we talk about all the signs that we've seen in our clients that tend to point to overtraining. There's nine of them and we go from everything from chronic pain and injury, all the way to metabolic imbalances and issues with fat loss. So when you listen to this episode, we're going to list all nine of these signs for you. If you have three or more of these signs yourself, the odds that you're overtraining are probably quite high. Also this month, our most popular workout program that we offer, MAPS Anabolic is 50% off. This is a phenomenal program for building strength, muscle, sculpting the body, and speeding up or boosting the metabolism. Here's how you get that 50% off discount. Go to MAPSRed.com and use the code RED50, R-E-D-5-0, no space for the discount. Dude, here's one I'm excited to talk about because Anne, who runs our customer service on the back end, every once in a while she'll come to one of our meetings and she'll be like, hey, I'm getting a lot of questions around said topic and continuously. Here is one that I think is abused in our space. I also think that it's not talked about enough. I think that a lot of the people that have huge followings lean on the beast mode, the all out, there's no such thing as overtraining, only under eating. And I think that message has been permeating the fitness industry for a very long time and we know from training so many clients that this is not true. And in fact, how do you define overtraining and then how do I know if I'm potentially doing that? Now, this is a good topic because we have a tendency to think, this is not just with exercise, but we have a tendency to think that if something is good, then more of it is better. More is always better. Yeah, and so if I want, if I have a goal, or I want to get fit and healthy, that if some of it, if some exercise is good for me, then why not do more of it? And why not do as much as I possibly can? If training intensely is gonna get my body to improve and get stronger, then why not train more intensely? And then it also feeds into the whole, you know, martyrship that the pain and the struggle, it makes you deserving of the results and the progress. So the only way I'm gonna deserve being fit and healthy, the only way I'm gonna deserve losing this weight is if I pay a penance. If I beat myself up. And part of that is rooted in self-hate, and part of that is rooted in somebody not liking themselves so much that they go to the gym to kind of punish themselves. Which is a major driver that we see a lot of clients come in with. It is. And then the other part is what we just said is that people think that if some is good, more is better. This is not true for anything. There's nothing in the world that there isn't a limit in terms of where you stop getting benefit and you start getting detriment. And if you keep going down that road, it can get quite dangerous. There is a dose-response relationship. And I think that just because, you know, you see some benefits from training really, really hard, doesn't mean it's the most optimal way either. So I think that's where people fall into this trap is, well, I sweat, I felt good, the scale went down a little bit, I must be doing things right. And that's not necessarily true. You could be seeing results and you could even be seeing some positive results but still be technically overtraining. Yeah, cause the problem is the unseen. The problem is I lost two pounds on the scale, but I don't realize that it could have lost four. Or I gained one rep on this exercise, but I don't realize that I could have gained two or three reps. So that makes it difficult. And there's a bit of a discrepancy here between, you know, how we would define overtraining. Now there's overtraining syndrome. I think that's what we should probably focus on. And this is where you've exceeded your body's ability to recover and adapt from the stimulus, the stimulus being exercise. Because remember, whenever you're working out, the reason why your body gets stronger, the reason why your body gains stamina or builds endurance, becomes more fit or leaner is because your body is trying to adapt to a stimulus or a stress. So in the case of resistance training, when I work out with weights, I'm stressing my body. I'm causing a little bit of damage. And so what my body does is it, first it heals the damage or simultaneously it'll heal the damage, but then it also aims at to make myself stronger and more resilient so that the same insult doesn't cause the same amount of damage. So it's an adaptation process. Well, if you overcome your body's ability to adapt, if you overcome your body's ability to, not just adapt, but also to heal, then you get stuck in a really, really bad cycle of putting damage on top of damage without healing. And then you get a lot of problems. So I think we should talk about that. But also you did mention dose response relationship. So what this says is that going up with the dose, I get better and better results, but at some point I get diminishing returns. So at some point, not only do I not get better results, but now I just compound the negative effects. So if we look at like caffeine, for example, up to a certain amount, I'm gonna get more and more energized from it. But then after that amount, and I keep taking more, I'm not gonna get more energized. All I'm gonna do is get the negative side effects, more and more of those, anxiety, heart palpitations, nervousness and that kind of stuff. Not only that, they're also just pure results. And you allude to studies that support this. And there's plenty of studies that support this. And you talk about it a lot on our show. And that there's a sweet spot for optimal results. For example, like hitting a single muscle group in a week's time. It's gonna fall somewhere between that nine to 20 sets. Once you go beyond, and that's gonna be different for every person, right? So somebody's gonna see most optimal results in that nine to 12 range. Others may be on the upper end of that of 15 to 20, which we would probably call those people great responders or great genetics, because they can handle that type of. Or just advanced experience. Right, so, but once you go beyond that, the results of training that way could be detrimental. Yeah, you don't get more results. And you start to slow down. You actually start to become go negative. I mean, I think everyone in this room has experienced what that feels like. Now, here's the thing with this. It's very individual. So what constitutes overtraining for one person could mean optimal training for another person. And it could mean lower than optimal training for another person. What determines what is overtraining for you is it's a multitude of factors, your genetics, your experience, how experienced you are with exercise. Obviously, the more you work out, the more your body can handle the more. How effectively you recover. Yeah, your diet. If my diet's really good, then I can handle, my body can handle more stress, more stimulus and recover from it and actually respond really well. My sleep, my overall health, my mental state, the relationships around me. So all these things influence what would constitute overtraining for you. Now, it's very difficult to determine what is the perfect amount of training for you. And if you're doing a little more than that or a little under than that, that can be a difficult thing to kind of figure out. And that takes a little bit of time and energy and experience. But what constitutes overtraining syndrome where you're now overcoming your body's ability to adapt, overcoming your body's