Overtraining

The training loads used in today’s elite sport don’t lead only to medals, high results or personal records, but also to illness, injuries and overtraining.

An elite athlete’s training is often compared to walking on a knife’s edge. To stay on the edge, you have to take into account dozens of accompanying factors that make up our everyday life. During the training process, the athlete’s body adapts continuously to the training load.

Over the course of training and the recovery period, the relationship between work capacity (performance capacity) and fatigue changes. For example, by the end of training fatigue exceeds performance capacity, but after recovery performance capacity is higher again. If an athlete’s recovery is constantly inadequate, i.e. compensating for fatigue with sufficient rest falls short over a longer period, fatigue begins to dominate and overreaching develops, and if the mistakes are not corrected, overtraining follows. Overtraining is a decline or stagnation in performance capacity in a regularly training athlete, without pathological changes in the body and often with only mildly expressed objective and subjective symptoms.

Overtraining is the result of the total load placed on an athlete. The most common causes are errors in training methodology, a chronic focus of illness in the body, a recent illness, and changes that make everyday life harder and disrupt recovery processes. This upsets the dynamic balance between training load and load tolerance, i.e. load capacity.

Symptoms of overtraining

• Decline in performance
• Reduced training load tolerance
• Rapid fatigue
• Rise or drop in heart rate
• Rise or drop in blood pressure
• Sleep disturbances
• Anxiety states
• Emotional lability
• Apathy
• Loss of appetite
• Digestive disturbances
• Headaches
• Dark circles under the eyes
• Pain or discomfort in the heart area

Athletes turn to sports physicians with such complaints quite often. Making the right diagnosis can prove difficult, because the complaints may be the expression of some illness or the functional complaints typical of overtraining. If the results of the clinical examination, tests and necessary investigations show no pathological deviations, similar complaints in athletes point to overtraining.

The central nervous system (hypothalamus–pituitary), the vegetative nervous system and the hormonal system (especially the adrenal glands, thyroid gland, pancreas and parathyroid gland) with their hormones all take part in the development of overtraining. The vegetative nervous system, i.e. the autonomic nervous system, keeps the body’s internal environment stable and ensures adaptive responses to any kind of load, influencing heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, sweating, breathing and other functions without conscious involvement. Depending on the direction in which the balance of the vegetative nervous system is disturbed, overtraining is also divided into two forms.

The leading symptoms of overtraining, and the ones that bother athletes most, are poor competition results, reduced work capacity and rapid fatigue. Based on the remaining signs, two forms of overtraining are distinguished, depending on whether the balance of the vegetative (autonomic) nervous system is disturbed in its sympathetic or its parasympathetic part.

Sympathicotonic (sympathetic, i.e. Basedow’s) form

Parasympathicotonic (parasympathetic, i.e. Addison’s) form

The sympathicotonic form is much easier to diagnose, because the symptoms are typical and the athlete’s general condition is badly disturbed. Excitation processes dominate, with overreactions, but recovery slows down and is inadequate. This form occurs more often in beginners, in young athletes and in those competing in non-endurance sports.

In today’s achievement-oriented sport, the parasympathetic form of overtraining predominates, where inhibition processes prevail and the athlete is unable to mobilize the energy needed for competition. Overtraining is most often caused by incorrect training and illnesses that disrupt the body’s condition and training rhythm. Time and again we see athletes turning up for a sports physician consultation in a state of overtraining some time after a training camp. Usually the training at camp was too intense and too high in volume, the reasons being time freed from school and family obligations, a different setting, good training conditions, boredom and competition between training partners. The result is a mismatch between the training load performed and load tolerance.

The risk of overtraining also looms when there are chronic foci of illness in the body, or during illness, if you keep training without changing intensity, volume or training plans, or if you return to your previous training loads too soon after being ill. It is often not taken into account that after getting over an illness the body is not immediately ready to tolerate training load, and a gap opens up between load and load tolerance. Illness and training together can sometimes cause liver overload, the signs of which are tenderness and a feeling of heaviness under the right costal margin, as well as changes in blood biochemistry. Factors that can promote overtraining include family or work conflicts, a heavy workload at work or in studies, bioclimatic factors (heat, cold, high humidity, mountains), sleep deprivation, nutrition mistakes or a sudden change in eating habits (weight loss). Too little rest time or too few recovery-type training sessions are part of a faulty training plan. High-intensity training has more effect than high-volume training. When training in the anaerobic zone (with increasing lactate production), levels of the stress hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline rise sharply, with adrenaline rising more.

It is known that adrenaline reflects mainly psychological stress, while noradrenaline reflects physical stress. This means that higher lactate production comes with a greater psychological stress component. Consequently, if anaerobic training sessions (competitions) come too often, the nervous system becomes overloaded. Eventually, this kind of overload leads to reduced secretion of catecholamines (adrenaline, noradrenaline) from the adrenal cortex, a lower maximal lactate level and poor competition results. Sports practice confirms that overtrained athletes have lower competition lactate. The athlete can’t keep up with surges or produce a finishing kick, even though they don’t feel completely exhausted. A typical mistake is often made in this state: unable to raise their speed, people conclude that they lack speed and add intensity to their training. Naturally, this doesn’t solve the problem, and the athlete can end up “sloshing around” in a vague state for a long time, without noticing that fatigue is dominating or is equal to the gain in performance. In cases of overtraining, the athlete is advised to reduce intensity significantly, not to compete and not to train above the anaerobic threshold. Most training sessions should stay in the aerobic threshold zone.

Once overtraining has set in, a couple of days of rest won’t clear it. Usually it takes a month to regain balance, sometimes more. Only rarely can it be done in 2-3 weeks. Training during this period should be light and aerobic, although the interval principle with long recovery pauses can also be used. Definitely no competing. The factors that contributed to the development of overtraining should be eliminated or reduced to a minimum. It is important to give the central nervous system variety and relaxation: time with friends, music, theater, dance, nature and everything else that a tense training regimen left no room for.

Recovery aids and restorative treatments such as the sauna, massage, thermal capsule, infrared sauna and water-park facilities offer effective help. Psychotherapy is important for restoring the athlete’s self-confidence.

The article “Overtraining” was first published on the Fitness.ee website on June 22, 2004.

Author: Sports Medicine Foundation

Source: WHO – physical activity.

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