Viewing 23 posts - 1 through 23 (of 23 total)
  • Have I 'over trained' ?
  • FunkyDunc
    Free Member

    Ive been upping my exercise over the last month to get ready for 3 Peaks Cyclocross.

    It has all been going fine so far. A week last Firday I did a 70 mile road ride in the Dales, and felt surprisingly good afer it.

    On the Saturday I went out for a gentle 5 mile ride with my son, with him on the Tag along.

    I then did a 5 mile run on Monday, and a 4.5 mile run on Wednesday. I was intending to do more like 6 miles, but it was just too hot and humid.

    Saturday I just went out on the MTB for an 1hr doing 12miles (hilly)

    Yesterday I did 50 miles on the road bike (very hilly). I was fine in the ride, but I knew I couldnt go up any more big hills, however my heart rate was fine.

    Yesterday afternoon I was shattered and felt very hot. I went to bed at 9:30. Today I feel light headed, cant concentrate, very tired and legs have no energy going up steps etc.

    I have been properly hydrated, eaten plenty etc etc.

    Tonight I intended to just do a 30 min turbo to spin the legs out, or do I just actually need to rest?

    Ta

    molgrips
    Free Member

    Being tired isn’t the same as overtraining. The latter usually takes months afaik, it’s a long term thing.

    Probably got some kind of low grade virus or something, maybe (IANAD). I find that viruses or infections that I woudn’t normally notice come and go, but if I am riding a lot they make me feel like you describe. At least I assume that’s what’s happening.

    FunkyDunc
    Free Member

    Molgrips – Thats kind of reassuring. My son is just recovering from a chest infection + a virus, so could well be that a have a low grade of that without realising it.

    What does overtaining feel like then?

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    smatkins1
    Free Member

    Decrease in performance and fatigue. Certainly signs of not giving your body enough chance to rest and/or enough fuel to do what you’re asking of it.

    You say you’ve upped you training, by a lot? Maybe you need to eat even more! Terrible news, I know 😉

    molgrips
    Free Member

    What does overtaining feel like then?

    Not sure, but there was a point a few years ago when in retrospect I may have pushed it too far through a suspected virus of some kind, possibly swine flu (as it was reported that many people got it but were asymtomatic). I’d ride, feel tired, then feel recovered in a few days so I’d head out again. But I’d feel knackered after 45 mins, even without pushing hard.

    But I repeat, I am not a doctor or a coach, so this may be bollocks. It’s only conjecture based on reading the internet and doing some training.

    whitestone
    Free Member

    Remember that in a training programme that rest is just as important as effort. Your efforts should be as hard as possible and your rests as easy as possible. I.e. on a scale of 1 – 10, efforts should be at least 8 and preferably 9 whereas rests should be 1 or 2. A lot of people do efforts at 6 and rest at 4 or 5 and so don’t give their body time to recover and adapt.

    When increasing your training, focus on either duration or intensity but not both. It takes a while for you body to adapt and you have to give it time.

    Also it looks like you are just working one muscle group – your legs, you need to get other bits up to speed/strength as well.

    FunkyDunc
    Free Member

    Maybe you need to eat even more! Terrible news, I know

    My theory would be that if you are not loosing weight then you are eating enough (whether thats the right stuff is a different subject) At first I lost about 3kg, then put a tiny bit back on.Im probably about 4kg’s off where I started from, and still have body fat to go at 😆

    I used to get out on the bike maybe once a week 20 miles or so, run twice a week prob 15 miles max)

    Now doing 100+ miles per week on the bike, runing stayed about the same.

    When increasing your training, focus on either duration or intensity but not both. It takes a while for you body to adapt and you have to give it time.

    I guess I am trying to do both in one. Unfortunately I havent done much for the last 3 years I had 2 serious bouts of Pneumonia.

    With not long now untill the 3 Peaks, I was trying to do longer rides so I can cope with the 38 miles with no issues. I was then doing at least 1 hill rep session a week of 1hr. Is that a bad thing to be doing?

    grenosteve
    Free Member

    Over training can have you feeling crap for a while, rather than a few days.