ability to heal and recover. Well, that's a little bit more clear and I think we should focus on that because I think people get stuck there and here's what happens. They get stuck in this overtraining syndrome phase but because they're hard workers, I see this a lot with people who identify with being hard workers. They're hard workers, I can push through anything. This is how they handle most things in their life that they ignore a lot of the signs that we're about to talk about and they keep pushing, keep pushing until it's just- You see this a lot with your type A type clients. You see this a lot with your athletes. And a lot of this is there is some value in having that sort of mental fortitude and being able to overcome obstacles. And that gets you a lot of success in the business world. It gets you a lot of success in school and a lot of other type of endeavors. And so that is definitely a valuable trait. However, this is where we sort of get into that. Well, what actually is the right dose for you? And how do you figure that when all you know is that working hard produces the desired results and everything else? Well, mental fortitude is a desirable trait somewhat. But I would say that a majority of people that listen to this podcast or a majority of the people that go to the gym aren't going to the gym in pursuit of mental fortitude. They're in pursuit of changing their physique, becoming healthier, building a better body, building muscle, losing body fat. And for that, overtraining belongs nowhere in that. There's no, if those are your goals and your main goal are those things, then pushing the boundaries of overtraining or flirting with those lines really belongs nowhere. Well, this is, again, this is one of those things where I criticize CrossFit because of the crossover and the muddying of the process of training because training itself is to then prepare you for this mental fortitude, this sporting outlet that you're expressing the ultimate version of your performance in. But the training itself, you need to recover. You need to build your body up to its best ability. And when you're convoluting it with all these different, different exercise signs and signals and just you're overwhelming the system in training, you're just gonna be spinning your tires. Two types of people that I see that fall prey to the overtraining problem. One, which is the more obvious one is the hardcore fitness fanatic who doesn't know, who more is better. They love it, they wanna go more, they wanna work out harder, they wanna push their bodies constantly to the limit and they're always dancing on that line of doing too much and doing the right amount. The other person that I see who falls prey to overtraining is the person who just gets started and is overzealous. This is the person who's like, okay, finally I'm making the decision, I wanna get in shape, I'm gonna just do it. I'm gonna go for it, I'm gonna go hard and I'm gonna go for it. And that person tends to have issues with overtraining because they're so excited that they're like, finally I'm gonna do this, let's do as much as I possibly can because that's gonna be better than doing less. I would add one more person to that. And I think this is actually the most common that I would see, which are chronic under-eaters. I don't know how, in fact, right now I'm on a three-way text with Katrina and one of our really good girlfriends and she has exercised most of her life, she just had a baby a year ago and she's getting back in shape right now. And one of the things that I do is that once a month I get on the phone with Katrina, her and we talk about where they're going, what they're doing, this, that, and the deal that I make with them is if you guys track and you can give me information, I can give you better direction. And so we were literally on the phone yesterday and she's telling me like, Adam, I'm hitting my protein targets, I'm eating really clean and balanced, I'm getting like 12 to 16,000 steps a day, I'm following maps aesthetic right now, but I'm concerned because I'm only hitting about 1300 calories. And this is really common, I used to get this a lot. And more common with my female clients that are trying to lose weight, but that would be a majority of my clients that I dealt with was somebody who was trying to lose body fat. And they start to clean up their diet and they land somewhere around this 1,000 to 1,300 calorie range. And for somebody who is weight training consistently and is stepping 12 to 16,000 steps a day, that is grossly under eating. Now she's seeing change in her body right now. And the message that I'm giving her right now is say, listen, we're gonna be in a far better off position, if I can get you to increase your calories and not the scale not move, then if we have two more weeks and you see the scale go down in their four pounds and you feel leaner, we're in a much better position on the first one than we are the latter. So I think there's a lot of people that are chronic under eaters when they come in and that's a great way to lead to overtraining. You are just not supplying the body with enough nutrients to recover. You're fairly giving what it needs to survive. And overtraining is just overcoming your body's ability to adapt. So that could be you're not getting enough sleep. It could be you're not eating enough food. It could be you have too much stress in the rest of your life. There is an appropriate optimal dose when it comes to exercise in your entire life, including your genetics determines what that optimal dose is. And that includes nutrition as well. I think we should talk about some of the obvious signs that you're in that overtraining syndrome phase. One of the more common ones that I can think about is just frequent injury or chronic pain. This is one that I think is most common for myself. Like we talk openly on this show that should be an obvious one. Even all the years experience that I have training myself and tons of other people, I still tend to overreach. And always to me, one of my first indicators that I'm overreaching is I get achy joints. And I don't know if that's the old man in me because I've been lifting for a very long time or what, or I like to lift heavy. But almost always when I know that I've been overtraining or pushing that boundary, my hips ache, my low back starts to bother me a little bit, elbow, shoulder. You just start to notice this achiness that I didn't have. And so for me, this is probably one of the most common signs that I always know like, it's time for me to back off a little bit or de-load. And I think it's tricky too because you could have somebody that hasn't been training for a long time. And then they get back into training. They're like, that wasn't even that much. And I'm in this pain and like, so am I overtraining? And so there's that kind of a scenario where you have to kind of explain through that. But yeah, definitely if I've been consistently training and then now I go to a point where I'm getting achy pains in my joints and I feel like this is just something that continuously nags me and I'm consistent in my training is definitely a signal. Well, no, that's a good point, Justin, because don't judge what constitutes overtraining for you. I know a lot of times people will have this sign and many other signs that they're overtraining. And then they'll look at the work and be like, but I'm not working out that much. I used to be able to do so much more. There's no way I could be overtraining. You are, you are overtraining. Don't judge it. But I hate to tell you this, if you're