Training: When Too Much Is Just The Right Amount

By Matt Fitzgerald
You’ve heard of overtraining. Overtraining can be defined as a decline in athletic performance caused by subjecting the body to more training stress than it can properly adapt to in a given period of time. In extreme cases, overtraining becomes overtraining syndrome, a severe disorder of the nervous, endocrine and immune systems that requires many weeks of rest to fully recover from.

Photo: John Segesta

Even moderate cases of overtraining can seriously disrupt the training process and thus must be scrupulously avoided. There is, however, a sort of gray zone between training progressively, well within one’s adaptive limits, and overtraining—a middle zone that is well worth visiting on rare occasions in the training process. I’m talking about overreaching, which is a short period of training stress that slightly exceeds the body’s adaptive limits but is terminated before it causes the performance decline associated with overtraining.

There is no universally agreed-upon definition of overreaching in endurance sports training. Some coaches actually use the word “overreaching” as a synonym for “overtraining.” Others say that you are overreaching anytime you are training hard enough to generate fatigue and a need for recovery. My definition of overreaching splits the difference. I say you are overreaching when you are training hard enough so that, after seven to 10 days, your performance begins to decline due to accumulating fatigue. But the art of overreaching lies in cutting back your training as soon as you reach that threshold of performance decline in order to give your body a chance to adapt to all of that hard work.

Why Overreach?
The rationale for overreaching certainly is not a necessary feature of triathlon training. You can get fit enough to race well by merely training progressively—that is, by increasing your training load very slightly from week to week for many weeks, with the occasional reduced-training recovery period thrown in. But effective use of overreaching will raise your fitness to even higher levels. The greater the amount of specific training you do without exceeding your body’s limits, the fitter you will become. Overreaching is simply a way to pack a little extra training into your program through controlled risk-taking. That’s why it is widely practiced by elite endurance athletes.

To gain a better understanding of the rationale for overreaching, it is helpful to consider the difference between acute and chronic training stimuli. An acute training stimulus is a single workout that is challenging enough to stimulate improved fitness. A chronic training stimulus is a sequence of workouts in which perhaps no single workout tests your limits, but the sum of them does because your burden of fatigue increases as you go. Endurance training always relies more on chronic than acute training stimuli because it’s the total volume of training that has the greatest effect on fitness. Volume is necessarily limited when individual workouts are extremely challenging. Strength athletes are often heard bellowing about the need to give 100 percent in every workout and to leave the gym crawling and trailing vomit. Endurance athletes can’t do that. Rather, they need to train in a way that gradually reduces them to crawling at the end of each week or training block.

Overreaching is simply a training strategy that puts even more emphasis than normal on chronic versus acute training stimuli. There are hard individual workouts, to be sure, but the real challenge comes from the sheer volume of training that an athlete takes on.

Not for Beginners
Because of their genetic gifts and experience, elite athletes are able to make more liberal use of overreaching than you or I could without risking serious injury. A pro might overreach for three straight weeks on two separate occasions during focused training for a major competition. Everyday athletes like us should begin with just one week of overreaching in the final weeks of preparation for an upcoming race. If that goes well, you may advance to two and eventually three or four nonconsecutive weeks of overreaching when training for future events.

Beginners should not even attempt to overreach. A novice triathlete’s body simply isn’t resilient enough to positively adapt to a full week of training without any recovery opportunities. If you have less than two years of consistent endurance training experience behind you, it is best that you never go more than three our four days without training lightly enough to fully recover from your most recent batch of hard workouts. Wait another season or two before you try to overreach.

Planning to Overreach
To plan a week of overreaching, simply sketch out a week of workouts that represents the most total training you think you can absorb in seven days without becoming injured or experiencing a severe decline in performance before the week is through. I find that the safest and most effective way to plan an overreaching week is to retain all of the hard training sessions you normally do in a week and replace any and all light sessions with moderate ones. In other words, when overreaching you need not make your hard sessions any harder than normal—although one or two of them should be a bit more challenging than the previous week’s key sessions. What transforms the week from a normal progressive training week into an overreaching week—in a manner that limits risk—is reducing the amount of recovery you are able to enjoy between hard sessions by replacing light days and rest days with moderate workout days.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example of an Olympic-distance triathlete who wishes to overreach for one week. The table below presents three sample training weeks. The first represents the week preceding the planned overreaching week. The second represents a progressive training week that would normally follow the first week if the athlete were not choosing to overreach. And the third week represents a sensible week of overreaching.

As you can see, the key workouts in the overreaching week are not more challenging than those in the progressive training week. What makes the overreaching week more challenging than the progressive training week is that Monday’s rest is replaced with a 20-mile bike ride, and two-mile runs are tacked onto the end of the other three rides. These additions of moderate-intensity training make the overreaching week roughly 15 percent greater in volume (measured in training hours) than the progressive week.