    I had grand plans to do the 24/12 12 hour solo, even though I haven’t rode much for a good 5 years. Had a good Jan and Feb this year, lost 2 stone and was really getting fitter, but in March I didn’t loose any weight and seemed to be stuck in one gear no matter what training I tried to do to up my pace. April I was shattered and stopped getting PBs on my rides, even commuting 10 miles was very hard work, and then I had a chesty cold all through May. 🙁

    I’ve put it down to trying to diet and up my mileage at the same time. I’m sure the May cold would have gone in a week or so if I hadn’t over done the training. Don’t think I’m back to where I was at the start of April even now!

    Seems quite likely, in my view. That’s not to say that a very easy turbo session will not be of some benefit. Overtraining can also mean a more sustained regime of excessive training of course. That’s really where things go seriously awry.

    Back to back days of challenging training are not to be recommended. Better to concentrate on a quality session, then use the next day or two to either do a recovery session (ie very light) or rest completely. Building aerobic endurance requires that you are not working anywhere near your limits, heart rate wise, so you can train effectively without nailing yourself.

    I mostly run, and I have been wrestling with finding the limits in ramping up training. For context I have been slowly building up the miles from February from 12-15/week and recently did 3 or 4 weeks of approx. 40 miles/week comprising (roughly):

    Mon tempo session 6-9 miles
    Tue rest
    Wed Interval session approx. 3 miles plus similar warm up/cool down
    Thurs Recovery jog 6 miles very easy
    Friday rest
    Sat Long run 10 miles steady
    Sun Recovery run 6-10 miles very easy approx.

    Throwing in the odd day’s riding instead of a Sunday run definitely tipped me into a place where I was feeling tired even a few days later, so I drop some easy running miles to accommodate the occasional ride.

    It’s a question of identifying your high intensity sessions, and working in as many easy miles around them as possible.

    I should also add that I’m not a coach!

    nemesis
    Free Member

    Overtraining feels like being knackered permanently for much more than a few days – think weeks. It feels like you’ve permanently just done a hard session the day before or similar.

    Noticeable signs can be that your HR won’t go up as high as it should when training – you feel like you’ve got a rev limiter on. Conversely, your resting pulse will typically be higher than usual.

    It’s unlikely that you’re really overtrained after just a few sessions but it could be the starter to it if you don’t allow yourself to recover now.

    Or you could just be about to get ill.

    nemesis
    Free Member

    Back to back days of challenging training are not to be recommended

    Well, not unless you’re used to it – if you do a sport where you need to be able to race/etc hard for several days then you have to train that way. The key is to not significantly increase your training load without getting used to it first – eg you do some hard sessions then make sure you recover then do some more hard training and repeat. If you’re not used to the load, your recovery will take longer until your body adapts.

    NZCol
    Full Member

    Listen to your body – if you;re knackered and need a rest have a rest. If you don’t feel ‘right’ then knock it back and give yourself a couple of days to recover.

    nemesis
    Free Member

    To the point on 30 mins on the turbo, it may help but I’d suggest that you’d be better off limiting it further if you are on the cusp of overtraining – you’re just trying to do active recovery rather that getting a direct benefit (eg getting fitter) – to 20 mins and keeping that very easy – you should be able to comfortably hold a conversation and you should be spinning with little load.

    asdfhjkl
    Free Member

    Most people under-recover rather than overtrain. If you feel shit then eat more, sleep more and take care of your body (foam roll, stretch, etc).

    FunkyDunc
    Free Member

    Thanks for all the info, all very helpful.

    When I was younger I could just go and ride and not worry.

    Now 41 and limited time to train etc it all feels harder. I finding that I do need to sleep more in general to avoid feeling tired, stretching helps loads too.

    Is recovery actually literaly not exercising? I thought that low intensity spinning was good for recovery as you are at least pumping blood through your legs, getting ride of lactic acid etc ?

    So is doing 1 long, low intensity ride at the weekend, 1 high intensity hill rep mid week, and then a general 30 ish mile ride (purely for enjoying the ride) a bad thing, should I just stick to endurance for now?

    Or is it mixing it up in one ride thats bad ?

    cynic-al
    Free Member

    If you’re knackered, rest, Simple.