going to the gym and you're working out and your joints are hurting and your body feels stiff and you don't feel like your mobility's getting worse, you're doing too much. That's it, you're doing too much. Back off a little bit. Now, there's also a combination of you could be doing the wrong exercises. You may need to focus on mobility type movements, but at the end of the day, it means whatever you're doing is too much for your body. So this is one sign. And by the way, if when we go through some of these signs and we list them, if you have one of them, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're overtraining, but if you find that you have three or four or five of these signs, yeah, you don't want to pay attention. Then you probably want to pay attention because you're right. You could have some stiffness in your elbow and it was the first workout that you did. Well, and I think too, like you'll get better at it as you come back. If you've been off and you come back in, there is the right dose to where you won't get like those kind of like that feedback. Well, there's also crossover. So we're gonna go through all these different signs, but some of these could be because of multiple things. For example, right now we're talking about frequent injury or chronic pain that you feel. Well, the chronic joint pain could also be because you eat too much high inflammatory foods. So you could have some achy joints that it's a combination of lifting a lot and then also high inflammatory, but your body is just inflamed and it's trying to tell you that. But you're not hydrated. I mean, again, if you just have one of these signs, it doesn't necessarily mean you're overtraining. If you have, you know, three, four, five of these, then the odds, the more of these signs that resonate with you, the more likely it is that you're overtraining. Another one is extended muscle soreness. So this is kind of like the first one that we just talked about, which was the, you know, chronic injury and joint stiffness and pain. Extended muscle soreness. Like if you find that your sore for, typically is what I tell clients, if you feel sore at all, by the way, you shouldn't feel, there is no like necessary amount of soreness, by the way. Technically, and I wish I remember what book or what certification or what I read. Technically, soreness is a sign of overtraining. It's a sign that you do a little too much. Right, so excessive is definitely overtraining. It's okay, look, in other words, it's not necessary. So I think some people think when they work out that they have to feel sore or some soreness. Yeah, let's dispel that right away. That's actually false. You don't have to feel any soreness. Sometimes you'll feel some soreness the following day, but that doesn't mean you had a better workout and a lack of soreness doesn't mean you had a bad workout. But if you're sore and it lasts for two days or longer, probably did too much for sure. For me, when I work out really hard, I tend to feel either no soreness or a little bit of soreness. And it's not the kind of soreness that's evident all the time. It's not like I'm walking around like, oh my gosh, my chest is so sore. It's the kind of soreness that I gotta check for. Like I'll stretch a little bit and I'll be like, oh yeah, I guess I am a little bit sore. I can kind of feel that. This is why I worked out. This is why I hate the leg day memes that are so popular. I can't walk for three days. Right, and I, well, and I used to do this, you know? So I'm guilty too. For many years in my training career, especially early on, this was like, we wore this like a badge of honor. I know. You know, how sore could I get, you know? And if I wasn't hobbling, then I didn't train hard enough. And that, I must have did that for four or five years consistently in my career, seeking out that type of soreness, which was ridiculous. In fact, I tell clients that if I can progress you as far as your programming, adding volume or gaining strength and you never get sore, we are fucking hitting home runs. Perfect. We are hitting home runs. If you were adding weight to the bar, you know, week over week or every other week or you are adding sets and increasing your volume of training and you are not getting sore, we are kicking ass. No, soreness is a great sign. Soreness is a terrible sign to dictate your progress, unless it's too much, in which case you probably did too much. There's another myth around soreness too. Like if you feel a little bit sore, that means you shouldn't work that muscle out. Not necessarily true. Great point. Not necessarily true. You could feel a little bit of soreness and work that muscle again the next day. And if anything, enhance or speed up its recovery. This was something that took me so long to learn. It's annoying. It annoys me to realize that I spent years focused on how much I hurt the day after my workout and using that as a gauge for in terms of how good my workout was. I remember one workout in particular, I went to the gym with my cousin. This is when I was young. I must have been 15 or 16. So this is when I first started going to gyms. We went to the gym and this is before cell phones and all that stuff. So you had to tell your ride to pick you up at a particular time. So my dad's like, what time do you want me to pick you up? And we're like three hours from now because we knew we would just have a great time. We went in the gym and we did everything. And when I say everything, I mean literally everything. We went from machine to machine and did as much as we could on every machine. Then we went in the freeway area and did every single exercise we could remember from Arnold Schwarzenegger's Encyclopedia Bodybuilding. Then when we were done, we were done like we were wasted. We went and got our protein shakes, drank those, sat on the curb, waited for my dad to pick me up. And I had to miss school the following two days. That's how sore I got from that workout. And I thought I was gonna build so much muscle. It actually took me back. I remember I went back to work out finally when I could and I was weaker. You know when this light bulb really went off for me was when I started reading the studies that talked about frequency. And when I started to learn how important frequency was in my training. And I started saying like, oh wow, I need to be hitting every muscle group at least two to three times a week. And I started thinking to myself, and I tried this, you know, I start, but the first mistake I made was trying to mirror the way I had been training for the previous five years of crushing myself in the gym. And then trying to do that two or three times on a muscle group, it was impossible. Doing, yeah, back to back days in a row itself is like, oh my God. And so what I started to notice was I had to keep scaling back and scaling back. And when I finally got to the place where I could train a muscle three times in a week, I was like, holy shit, I'm only doing like five sets on this muscle and this workout. This is crazy. I used to do 18 to 20 sets on a muscle in a workout. And in order for me to hit it effectively two or three days a week, I had to dramatically reduce the amount of sets I did and the intensity that I did it at. And your soreness a bit went away. Way, way down. I had to. I had to get it, I had to back it way off. Otherwise, what was happening was I would try and do that workout a second time in the week. And I was still so sore from the workout on Monday that when I was hitting it again on Wednesday, my performance was incredibly decreased. And I'm like, this