Overtraining Symdrome: Are You Exercising Too Much?

You can expect mistakes to bother you during the course of your fitness regime from time to time. Obviously mistakes occur without your knowledge, but they can also help you to rectify your strategies next time. One such mistake is "Overtraining". Overtraining is common during an exercise session. It is the physical as well as the behavioral state of mind which occurs after you perform exercises beyond your recovery capacity. Overtraining can cause adverse effects on your strength and fitness.

One of the most important principles of exercise is "overload". It signifies overloading your body in order to derive the maximum benefit from a particular exercise. It can be in the form of intensity, duration or a frequency of exercises or a combination of any of these. But sometimes, despite hard overload training, one may experience an unexplained decline in performance and physiological functions that can extend over weeks, months or even years. This is what you expect in overtraining. This condition has been attributed to both physiological and psychological causes.

What can Lead to Overtraining?

Normally three possibilities are associated with overtraining:

• You are creating the proper stress, but not allowing enough rest to recover before imposing another stress.


• Your recovery time may be fine, but the stress caused during your workouts is comparatively higher.


• You are doing a combination of both.

Whatever the case may be, expecting a positive result is not at all possible. Excess of anything is bad and it holds true for exercise also. Overtraining will not allow your body to recover properly. Recovery time is more important than the workout time because the growth and the improvements take place when your body is in its resting state and not when you are working out!

When you do some exercise, various metabolic changes take place within the body. These changes are proportional to the dosage of exercise. Our body tries to adapt to the stress imposed during the exercise and try to recover from it. During this recovery time, all the improvements and the growth takes place as mentioned above, but when this dosage exceeds the limit in such a way that the body is unable to cope up with it, overtraining results.

What are the Typical Symptoms of Overtraining?

During over-exercise, your body experiences more catabolism (breakdown) than anabolism (buildup). Symptoms that result from overtraining are collectively called as over training syndrome. The symptoms of overtraining are highly individualized and subjective. Interestingly, over training not only causes physical effects but also affects the psychological and the mental status of an individual. Some of the symptoms of overtraining include:

• Lack of energy to carry out the activity, general body discomfort, muscle soreness and pain in muscles and joints.


• Decrease in performance or output.


• Loss of enthusiasm and motivation to perform exercises.


• Psychological symptoms like depression and irritability.


• Loss of appetite, drop in immunity and increase in the risk of injuries in the form of sprains, strains and rupturing of muscles.

Over training is commonly seen during weight training but can also result from aerobic exercises like running and cycling. Overdoing something is not a very wise idea and the beneficial effects may get reversed. It is very essential to allow considerable time for rest to help in the body's repair or recovery process. This applies not only to those who are performing strength training but also to those who are on an aerobic exercise regimen.

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