Month: April 2010

Having given some general rules of thumb in terms of training inPart 5 I want to wrap up and talk about some lower cost ways to try to monitor overtraining or determine if it’s happening or starting to happen.

Monitoring Training to Prevent Overtraining

Finding ways to determine if overtraining is occurring is a problem that has confronted sports scientists, coaches and athletes for decades.  Many methods and technologies have been developed and I’ve mentioned one or two already.  Most are invasive require regular blood work or some other measurements.  You might see them in a lab or research or perhaps with elite, highly supported athletes.

But the average athlete simply can’t be expected to measure things like blood urea, the free testosterone/cortisol ratio or CPK levels.  Even some of the techniques I mentioned previously such as comparing lactate levels to heart rate, RPE or performance may not be readily available. … Keep Reading

Continuing from Part 5 where I looked at different “Types” of overtraining and presented one of the most current and comprehensive models of overtraining, I want to switch gears into more applied information.  In this part of the series I want to look, in a global sense, at how to limit the risk of overtraining.  My primary focus here will be on the training end of things more than the recovery side.

Preventing Overtraining

In a global sense, the first key to preventing overtraining is to make sure that the workload/training program is set up appropriately.  This is something I went on and on (and on) about in previous sections but basically, there needs to be some acknowledgement of the recovery processes that are in place and the workload set to that.  Alternately, if you must do a certain workload, recovery must be improved to match it.

As an example, thinking that the same training program that is appropriate for a 22 year old male will also be appropriate for a 39 year old female is fairly asinine. … Keep Reading

Having finished examined the definition of overtraining in Part 3 I want to move into some other topics.  Today I will focus on the idea of there being different “types” of overtraining.  This will lead into a bit more detailed look of the physiology behind what is occurring in overtraining.

A-Type and B-Type Overtraining

As I imagine most readers are at least vaguely familiar with, the human nervous system is generally divided into the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system.   The sympathetic nervous system handles responses related to stress and fear.  Heart rate goes up, blood pressure goes up, etc.  In contrast, the parasympathetic doest the opposite, slowing heart rate, blood pressure, etc.

In a very simplistic sense you would want high sympathetic tone when you are training and increased parasympathetic tone for recovery.  While I won’t get into it here, Heart Rate Variability are essentially examining the relative “dominance” of the sympathetic versus parasympathetic systems.… Keep Reading

In Part 1, I gave a detailed definition of overtraining which I’ve reproduced below.

Overtraining occurs when there is a long-term imbalance between the training load and recovery processes that, for a given athlete, leads to a decrement in performance that takes more than 2-3 weeks to return to normal.

Having examined the details of performance decrement/underperformance syndrome in Part 2, I want to back further up the definition and look at the idea of the balance between training load and recovery being the root of the issue (at least at a global level).

I also want to make the point that explicit training and recovery is not all that needs to be considered here.  Finally, I’ll also look at the idea of underrecovery as a bigger issue than overtraining per se.

What Causes Overtraining?

A long standing question among sports scientists is what the actual “cause” of overtraining is. … Keep Reading

In Part 1 of this series, I gave a detailed definition of overtraining which I’ve reproduced below.

Overtraining occurs when there is a long-term imbalance between the training load and recovery processes that, for a given athlete, leads to a decrement in performance that takes more than 2-3 weeks to return to normal.

Having talked about the time frame issue along with the “for a given athlete bit” I want to look in detail at the issue of “decrement in performance”.

What Defines Overtraining?

Scientists have spent decades looking for biological markers of overtraining.  I’ll talk about some of them in a later part of the series but, ultimately, most of them aren’t relevant or practical to measure for athletes.   So you’ll see discussion of the glutamine to glutamate ratio in the blood or the testosterone/cortisol ratio.  With changes being indicative that they might be occurring.

And neither of them (and many others) being at all useful in the real world for the majority of athletes. … Keep Reading