can't be ideal. So I had to keep backing off the intensity and backing off the volume. And so finally I felt almost like, man, this isn't enough. I'm not doing enough. But then I was starting to see the results and I was stacking more weight on the bar. And that was like a huge light bulb moment for me. It took a long time, I bet. Oh, absolutely. I struggled back and forth for a long time. Yeah, so soreness is a terrible, terrible indicator of how good a workout was. The only thing that soreness is good for is to tell you that you did too much. And so the rule of thumb that I tell people is, okay, it's okay to be sore for a day, maybe two days every once in a while. But if you're sore for two days consistently or more than two days, you did too much. Or if you're sore to the touch, where you don't have to check to see if you're sore, you just know because you move and you're like, that muscle is fried. You did too much. Scale back the volume, scale back the intensity. That's a very, very quick path towards overtraining. And if it's extended muscle soreness, that means that your sore for longer and longer as the weeks progress. This is a great sign of overtraining. It's like, I did my same workout that I always do, but it's taking me longer to feel better from the soreness this time than it did last week. And then the next week, you're like, wow, I'm sore for even longer and I'm not doing any more than I have been. That's a sign that your body's ability to recover and adapt is severely being impaired and you may be overtraining. The next one is the most common and obvious one in my opinion. And that's decreased performance. If you gotta ask yourself this, why am I working out in the first place? Now, if you enjoy working out for the sake of working out, that's awesome. That's a great place to be. But you also work out because you want improvements in your performance and in your body. Well, if you're going to the gym and you're not only not getting stronger or not improving your stamina, but you're actually going backwards, you overdid it. You're overtraining. And remember, in the context of your life, so you may have done the same thing that you normally do, but you didn't get good sleep in which case it was overtraining. Or maybe you did the same thing but you just didn't eat as well in which case it was still overtraining. But if I go to the gym, and if I notice that, let's say I'm normally doing a squat and I'm using 300 pounds on my squat, and then the next time I come, I have to go down to 295, and the next time I go, it's 290, I gotta, okay, I'm going backwards. That's an obvious sign that I'm overtraining. Obvious one. I'd say for most people. Now, you're gonna have weeks where you're not gonna always consistently improve, but if you start to string together weeks of decreasing performance, you gotta take a step back. Yeah, I always get that, even the subtle signs of when you're doing the same weight and it just feels like a grind. And it just feels like, this should not feel this heavy. This used to be pretty easy for me to get up. I'm paying attention to that right away because that's something like, either it is one of those factors, like I haven't been eating real well, I haven't been sleeping right, I've been stressed out, work, all these other factors are contributing towards this. And it's okay to kind of scale back a bit so that way, your body can then work on recovering fully, then coming back in and giving a better performance. Yeah, I remember as a, when I first started working out, one of the clear signs that I was overdoing it would be my performance would kind of start to decline, but because I was so hard headed and like I said earlier, hard working, I'm just gonna keep pushing. I'm gonna keep pushing. I know I'm supposed to force my body and I would keep going, keep going. And then we would have to go on a vacation or I'd get sick or something would happen and I'd have to miss, you know, five days of a workout or a full week of a workout. And I'd go back to working out after taking a week off and fully anticipating like, oh my God, I'm gonna be so out of shape. And you're stronger now. Stronger. Yeah. I was stronger than I was before. And then I'm like, wait a minute. There's a sign. Yeah, what the heck's going on here? That's actually always a great way to test and see if that you might be over trained. If you're that person and it tends to be the person, this I think is more common with your fitness fanatics, right? Yeah. If you're training so much. And this is, I used to always tell my fitness fanatics that I speak to on this topic that, you know, hey, take three days off the gym completely and then come back and then tell me how you feel. And if you come back stronger from taking three or more days off from the gym, it's normally a good sign that you were over reaching and you need to back off. And I would say I probably fall in this. This is, of all the ones that we're going to go over, I would think that the decreased performance and the chronic pain are like the two that I- That you noticed the most? Yeah, that probably happened still today to me. Like I'm always kind of pushing those boundaries. Oh, joints are getting a little achy. Oh, wow, I had to back off 15 pounds off my squat. Like the example you gave Sal, like that happens to me. And I always know that, okay, I need to de-load or back off a little bit. Now the one that I noticed most consistently that I noticed before all the other ones is insomnia or changes in my sleeping patterns. I noticed this one right away. Like if I'm working out real hard and pushing myself and I know I'm on that line of overdoing it or doing the right amount, if I'm sleeping and I'm waking up in the middle of the night or it's hard for me to get to sleep or I'll wake up really, really groggy, that's for me the first sign. Like I know, like, okay, I'm doing too much. And it's always that insomnia. By the way, that one's a clinical. That one they'll show in studies time and time again and all athletes, cyclists, runners, weight lifters, they'll notice that being one of the first signs. They'll monitor their sleep and their sleep will just start to get crappy. And they'll be like, that's the first sign that you're overdoing it. I don't even think it needs to be insomnia too. I think that's the extreme version of that, right? I think just a couple nights in a row of poor sleep will really affect your performance and is a sign of overtraining, right? If you, I just had this the other day or last a couple of weeks ago where I had like two or three days in a row of just bad sleep. And then on my programming, I'm supposed to be going after a heavy squat. And I just know, like, that's one that I now have learned to be able to be like, before I go into the gym and find out the hard way by putting a bunch of weight on the back. You can adjust on the fly. Exactly, I already know. I know that, you know, maybe I can get away with like one bad night of sleep, but back to back or multiple days in a row of bad sleep and then thinking that I'm gonna go in the gym and perform at my best. Absolutely not having it. And then in fact, I'm so, I think I'm so in a place that I'm flirting with that line. That's actually when I'll switch completely what I was supposed to do in the gym. I'm supposed to heavy squat. Okay, it looks like I'm actually doing mobility work, maybe some infrared sauna. Maybe I'm gonna meditate like, and I'm gonna work inward. So that's when I know that I, because I think sleep is now, especially getting older. I think when you were 20, you think