@anna_5588 this is for you.
I don’t know if you tend to read the articles I link, I know that sometimes you’ve read forum pieces, but it seems more earnest if I put it into words what it is I want to tell you rather than have you go read it somewhere else. If anything else, there’s some benefit in me being able to highlight the things I want you to note.
It’s in regards to overtraining, and overreaching.
This might not seem like my voice though, because overall it isn’t (yet). It’s a collection of notes on what I’ve dug up on overreaching and overtraining recently and so it hasn’t been “composed” and remixed yet to be more “me”.
Unfortunately, I believe you have a lot of fatigue masking your fitness, so I honestly do not know how well this applies because the “norm” to which you compare isn’t a decent baseline of comparison as I imagine your point of reference is related to an already fatigued state.
First I try to paint a picture, it’s not meant to scare you, and then I talk about a lo-fi way to evaluate your recovery and this is something you need to get better at.
I’m going to list some of the common signs of overreaching. These words are not mine. I recall that a few of these apply to you, and your day-to-day descriptions of how you are feeling.
- Loss of “pop” when trainig. Meaning that weights that’d ordinarily be lifted with a clean and crisp execution now take a little longer to complete. Limit strength may decrease. Volume tolerance may have declined.
- Difficulty in elevating your heart rate (Personally, I’ve had this in a really bad way reaching a peak heartrate of 40 BPM on limit climbs…)
- Feeling of simultaneous tightness and stiffness, or tendon discomfort. This may dissapate after the first few eccentric motions on any set — particularily the tendon discomfort (I have this right now
)
- Delayed onset muscle and tendon soreness that persists. (I have this at the moment) This may be triggered even by low volume or low intensity training. Might be accompanied by the somatic sense of being heavy.
- Changes in appetite (I see this with you often) and fluctuations in bodyweight (this too)
- Mental fuzziness and loss of focus during training
The above are the first telltale signs. Here are the signs of actively being overtrained.
- All of the above symptoms, conceivably increased in severity.
- Loss of motivation in and outside of the gym (we’ve seen this with you recently)
- General loss of focus
- Sleep distrubances
- Mood-related issues or general irritability
- Persistent feeling of fatigue (i.e., you wanting to stay in bed)
- Loss of libido
Overtraining takes many weeks or even months to recover from (Autonomic imbalance hypothesis and overtraining syndrome - PubMed Autonomic imbalance hypothesis and overtraining syndrome - PubMed)
As a rule of thumb, if you sense that your motivation to train and general health status is declining, i.e., you simply don’t feel well from the stress of training (or life stress), force-feeding (i.e., your appetite is low — which I know you recently remarked that it was) then chances are you’ll not be making good progress.
Don’t be a victim of your own ambition!
@Bagsy that might apply to you too.
Albeit “common sense,” the ability to auto-regulate in this way can be easily be obscured by drive and determination to progress, or not regress, or because we have mental demons that we battle (something you @anna_5588 and I share).
Depending on how recovered you are, that should drive the expectations for your performance.
As I wrote in @Bagsy s log,
- Well-recovered: expect improved performance.
- Moderately or somewhat recovered: expect similar performance.
- Somewhat tired, or very poorly recovered, expect declined performance.
For those that can, it seems as if a dedicated calendar duration (usually a “deload” week) isn’t necessary and it might be adeqaute to employ autoregulation on a per session basis. Some reduction in training stress is necessary. This can be through reducing either, or a combination of,
- volume,
- intensity,
- type of set (cluster, straight),
- the inclusion/exclusion of intensification techniques (forced reps, negatives, drop sets), etc.
- training frequency
I read a lot of training programs. The ones that are successful seem to have picked up on the fact that the people that seek them out generally tend to have too much vigor and zeal to help but silence their inner voice telling them to slow down. I believe this is why they employ scheduled deloads. Meadows programs do this. Fortitute Training does this. DoggCrapp does this. 531 does this. Success leaves clues
FT actually encourages intra-session autoregulation and still includes a scheduled deload.
Lastly, it’s amazing how strong you’ve (@anna_5588) gotten despite all of the things that you do that lies anathema to recovery but I think this shows you have a good predisposition toward being strong, that you have great technique, etcetera. I do not believe that all that you do feeds the progress that you’ve had.
(@Bagsy, while I originally set out to write this for Anna, you might enjoy reading it too)