    Never understand why folk try to ride through fatigue.

    Whether your schedule is too much for you we can’t tell. You certainly need some long rides and I’d say some intervals to help on the climbs.

    cakefest
    Free Member

    Similar age. Suffered from overtraining last year and blew 6 months of 24hr solo training with 2 weeks acute illness 3 weeks before the event. I got greedy. ‘Aah, it’s only 50 miles on the road, it won’t hurt.’ Looking back the signs were all there. I was concerned that a missed training session was a missed opportunity to increase endurance.

    Now I think it’s the other way round. A missed rest session (super easy recovery ride, or complete rest) is an opportunity to reduce my fitness.

    I reckon for me it’s also important to regularly ride the bike in a non-training mode. I’m going to ride this bike because I enjoy it, this is why I do it. Birds, trees, wind, sunlight, rain, clouds, bermed corners. Not just for the HR, miles or fitness.

    Interesting that missing a couple of sessions doesn’t really do that much damage to fitness for me (unless I eat loads of bad food and stay up really late) whereas not resting enough when doing hard sessions drives me into the ground.

    whitestone
    Free Member

    Just wait until you are in your mid 50s! 🙄

    I tend to concentrate on one thing per session though obviously there’ll be some benefits to other aspects that you might be training for.

    Recovery is very light, it might be nothing. I find that a proper warm down is better for getting lactic out of the system – it needs to be done ASAP.

    nemesis
    Free Member

    Now 41 and limited time to train etc it all feels harder. I finding that I do need to sleep more in general to avoid feeling tired, stretching helps loads too.

    Yep, as you get older, you need more time to recover – plenty of older pro sportsmen have to change their training regime as they get older to reflect that.

    Is recovery actually literaly not exercising? I thought that low intensity spinning was good for recovery as you are at least pumping blood through your legs, getting ride of lactic acid etc ?

    That sounds about right – ‘active recovery’ is generally a good thing but it really does need to be fairly light

    So is doing 1 long, low intensity ride at the weekend, 1 high intensity hill rep mid week, and then a general 30 ish mile ride (purely for enjoying the ride) a bad thing, should I just stick to endurance for now?

    Or is it mixing it up in one ride thats bad ?

    Impossible to say – it just depends on you. Some people cope with much more, some less. It’s overall load rather than specific sessions though flat our hard sessions do typically take more out of you than much longer easier sessions. If you’re used to mixing it up then that’s probably going to be ok. If you’ve just been doing steady miles and then suddenly throw in intervals and then don’t allow proper recover/adaption time, you may start yourself on the road to overtraining (sorry, under-recovery 🙂 )

    asdfhjkl
    Free Member

    Is recovery actually literaly not exercising? I thought that low intensity spinning was good for recovery as you are at least pumping blood through your legs, getting ride of lactic acid etc ?

    Not quite. Recovery encompasses a whole bunch of things, including training, not training, stretching, eating, sleeping, hydrating, etc.

    Lots of people aren’t working hard enough for their high intensity training and aren’t taking it easy enough for their low intensity training.

    BadlyWiredDog
    Full Member

    I use an iPhone app called ithlete which uses Heart Rate Variability to give you a more objective measure of how well recovered or not you are. It’s like a more sophisticated version of checking RHR gives you a traffic light red/amber/green result, plus if you subscribe to their pro version, a more sophisticated summary.

    I find it really useful. I’m quite capable of riding myself into a deep hole and it stops me doing it by giving me a justification for backing off when I’m a bit broken. Sometimes it tallies with how I feel, sometimes it doesn’t. It doesn’t change the basics, it’s intensity rather than volume that really hammers you for example, but it helps me work out roughly what’s going on.

    The two factors I’ve found have the biggest impact other than training intensity are sleep – the more the better – and being dehydrated, which knocks things badly.

    It’s also good at telling you when you’re sick and if you are ill, letting you know when you’re properly on the way back. Works for me anyway.

    wanmankylung
    Free Member

    I would doubt that the moderate amount of exercise you have been doing could be enough to lead to overtraining syndrome. Toughen up princess. 😀

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