you're invincible and you'll never have a problem with this. But now as I've gotten older, that sleep is so precious and it makes such a difference on how my lifting is that I don't even waste my time going after a hard workout after multiple days of bad sleep. I know that this is a day that I'm gonna, you know, work inward. And the poor sleep is likely the result of just a high stress response in the body. You know, if cortisol, remember cortisol is an energy hormone. A lot of people think, oh cortisol stress hormone makes you feel bad. Cortisol gives you a lot of energy. Sometimes you'll lack sleep, but you'll get up and you'll still be wired and be like, no, I feel great. It's because your cortisol is kind of chronically elevated. Now you go down that path and it turns into bad things. But I think that may be why people have issues with sleeping when they're over-training. It's just the higher levels of cortisol. So you get this kind of nervous energy. Well, you wanna hide in the morning, right? And then like to taper off towards the night. This is also one of the things that makes it challenging for somebody who's a late night trainer. So if you're training at seven, eight, nine o'clock at night and you kind of throw off your circadian rhythm, this is something that could be causing you to be off your sleeping patterns because you have this hardcore workout at nine o'clock at night. Your adrenaline's through the roof. Cortisol getting spiked. You can't stop. This is why I can't train past six o'clock. If I train beyond six o'clock, it wires me so much that I can't go to bed beyond or before two o'clock. Well sleep's such a humongous factor in recovery. And so now if you're interrupting that process, now you have to like account for that and it's gonna, you're gonna compensate on all kinds of other ends of that. Yeah, it actually makes it worse, right? You can't sleep very well, which then makes your ability to recover even impaired even more. Well, and this to me feeds into the next one, which is excessive fatigue. And then paradoxically, cause people think, what do you mean you can't sleep and you have excessive fatigue? All right, here's what it looks like. You're dead tired, you go to sleep but your sleep is crap. And then during the day, you can't stay awake. It compiles. Yeah, you can't stay awake. You're in a meeting or you're at school or you're whatever you're working and you're just like fighting it with your eyes. You're drinking lots of coffee. You just don't have that zest and that energy. That's that combination of poor sleep and then excessive fatigue. And I've been through this. Hey, and to a point, I'm glad you touched on the coffee thing because using a drug also can mask some of these natural signs. Oh, totally. So you know, we have- You've had an anabolic. Right, we have these natural signs that our body is trying to tell us that, hey, you need sleep. You need recovery. Hey, you're over-training but then we've now trained ourselves to have four cups of coffee, our Red Bull, our Rockstar or whatever and your pre-workout. And it's now masking that your body's natural signs that are trying to tell you, hey, you probably need a day off or hey, you probably need to back off on the intensity of your training but instead, you're taking all these drugs to totally mask that, you have no idea. God, I'm so glad you went there. Not just that, but the painkillers, the NSAIDs. So here I am, I'm working out, I'm busting my butt, I'm really trying to get to my goal. Oh, I got this kind of stiffness. I got my joints are bothering me. All right, let's take some Ibuprofen. Let's just pop some Ibuprofen. Let's take some Ibuprofen. Oh man, my sleep is kind of crap. All right, I'll take some melatonin and I'll take some herbs that help me sleep or maybe I'll have some cannabis or some wine or whatever. Now during the day, oh crap, I'm fatigued. Now I'm gonna have caffeine. So what you're doing is you're completely masking all the symptoms of overtraining with all these substances and it's just gonna make it worse. It's just, I know, I've known many clients who- Oh, it's definitely gonna make it worse for your results. You may be able to get by, right? By doing all these things, but for certainly, if you're wondering why you're on a hard plateau and you're not seeing results or why for some reason your body's not responding the way you want it to respond based off of all these other good things you think you're doing, that could be exactly why. Totally. This is another paradoxical symptom of overtraining. Loss of appetite and cravings. And yes, they can both happen at the same time. This is somebody who's, their appetite is low. They're trying to eat their normal amount for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They just find themselves not wanting to eat much. This is a sign of overtraining. And then they also have cravings for foods. For junk food. Junk foods. Now there's a few different explanations that are popular in terms of why this tends to happen. One explanation is that, you know, the fact that sugary foods or highly palatable foods just give you, they make you feel better. So because your body's feeling crappy, your body is craving for things to make you kind of feel better in the moment. And so these hyper palatable type of foods, the ones you have cravings for help you do that. Some people also say that it boosts serotonin. So it's another way for your body to make you feel good in the moment. But both of those are real important because you can have both or you can have one or the other. Sometimes people just how they have is cravings. So because they're overtraining and they're finding themselves eating more and more of the kinds of foods that they probably shouldn't, especially when it comes to their goals. They're eating more of the, and the food, this is what I tend to see with my clients. Just the hyper palatable stuff. The breads, the pastas, the sugary type foods, you know, spoonfuls of peanut butter, you know, that's another one. Candy, that's another one. Just foods that don't really, shouldn't really be part of a kind of healthy, you know, program. But now all of a sudden, I just want to eat a crap load of them. And I've even heard people try to explain it and say, oh, it's because I'm burning more calories. Because I'm burning more calories, my body needs all these extra calories. Okay, there's a little bit of truth to that, but mostly when you have these cravings, and we all know what cravings are feel like. A craving is different than regular hunger. A craving is almost insatiable. And when you eat the food that you crave, you can't get it in your face fast enough. Those, again, by themselves, don't necessarily mean you're overtraining, but in combination with some of the other ones that we said, oh yeah, that's a good sign. For me personally, when I'm overtraining, I get the loss of appetite. I don't know about you guys. I start to find that I just don't want to eat as much. I just don't. Yeah, I don't want to eat as much. I find this too, this goes hand in hand with the chronic under-eater. Like you're chronically under-eating, you're training super hard, and then you just crave like this. You want, your body's dying for a bunch of cookies. Right, sugar. Your body's just craving that glucose because you're deprived of it and yet you keep pushing the body like that. And I would lean more towards like you alluded to, Sal, which is, you're getting that the pleasure response or the endorphin rush that you're getting from eating those types of foods. And because you're suppressing