 How do you know whether or not you're overtraining as a cyclist? Proper training is a fine line between too little and too much and finding that line can be difficult. Today, we're going to go into the science on different types of overtraining, how overtraining negatively affects your performance, how to tell if you're overtrained, and how to set up your training in order to avoid it. Welcome back to another video. Perhaps one of the most fundamental concepts for training for cycling or just for fitness in general is the concept of progressive overload, which means that if you want to get fitter, faster, stronger, etc., you need to constantly increase the amount of stress that you're giving your body. I've talked about this a lot on this channel. Give your body the same amount of stress that it's already adapted to, and it'll stop making adaptations. The other side of the coin is that if you give your body too much training stimulus, this is called overtraining, and in this scenario as well, you'll also see a fitness plateau or even a decline. This can be a major problem with cyclists and one that may be on the rise. Motivated athletes often don't want to admit that they need to back it down on their training until it's too late. You know how you can tell if you're overtraining? You don't. Hard enough to pick up. Determining where that line is between too little and too much is the art of proper training. The problem is that line is in a different spot for everyone, but knowing the signs and symptoms of overtraining can help you assess whether or not you've reached that point. First off, it's important to make the distinction between overreaching and overtraining. This review on the signs and symptoms of overtraining stated that if training load is increased producing a decrease in performance and subsequent rest brings performance to a higher level, this is termed overreaching or supercompensation. The key there is that this is training that will temporarily reduce performance, but once you rest, you'll actually return stronger. Overreaching is necessary for making fitness gains and breaking through fitness plateaus. It's stressing your body more than it's already been stressed, which is necessary for progressive overload. If you have a big block of training and are completely wiped out, you won't be stronger, at least not immediately. Follow that up with a rest week, however, and this is where you start to make big fitness gains. The step beyond overreaching is overtraining, and it has an important difference. Increases in training load accompanied by performance decrements and physical and psychological symptoms is termed staleness overtraining or chronic overtraining and may take weeks to months to recover from. Overtraining is not something that you return stronger from. If it takes you weeks to months to recover from the damage that you've done, that ship has sailed. So where is the line between overreaching and overtraining? Some articles do attempt to quantify the difference. For example, this article on overtraining and recovery states that if you've failed to recover after more than 72 hours, you may have reached negative overtraining and are in an overreached state. This review states that overreaching is reversible in days to weeks. It's important to keep in mind though that this line likely varies from person to person, given the range of responses people have to training and overtraining. This is where it becomes useful to know the symptoms of overtraining so that you can distinguish between overtraining and overreaching. To understand this, let's explore the different types of overtraining. Overtraining further divides into two types, monotonous program overtraining and chronic overwork. In monotonous overtraining, there may be a loss or plateau in performance due to constant unvarying use of the same type of exercise and training and not because of overwork or excessive fatigue. This is what I talk about when I talk about periodization, varying training over time and progressive overload. If training is monotonous and unchanging, performance will stagnate and this is what's meant by monotonous overtraining. This isn't the kind of overtraining where you've been training too hard and now you're excessively fatigued. The symptoms from monotonous overtraining include plateauing or a loss in performance and decreased motivation. Unfortunately, this type of overtraining is a lot easier to fix and simply requires you varying your training and won't require weeks to months to recover from. That's what chronic overwork does. Overwork is what you might typically think of as overtraining where you've been working too hard for too long and now you're cooked. If the period of overwork is short-term, that's overreaching, which isn't so much of an issue, but if it's chronic, then we get overtraining, which can be further divided into two types, sympathetic and parasympathetic. This is where things can get a little tricky because the symptoms for these two types of overtraining can be very different. Remember that your sympathetic nervous system is associated with fight or flight and your parasympathetic nervous system is associated with rest. The sympathetic form of overtraining is characterized by increased sympathetic activity at rest, while the parasympathetic form is characterized by decreased sympathetic activity at rest and during exercise. It is believed that sympathetic overtraining syndrome is an intermediate stage before parasympathetic overtraining. Essentially, sympathetic overtraining is less serious. Once you've gone into parasympathetic overtraining, you've really screwed yourself. And the danger is that the symptoms for parasympathetic overtraining are less obvious. Let me first show you the symptoms of sympathetic overtraining and then parasympathetic overtraining to show you what I'm talking about. With the sympathetic type symptoms include loss of motivation, irritability, depression, insomnia, decreased appetite, decrease in lean body mass, increased heart rate, increased cortisol, decreased testosterone, decreased glycogen levels, chronic fatigue, and a loss in performance. If you've noticed that you've lost motivation to ride, it may not be a motivation issue. It may be because you're overtrained. Same with feeling irritable and depressed. These symptoms may not manifest in everyone, but if you're prone to these states or have these personality traits, they may be exaggerated when you're overtrained, not unlike somebody whose undesirable personality traits are exaggerated when they drink too much. See, this is why when you train too hard, you just got to use a beer as your recovery drink. It balances things out. Having trouble sleeping can be an indicator as can appetite and weight loss, specifically muscle loss. And it's during this phase of overtraining that you see an increase in your resting heart rate, which has been shown to be a useful indicator of fatigue. But as we'll see, this is only up to a point. These symptoms are easier to pinpoint. If not by you, then perhaps by your spouse who can let you know when you're being exceptionally irritable. However, with parasympathetic overtraining, the list