If planned appropriately, a normal, progressive training week is already challenging enough to leave the athlete in need of the following Monday’s rest day. In light of this fact, it’s easy to see how the modest additions in the overreaching week will push the athlete very close to, but not past, the brink of overtraining.

Overreaching periods like the one below should only be done in the latter weeks of training for a peak race, when you are already fairly fit. To the right is an example of a sensible 18-week training pattern for the same hypothetical Olympic-distance triathlete. In this example, a “progressive week” is one with a training load that is five- to 10-percent more challenging than the next most challenging week preceding it in the training process. A “recovery week” is 10- to 20-percent less challenging than the preceding week. And an “overreaching week” is 15- to 20-percent more challenging than the next most challenging week preceding it in the training process.

Overreaching Aids
Supporting the post-workout recovery process with every available means is always important, but it’s never more important than during periods of overreaching, when the most effective recovery method—rest—is taken away. The most effective methods that remain are sleep, massage, stress management, and good nutrition with some supplementation if necessary.

Sleep. Sleep is critical to the recovery process. The more you sleep, the more training you can handle. Runner Constantina Dita-Tomescu of Romania reportedly slept 13 hours a night while training for the 2008 Women’s Olympic Marathon, which she won. In an interview with the Boulder Daily Camera, her coach and husband, Valeriu Tomescu, said, “You want my advice, for the athlete and the coach? Don’t care as much about your training as you care about your recovery. Why is that? Because if your recovery is good, then your training will be good. Always.”

It is very unlikely that you need 13 hours of sleep a night or could even allot that much time to sleeping if you did. But you should at least make sure you’re getting enough sleep during overreaching periods to be well-rested for your workouts.

Massage. A new review of scientific research on the effects of sports massage on muscle recovery and subsequent muscle performance, authored by researchers at The Ohio State University, was published recently in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine. They analyzed the results of 27 past studies. While as a group they provided little support for the proposed benefits of massage, the authors of the review found that the 10 studies using the preferred randomized controlled design yielded evidence of “moderate” benefits.

Sports massage is one of those things that is very difficult to study properly. To really do the job you need to collect data from a large number of athletes in heavy training over a long period of time, and that just hasn’t happened yet. My hunch is that the effects of massage therapy are numerous but subtle, in some cases almost intangible, and as such they are very difficult for the scientist to recognize even though these effects may well hold the potential to make a worth-the-money difference in helping athletes recover faster, train harder and avoid injury.

One thing is certain: Athletes who get regular massage treatments swear by their benefits. Indeed, Tim DeBoom recently stated that his long-time massage therapist made a significant contribution to his two Ironman World Championship wins.

Stress Management. There are many different types of stressors, ranging from exercise to deadline pressure at work, that affect the body in similar ways. Thus, the more stress you experience outside of exercise, the less exercise your body can handle without breaking down. Managing your general life stress is an effective way to increase the amount of training your body can absorb. Proven ways to manage stress include spending time with friends, laughter, meditation, avoiding conflict with others (by practicing good communication skills), minimizing commuting time, sex (!), spending time on a favorite hobby, avoiding overworking and enjoying one or two alcoholic drinks in the evening.

Nutrition and Supplementation. Nutrition provides all of the raw materials that the body uses in recovery processes. Protein from animal foods rebuilds damaged muscle fibers, antioxidants from fruits and vegetables limit post-exercise muscle damage caused by free radicals, omega-3 fats from fish control inflammation, and so forth. To maximize recovery, maintain a well-balanced diet, be sure you’re getting enough total calories each day, and never fail to consume carbs, protein and fluids within the first hour after exercise.

Certain supplements may also promote recovery. For example, Olympian Laura Bennett uses Optygen, a recovery drink rich in the amino acid glutamine, which overtrained athletes lack. Terenzo Bozzone, the 2008 Ironman 70.3 world champion, uses a mixture or herbal and fungal extracts called ARX. “I started using it eight weeks before Clearwater and it helped tremendously,” he says. “I was waking up in the morning and thinking, ‘Gee, maybe I didn’t go hard enough yesterday, because my legs aren’t that sore!’”

Listen to Your Body
In a well-planned and executed period of overreaching, you should experience a gradually increasing level of fatigue from day to day. On the last day of the designated period, you should feel sluggish from the very beginning of the planned workout but still strong enough to complete it without undue suffering. Olympic marathon runner Brian Sell summed it up in a recent interview in which he described his own experience with overreaching as “a kind of calloused, dull feeling … where I never feel great but I never feel like just stopping and walking either.”

If you find yourself in the middle of an overreaching period and feeling that you do need to stop and walk, or that an injury is developing, abandon the plan and take it easy for a few days. Chalk it up to experience and apply the lesson learned to your next overreaching period by making it a little shorter and/or lighter, beginning it in a more rested state or waiting until you are fitter before attempting it

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Read more about :Burn-Out, Fatigue, Limits, Nutrition, Over-reaching, Over-training, sleep