it so much by training so hard and not eating very much that the body's desiring those things. You get that swinging of the pendulum. Right. Yeah, how about this one? Adam, I've heard you talk about this, especially when you were competing in the last weeks, leading up to a competition. I've experienced this as well, not through competition, but just through overdoing it. Or all of a sudden I just get sick really easy. Like I'm just in a room and there's someone with a cold across the room. You just run down and susceptible. We were just talking, I was talking about this yesterday about my mom. So I was supposed to have two different family members come up and visit me this weekend and they were all sick. And my sister was just like, you know, mom is always sick. And I'm like, well, you know, she kind of burns the candle at both ends and she doesn't eat well. And you know, we forget that your immune system is another system of the body and all the systems are affected by each other. So if you're hammering another system, the fact that you think that it's not going to affect the other system is ridiculous. And if you already, and I think in my family, we have, because I used to be like this, I used to catch every cold. And this is especially when I had a very poor diet when I was young, when I was younger, I could get away eating whatever I wanted or I thought I could get away with eating whatever I wanted. But I was sick a lot of the time. And looking back now, I think a lot of that has to do with one, I think my family already has kind of a weaker immune system. And then on top of that, I was eating poorly and then training hard all the time. And I just used to get sick all the fucking time. I rarely ever get sick now. And so that absolutely is a common one that I've seen. Somebody who is, you're beating up your other systems and it's now affecting your immune system. And so you're susceptible to picking up a cold really easily because you're vulnerable. Now, people think, oh, I thought exercise was supposed to boost and strengthen the immune system. It is, it is as your body adapts and becomes healthier and stronger. The problem is you're overcoming your body's ability to adapting it stronger. So it's constantly in this repair mode. And your body when it's, it's got limited resources. And if it's constantly repairing and repairing and repairing when it's time to fight off a foreign invader, it's not gonna have as many resources to do so. It's not gonna have the same strength to do so. So you just become vulnerable to illnesses. Now this, this could, I mean, you could go all the way down the line of chronic illness. So we're talking about like getting sick like colds and stuff like that. But if you're a chronic overtrainer, your rate of chronic illness goes up as well. So you could develop your more likely develop autoimmune issues. You're more likely to develop issues with inflammation of the heart and heart disease type illnesses. Cancer may even be something that you increase your risk of through chronic and constant overtraining. And remember this, too much overtraining is just too much stress on the body. So sometimes people are like, well, you know, it's hard for them to understand that. And I thought working out was good for me. But then I'll say to them, do you think too much stress on your body is good or bad for you? They'll be like, oh, it's bad, too much stress. I can't sleep. I get sick easily. You know, I don't feel healthy. Same thing. Too much working out is too much. Physical stress. It's too much stress on the body. It's no different than if you're going through an extremely stressful time in your life, like you lost your job or going through a divorce or whatever. That's tons of stress on your body. Well, too much working out is also too much stress. So if you're listening right now and it's hard for you to kind of comprehend what's happening. You know, you think, oh, we had too much muscle, soreness and joint pain. That makes sense. But the other ones don't make sense because I thought exercise, it's just too much stress. It's no different than anything else, which brings me to another one. Mood changes, agitation, depression. Boy, these are common ones. If you've ever been around an athlete that's training at an extremely high level, like be around a bunch of football players during double days. You do not want to be around them. Or yeah, yeah. What was that like, Justin? When you guys are doing your double day. Oh man, everybody was so on edge. Like anything you did, like you'd get a reaction out of somebody if it was like, if they didn't agree or didn't like it. So yeah, everybody's walking on eggshells. Everybody's trying to stick to themselves. Basically, we all had to like isolate each other because yeah, it was just one of those environments where everybody was just at this really heightened state. Like, you know, when you're at like a really high level, like the slightest thing will just set you off. Well, you're in fight or flight 24-7. It's just like why during competition days, you do not want to be around me the last two weeks, especially the last seven days. I mean, I had to take work off. I remember that. Yeah, you just, you just know, you take those seven days off because. You didn't do a lot of jokes. Yeah, just, I'm just a pill to be around. And that's because I'm stressing the body from all, I'm under eating, I'm overtraining, I'm not getting good enough adequate sleep. I mean, you're stressing the body in so many other areas that you know it's not ideal and healthy. And which is, I used to communicate that to my audience when I was going through competition is that, okay, when I'm competing, I'm gonna try and do this as healthy as possible for as long as possible. But at one point, it becomes a sport. At one point, it is no longer I'm doing things that are, just because my body looks ripped and shredded and what somebody else may think is an example or exemplifies health. It's not true whatsoever. In fact, it's really, really unhealthy. We used to, you call those people on stage walking dead men or walking, walking dead women. Like that's, you're at that, you're on that very fine line of, damn, you're killing yourself because you have such low body fat percentage. You're feeding the body so little food, so little water, so much training. It's not healthy whatsoever. And you're just pissed off. Yeah, and you're just angry at the world. Well, you have, look, if you think about this, like think about when you're snappy at home, maybe you're spouse, your girlfriend, your boyfriend. Think about when you're snappy. It's usually not because of what they said. It's usually because they said something or did something and it was on top of a bunch of other stuff that happened during the day. It's like you have this bucket that you could fill with stress, but at some point it'll overflow. Well, if your bucket is constantly at the top and barely overflowing, it doesn't take much. Doesn't take much. You wake up in the morning and your kid wakes up and then they, they're not super happy to see you or they make a little comment and boom, you snap. You know, or everybody's irritating. And this is a bad one because then you start to see the world through these kind of, you know, angry lenses and everything seems annoying to you and irritable to you. You know, this is a great sign. Like if you're working out, let me tell you something right now, if you're working out right, you should have a better mood. If you're doing it the right way, yeah, if it's the appropriate amount of exercise, you