Overtraining is a myth

There is a saying that says it's not what you do in the gym it's what you can recover from. I was listening to a podcast where a discussion of training in international wrestling came up and how the USA vs. Russians train. The overall conclusion is that the Russian national team trains far less hard throughout the year then they ramp up the training for a couple of weeks, whereas our training sessions are very intense and difficult and the athletes don't get as much overall skill development because we are training very hard all year. This, in theory, will increase your overall volume in skill training “to avoid” injuries and of course, avoid “overtraining”. The goal of this post is to talk about what that term means and how we can avoid “overtraining" even when training at maximum effort. 

Let's first start with defining terms. What I am referring to is training so hard that you get injured. I see athletes all the time pushing their bodies to their limit with no real issues or any serious injury. Is this their genetics or is it something that is controllable? To be honest it's probably a combination of both. Obviously, genetics have a role in people getting injured at a higher rate than others but it's definitely not the only factor. Let's talk about the controllable We can start with the physical aspect of training and the modalities that we can practice off of the mats. These same practices can be applied to strength athletes in sports like strongman or powerlifting. Let's first talk about the annoying nagging pains you might be experiencing while lifting or on the mats. That pain you are feeling is a signal, it is your body's way of saying something is wrong and if not addressed it can lead to something more serious. Now how does this lead to an overtraining injury? Overtraining in my opinion is an easy way to scapegoat for something that could have been avoided in the first place. The hard training isn't the culprit here, it's the avoiding of the signal and dysfunction. I'm going to give a quick example of this. Let's say for example the outside of your knee pops during a grappling match or while lifting weights, people will auto-assign the cause of this injury on the warm-up or knee sleeves or some other easy thing. I am not saying that freaky things can't happen because they do all the time but from my experience, most people who deal with an injury like what I'm describing don't have a complete range of motion in their hips then they will try and load a hip that cannot rotate, so something is going to have to rotate in this case the knee which becomes a mobile joint and then pops. In short, the way this is avoided is by ensuring you have a full functional range of motion by using a well-thought-out strength program that addresses everything not just how much you bench press or curl in the squat rack. 

Avoiding the boogeyman called overtraining has more to do with what you do when you’re not in the gym and believe it or not they all go hand in hand. I had the pleasure of doing a seminar with Stan “the Rhino” Efferding and he said I agree that the bedrock of diet and exercise is rest and recovery. While I agree completely with this statement I believe it is much more cyclical than this. If you were to track your rest and recovery what you tend to see is better recovery when eating close to or at your daily calories burned. Why is sleep quality so important? What you have to understand about sleep is, it's not as simple as getting in bed and sleeping, yes length of time is very important. It means next to nothing if during that long period of time in bed you spent 90% in Light sleep or worse awake. AWAKE You might be wondering what I'm talking about, When I say awake you are clearly lying down with your eyes closed in bed, While this is true you are “asleep” there are stages of sleep which are awake, light, SWS (deep), and REM sleep. For each of these stages, you have a sweet spot that is ideal for recovery. The things that can negatively affect the sweet spots can be several things such as sleep hygiene, nasal breathing or snoring, and blue light exposure just to name a few. The biggest culprit of a negative impact on sleep is mouth breathing. Some people are severely affected by sleep apnea If you do have sleep apnea i recommend you get a CPAP. For those who only snore lightly, I suggest something very simple: nasal strips and mouth tape. From my personal experience and with clients I have seen GREAT increases in sleep quality when following just those two simple remedies. The other things I mentioned are much simpler, don't look at your phone 30 minutes before bed, take a hot shower before bed, and always sleep on clean sheets. Why are calories so important in recovery, it's very simple if you're training hard at anything. How can you rebuild the “broken down” systems if you're not adding the proper nutrients to do so. I pointed at calories earlier because calories are absolutely the most important component in all fitness endeavors. If we are talking about high-performance athletes it's a little more complicated than that, while calories are still king the macro and micronutrients still have a major effect on overall performance. First and foremost I want to say exclusion diets for athletes make no sense to me, I didn't always believe this but after listening to people much smarter than me, it absolutely makes sense. What I'm looking for you to take away is that all nutrients have an upstream effect on how you perform. But also on how well you recover, i want to touch on one micronutrient. sodium is widely one of the most beneficial micro nutrients you can consume because it will be a large factor in rehydration. You hear a lot about sports drinks that will rehydrate you after hard training. I'm here to tell you that you will get a much better result from consuming food. Not to say that an intra-sports drink that has sodium isn't beneficial but the majority of your hydration is going to come from salting your foods. Understanding how everything we do has an effect on your success is paramount in being able to train hard consistently. When you are training remember it is all about what you can recover from and your recovery is based on the things you do for the majority of your day. 

My goal in this post is not to tell you to train less hard, because in my opinion it is very important for growth within any sport to train at “game” speed and as frequently as possible. Kobe did not become one of the greats by just practicing his free throw; he practiced at game speed as often as possible to become an all-around great player. I'm extremely happy that more science has made its way into training modalities but there will never be a time when you can out-science hard work. So don't believe the myth and take care of your body outside the gym and keep working hard!!