It's time to stop

Overtraining can strike anyone, but is more often found in endurance athletes and formerly sedentary individuals who’ve lost significant weight and are afraid they’ll slip back to their old ways, and their old weight. Overtraining can carry the following symptoms:

• You have a higher than normal resting heart rate
• You’re irritable and have trouble sleeping
• You’re unable to complete normal workouts
• You’re chronically fatigued
• There’s a lack of progression in athletic performance
• You can’t bust through a weight loss plateau
• Your body fat percentage is increasing despite continued workouts
• You become sick more frequently
• Your training log indicates that you’re going hard all the time

If you’re experiencing more than one of these symptoms, you might be a victim of Overtraining Syndrome.  Prevention of overtraining is the best medicine.  To prevent overtraining, here are a few recommendations:

• Keep a training log to track what you’re doing and the progress you’re making toward your goal. 
• Follow a training plan that incorporates a variety of exercise and rest days.
• Place your rest days after your higher intensity days (and before long endurance workouts if fat loss is a goal)
• Balance volume and intensity.  You can’t have both.  As intensity increase, volume must decrease.
• Fuel up appropriately.  This means eating enough food to support your body and muscle growth as well as eating quality food.
• Get more sleep.  The quality of your workout and your performance is directly related to the amount of rest you give your body. 

If you’re already overtrained and past the point of prevention, the remedy is to back off and rest.  You’re not getting stronger while you’re working out.  Instead, you get stronger when you rest.  If you never give your body time to rest and you’re always going at the highest intensity, you’ll crash sooner than later. 

By rest, I’m not referring to just switching exercises.  For example, an overtrained cyclist cannot simply reduce their bike mileage and swap that for running. 

You need to back off and get some rest.  Your body needs to recover and rebuild.  Learn to take the time off and you’ll come back even stronger.

Put away the cell phone!

You can work out.

You can’t do both. You have to decide. Try to do both and you’re just wasting time. Please get off the treadmill/elliptical/whatever machine and give it to someone who really wants to do something.

You’re driving everyone nuts. Please stop.

Hang up. Put the phone away. Get a real work out.

When you’re done, and only when you’re done, send me a text and tell me how well your workout went. Just don’t do them both at the same time, please.

Rather than close the center, we kept the center open and let our members know that some of the equipment would not be available. We have another location a couple miles away and members could go there instead. Alternatively, we promoted this as an opportunity for people to try something different with their program. It’s an opportunity to change from having a “routine” to something exciting and different.

The carpeting process was scheduled to last three days. On day 1, members came in at 5 AM and a few were shell-shocked. They wandered around trying to figure out what to do, randomly pulling a cable here and doing a rep there. A few said, “I can’t do anything today”. One nearly climbed over a few cardio machines that were pushed together just to get to the one machine he uses every single day. He looked quite relieved and proud that he did the same thing as yesterday, and the day before, and the days and weeks before that.

Your body is a pretty amazing system. It adapts to the positive stress of exercise. When you place a load on the body it adapts to that load by getting stronger. Soon, the body sees that load as normal and unless you place a different stress on the body it hits a plateau.

If you do the same walk on the treadmill, at the same speed, for the same distance, over the same duration, your results will not improve. That program will work at first, but the Law of Dimishing Returns says that sooner or later the result will be zero. My point is that you need to keep the body guessing as to what’s coming next.

Take a look at your personal program.

Are you still doing the same thing you’ve been doing for weeks, months, years? If so, turn it upside down, make it tougher, and get ready to see results!

• Are you doing just cardio? Add weights
• Are you just doing weights? Add cardio
• Are you doing your cardio at the same intensity? Maybe you’re ready for interval training?
• How about trying a total body exercise like swimming?

Need help creating a new program to get the results you’re looking for? Give me a call at (630) 269-8992!

The body is a pretty amazing system. When you’re beginning your workout program, you might be able to only do 20 minutes at a moderately elevated heart rate. As health and function improves, you’ll be able to more work with the same effort. Many people hit a plateau with their cardio workout (and their resistance workout) where they’re comfortable and stay there though. I see people doing the same workout at the same pace and same intensity. At one time it might have taken their body 300 calories to perform that effort. Now that they’ve improved it might only require 250 calories.

Looking to bust through that plateau and make a difference? Try changing your intensity with interval workouts.

First, make sure you’ve built up a sufficient cardio base. After your warm up, bring your heart rate up to 65%-75% of your max for 5 minutes. Next, crank up the intensity to 85% of max for one minute. Repeat this cycle 3-5 times and then cool down. Try this once a week. If you have any heart or other medical conditions, make sure you’ve been cleared first.

Need help developing a results-driven program to meet your goals?

I can help. Ask me.