should have the opposite of all the stuff that we're talking about, by the way, the opposite. So we talked about like excessive fatigue. You should have more energy. We talked about weird appetite, either no appetite or craving. It should have, you should have a healthier appetite. We talked about frequent sickness. It should be that you're not getting sick as often. Like all the things that we're talking about, the right amount of exercise for your body will do the opposite of all of these things, including moodiness, depression, agitation, irritability. If you do it right and you're doing the right amount, you'll find that you have a higher tolerance for irritable, irritating things. People should be commenting and saying, wow, you're in a better mood. They should not be like, man, since you started working out, you've become an asshole. That's probably not a good sign right there. And I would say the last one and probably one of the hardest for people to overcome is metabolic imbalances. And this was something that- I was when the body just doesn't wanna respond anymore. Right, this is the, I'm eating 1200 calories a day. I'm training five to seven days a week. I'm stepping 15 to 20,000 steps and your body is not losing body fat. Just hit a wall. Yeah, you know you're eating good calories as far as what you're eating. You know you're trying hard cause you're exercising three, four, five plus times a week. And it's just not adding up. You're not seeing results. And I remember this as a trainer when I first started to see this and not knowing what's going on. Like this can't be right. My client says, you know, she's eating a chicken salad twice a day and she's on this and we're training. She's seeing me three times a week. Like she can't be not losing weight. This is impossible. This is impossible. It doesn't make sense. What about the law of thermodynamics? I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it. But this is where this is somebody who has chronically under eight for an extended period of time and the metabolism has now adapted to an extremely low caloric maintenance. And you've sent it that signal because you're pushing it one way really hard. You're underfeeding it another way and all it's trying, it doesn't know better. It's just trying to adapt and survive. And it's now adapted and survived to this extremely low caloric imbalance and can handle all the stress that you keep pushing on it. It's adapted. It's got good at that. But that's not what you want when you're somebody who's wanting to see change in your physique. And this is a tough one. Yeah, it's a hard one because people then just want to push harder and harder. And it seems counterintuitive that backing off will get their body to respond again. But think about this way. For all intents and purposes, body fat on your body is an insurance policy. It's stored energy. When you're walking around with body fat on your body, you're walking around with your own food. It's like your body has food stored like a camel with its hump or whatever. So your body, if you're under a lot of stress, do you think your body's gonna want more insurance or less insurance? It's gonna want more, right? If you're putting too much stress on your body, your body's gonna be like, oh boy. Because you gotta keep in mind for most of human history, one of the number one primary sources of chronic stress for humans was lack of food or inability to find food. So your body is like, okay, chronic stress, which is too much exercise here. Remember, it could be from a lot of different ways, areas. In this case, it's over-training. Too much stress. We need to hold on to body fat. Let's hold on to this body fat because probably not enough food around us. Then on top of it, you're underfeeding yourself and you're actually reinforcing that signal. So now your body's really trying to hold on to body fat. So you get in this really crappy position where you're working out like crazy. You're not eating much and nothing's happening. Very, very frustrating. And it does seem counterintuitive that reducing your intensity, getting more rest, would get your body to burn more body fat. But in this particular case, that's exactly what happens. And it always used to shock my clients. I'd have clients who would come in to me, come and see me and they would be chronic over trainers. And I'd say, okay, here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna take three of those days a week that you're doing those crazy runs that you're doing. And I'm gonna have you do a relaxing yin yoga class. I'm also gonna have you prioritize your sleep for a little while. I'm gonna be like, oh my God, I'm burning as much calories. Am I gonna gain all this much body fat? Like, no, you're not. And here's what would happen. For a little while, the weight would stay the same, which would blow them away because they would expect to gain weight. But then all of a sudden, their body would start burning body fat again. What's going on? I'm burning less calories, theoretically. I shouldn't be burning more body fat. And it's like, well, no, not necessarily. Your body's adapting now, doesn't feel stressed. And now it feels like its metabolism can speed up a little bit without being afraid. And now you're burning body fat. So we just named a bunch. I think we named nine. Signs and signals that your body's overtraining. Again, like I said earlier, the opposite of all the things that we listed should happen to you with the appropriate amount of training. If you have one of these signs, it may or may not mean you're overtraining. If you have three, four, five, or more of these signs, the odds that you're overtraining are pretty high. But I think we should talk about now, let's say somebody's listening and they're like, okay, well, five of those were me. What do I do now? I think I'm overtraining. What's the first step? Number one, prioritize sleep. Number one, I think that has to be, and what we mean by prioritize sleep is set a routine. Just like you prioritize getting ready for work every single day, or get ready to take a test, or get ready for something that you do at work, think about the same way with sleep. And this was something that was hard for me. It was something that most my clients I had never had. It's so crazy we have all these routines that we do for so many other aspects of our life, but one of the most important things that we know from all the research, and you've probably heard is sleep. Sleep is extremely important, but yet very few people have very rigid routines that they go through. Hey, at this time I have dinner, I go for my walk for an hour afterwards, I read for a little bit, I sit by a fire, candlelight, I turn off all the blue light, I don't stare at my TV past a certain time. A lot of people just don't put a lot of effort into preparing their brain, preparing their body for a good night's rest. And that has got to be the first place that I take anybody who is potentially over training is we have to address that first. Yeah, we expect to just turn off the bright lights, put our head on the pillow, boom, fall into good sleep. It doesn't work that way, your brain starts to receive the signals that the sun has gone down by how bright the room is or whatever that you're in. So turn the lights down. I do this about an hour or two before bed, or I turn them off and I go by either candlelight or I use those highlights all the time. I try and mirror the sun. So what depends on what time of the year it is that the sun sometimes goes down at six. Turn things down. Yeah, I mean, if the sun is