of symptoms is much shorter and harder to detect. Parasympathetic overtraining symptoms include phlegmatic behavior, depression, increased sleep, normal appetite, normal body mass, low heart rate, hypoglycemia, and low blood lactate levels. Parasympathetic overtraining is an advanced stage of overtraining and may be difficult to recognize. Essentially, once you go so far off the deep end of overtraining, you actually start to feel more or less normal again, or at the very least calm and generally lacking emotion in case you didn't know what phlegmatic means. But the reality is that you're in a deeply fatigued state. Normal appetite, normal body mass, low heart rate sounds like business as usual, right? The reality is that you need some serious time off the bike. Fortunately, few athletes will ever get to this point. In order to prevent this from happening to you, it's important to understand the causes of overtraining and how you can arrange your training so that it's both effective and less likely to lead to overtraining. Now you may be thinking, Dylan, the causes of overtraining are in the name. It's training too much. Right, obviously. But specifically, what kinds of training and what kinds of recovery conditions lead to overtraining? After all, overtraining appears to be caused by too much high-intensity training and or too little recovery time, often combined with other training and non-training stressors. The recovery side of the equation is important and contributes to overtraining. More job stress, family stress, life stress, etc. will affect how much training you're able to absorb before you hit your limit. Nutrition, of course, plays an important role too. For example, high antioxidant fruits and vegetables have been shown to aid in recovery. Eating healthful food is important, and then there's also the question of how much to eat. Could being in a calorie deficit perhaps to cut weight for racing contribute to overtraining? You may have heard some bodybuilder types on the internet saying there's no such thing as overtraining just under-eating. Yeah, seems legit. I mean, how else am I going to justify eating an entire 2,000 calorie pizza after a ride where I only burned 500 calories? I'm just trying to replenish my fuel stores, bro. Fortunately, this has been studied. This review on overtraining and glycogen depletion looked into the hypothesis of whether or not low glycogen or essentially not eating enough could be a cause of overtraining. It's been shown in swimmers for example that lower level responders to training had lower muscle glycogen levels. However, cyclists who increased their training load for two weeks and compensated by eating more carbs to maintain glycogen levels still met the criteria for overreaching and likely overtraining, leading them to the conclusion that some other mechanism or a combination of mechanisms may be at play here. Eating enough likely helps prevent overtraining, but don't think that you can out-eat overtraining. At some point, you've simply done too much work and no amount of calories will reverse that. When it comes to eating to prevent overtraining, it's pretty simple. Eat enough and make sure that what you are eating is healthy and nutritious. All right, now let's talk quickly about sleep. Sleep has been found to be one of the single best recovery strategies available to athletes. Ironically, overtraining also causes sleep problems. This seems like it could cause a negative spiral pretty quickly. The more you over-train, the worse you sleep. And the worse you sleep, the worse you recover, leading you to be more overtrained. There are obviously many causes of poor sleep, but overtraining may be one of them. If you're having trouble sleeping and you suspect that you may be overtrained, that might be an indication. Let's try not to get to that point though by prioritizing sleep in our life. Sleep will outperform any other recovery aid. We've been talking about the recovery side of the training recovery equation, which is obviously important, but let's finish up by talking about what your training should look like if you want to avoid overtraining. Going back to the review article on overtraining in athletes, they state that an in-depth knowledge of periodization may be necessary for the prevention of overtraining, as periodization provides a framework for incorporating intensive training and regeneration periods in the appropriate ratio and volume in a training program. Basically, training should change over time and training should include rest periods. Make sure in your training week you have at least two rest days or active recovery days, and in your training month, make sure that you have a recovery week with reduced volume and intensity of training to rid your body of the fatigue that you've built up over the course of the month. As far as what your training week should look like, it's important to know that you don't want to overdo it with high intensity work. Two or three high-intensity days per week has been shown to be optimal. More than this is not only not beneficial, but may lead to overtraining. Make sure that your two or occasionally three high-intensity days per week are done when you're well rested, and to ensure that you're well rested for these days, most of your rides should be done at zone two or below. Why is it important to stay in zone two on these days? Again, it may have something to do with how different types of training affect your autonomic nervous system. This study on autonomic recovery after exercise found the exercise below the first ventilatory threshold, which is where zone two or endurance zone lies, causes minimal disturbance in ANS balance. Further, the first ventilatory threshold may demarcate a binary threshold for ANS slash HRV recovery in highly trained athletes, because further delays in HRV recovery with higher training intensities were not observed. Essentially, if you go over zone two, you start to accumulate autonomic stress. This isn't a big deal if it's done a couple days in a row, but do this day after day for weeks on end, and you start to develop staleness or a feeling like you just can't put out power. This is overtraining. This is why if you're going to turn on the stress response, you don't want to half-ass it. You want to make it a high-intensity day. Having this dichotomy between very hard days and very easy days has been shown to not only lead to better performance gains, but less perceived fatigue from training. Your average training week should have two hard days, two recovery days, and the rest should be zone two or below. Last thing before I go, what is the best thing to do if you find yourself overtrained? Take some time off the bike or at the very least, take some time to just do short easy rides. How much time you need off is going to depend on how overtrained you are, but the last thing you want to do is train through it. If you're overtrained to the point that it's affecting your performance, there is no training through it. There's only training yourself deeper into the hole. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like, subscribe, and share it with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.