down outside, I start bringing down the lights or that's, you know, we work with a company that has blue blockers, I throw my blue blockers on. I just keep it in my living room where I'm at normally at five, six, seven, eight PM at night. Whenever that sun goes down, I reach for those. Because I know it's inevitable, I'm probably gonna still look at my phone one or two more times. I'm probably gonna watch one of our favorite Netflix shows or whatever. At least I'm blocking out all that high blue light that my body's getting that's telling my brain it's still in the middle of the day. I wanna start settling it down by doing that. Totally. The next thing I would say is reduce the intensity of your workouts. I think that's more important than reducing the frequency of your workouts if you had to pick one. So that's the first place I would go. Go do your workout like you normally have scheduled but workout way easier. So instead of going to the gym and beating yourself up, maybe go to the gym and practice all the exercises or instead of doing your fast five mile mile run, do a, you know, a slow jog or walk for five miles. Reduce the intensity of everything that you're doing and allow your body the ability to start to catch up and start to recover and adapt. Seek that feeling you were talking about. This was, and I remember when I finally figured this out because you're right, you will leave the gym feeling good. You should. And for many, many years, I did not feel leave the gym feeling good. What I thought was good was my body was hammered. It was exhausted. I was drenched in sweat. I was hobbling. Like that means it was a good session. That's wrong. Like a good session. I walk out and I feel aired up. I feel energetic. I feel like I could have done another 10 sets in there. You don't need to go until you can't go anymore. Go and feel good. Feel, and the rest of your day should feel very, very good from lifting. Totally. The third thing would be to reduce the frequency of your workouts. So if you're doing the first two and you're still feeling overtrained, then I would start cutting back on how many days a week you're going to the gym. That's most likely somebody who's five, six, seven days a week. This is less likely somebody who's only training. You're gym heroes. Yeah, this is less likely somebody who's training only two or three times a week. Totally. And then add a recovery recuperative element to your routine. So what would that be? Mindfulness meditation would be one. Stretching. Mobility practice. Yeah, light stretching and mobility. Sauna use or a cold, hot contrast showers would be another one. Now these recovery recuperative type elements can help, but they're not cures because I know people who are like, oh, I'm overtraining. You know what I should do? I should just add some sauna. They don't change anything else, right? I'm gonna add some sauna. No, they don't make that big of a difference, but they can make somewhat of a difference. I tend to do this with clients who are training six days a week and then I tell them, okay, I want you to only work out four days a week because you're doing too much. They're like, but I gotta do something those other two days. I'm like, well, that's okay. Why don't you do some stretching mobility work and some sauna? And then I think too, yeah, we do have to look into the nutrition. And we have to look at making sure that you have adequate calories, adequate, and maybe adjusting your macronutrients so you have a little more facile, more protein, something that's a little more restorative to help aid in the recovery process going forward. Totally too low of calories or too low of carbohydrates, proteins, or fats. Definitely too low of proteins and fats, but sometimes too low of carbs also can impair your body's ability to adapt. I mean, if you're too low on proteins and fats, almost any type of exercise will be too much. But for some people, even carbohydrates, going too low of carbs for too long, even though the workouts are the same, everything's the same, they start to notice that their body just isn't feeling as good and they're not recovering as much. That would be a very close number one to me, Justin. It's sleep I would put up there, because I think chronic under-eating is the number one factor. It's very common, you brought that up. I just went through this whole list of clients in my head knowing exactly that was a major factor, was just chronically eating in a deficit. Pretty much consistently, I don't even know times, some of my clients would just stay in that deficit pretty much the whole year and just think that they had to do that to maintain this certain body and get any progress going forward, which in fact, had the opposite effect. Now for some of you who are deep into overtraining and you're having an epiphany right now, you're having an aha moment, and you're like, wow, okay. This is, I'm doing way, way too much. Try taking a week off, literally. Try taking a complete week off of exercise, focus on your sleep and rest. And these are for the people where the overtraining symptoms are severe. It seems like hormone imbalances. You may be a woman, you may have lost your period or you have really infrequent or irregular periods. You may be a guy, your libido's completely gone. Energy's totally shot. Feels like you have no testosterone. These people may benefit from taking just a week off, getting more rest, eating healthy, doing recuperative things for the body. Then when you go back to the gym, then you can implement some of the stuff that we're talking about. A good recommendation, and this is a shameless plug, but I mean, this is MAPS anabolic. We refer to that as a great program for someone who's trying to build their metabolism. And in that program is an option to only train two days a week. So my recommendation for somebody who's having that aha moment that you're talking about right now, Sal, would be to- Take time off. Take time off. And then start with MAPS anabolic and start two days a week and see how you feel from there before you build up to three and then follow the programming. And this is also the benefits of following solid programming because somebody who knows what the fuck they're doing has looked at the organization of the exercises of what you're doing every single day, the total volume that's included in it, and that's thought out and mapped out for you. It is a much bigger factor than people realize. Like it seems simple and easy. It seems simple that you could just rip this off the internet and grab anybody's ideas in terms of like, oh, this is a fun, good, cool workout or whatever, but to really hone it in on specifically what's gonna benefit you the most and individualize it, like you need a professional really to draw that up for you. Yeah, MAPS anabolic is a phenomenal program. It's appropriate training level and intensity and exercise organization for most people. Most people listening right now, MAPS anabolic will keep you in that optimal range of training, frequency and in terms of progress for most of the people listening right now. And the good news is it's half off actually this month. At the beginning of the episode, I'll give you the code for that. And with that, go to mindpumpfree.com, check out all of our guides. They're all absolutely free. We have guides on training, fat loss, muscle building. We even have guides for personal training. Oh, we have a testosterone guide for men who wanna learn about raising their testosterone levels naturally. You can also find all of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam.