GÉNERO 18 Y NEGOCIACIÓN COLECTIVA

Just on principle, there has to be some point beyond which more training becomes counterproductive. I don’t deny this, nor will I say that overtraining doesn’t exist. The phenomenon is well-studied and its effects are undeniable ― at least in high-performing endurance athletes.

I’m more interested in how we define overtraining and “too much” training in the first place. The view held by most gym-rats and casual lifters is unsophisticated. Look at Arnold’s workout, with six training days and three hours worth of sets each day. That’s “overtraining”.

Put another way, overtraining is an amount of work or volume that lies beyond some (incredibly vague) threshold of tolerance. Working within that threshold is fine, going beyond will wear you down and burn you out. To them, overtraining is something you do.

Sports science defines the Overtraining Syndrome (OTS) by a checklist of symptoms, which include a loss of motivation to train, changes in biological stress-markers, and most importantly, reduced performance. This makes more sense, but full-blown OTS is rarely seen outside of athletes at the highest levels, and even then it’s usually endurance athletes training with tremendous weekly workloads. These unfortunates can take months (or longer) to dig themselves out of their fatigue-hole.

Overtraining, in official sports-science terms, is not an amount of work but a condition or state of being: the stress-response gone haywire, the system-wide damage accumulated from months of excess.

Overtraining, by definition, reflects diminished performance. Coaches and athletes and gym lifters would never concern themselves with stress or overtraining if it had no impact on 100m times, on 1RM performance, on the 10K run. We care about overtraining precisely because it limits what we can do.

That means performance, irrespective of biological stress markers, is our number one indicator. Even if all the right signs are there, can you be overtrained when you’re still you’re hitting PR numbers?

Back in 2001, Dr. Michael Hartman and Glenn Pendlay put this idea to the test, coaching a team of weightlifters through a grueling training cycle designed to push them to their limits. Throughout the training, the lifters, all squatting and doing the Olympic lifts many times each week, were tested for levels of testosterone and cortisol.26

Hartman and Pendlay hypothesized that the ratio between these two hormones (the T/C ratio) would provide a marker of overtraining symptoms. As predicted, after several weeks of extreme training, lifters were coming in with crashed T/C ratios. But despite crashed-out hormones and fatigue so crippling that some of the lifters could barely make it up the stairs to the gym, something remarkable happened.

“We still had several lifters set all-time PRs at the end of a week in which we worked up to a max five times,” says Hartman.27

strength gains, their research also demonstrated that while any heavy-enough training will make hash of the hormonal profile, it’s still possible to keep making PR lifts.

Are you really overtraining if you’re still hitting PR numbers?

It might help to think of this whole “overtraining” phenomenon as a two-step process, with two related but different phenomena in play.

What gym-rats and casual lifters experience as “overtraining” is rarely so vicious as full-blown OTS. You trigger feelings of tiredness and lethargy. You feel sore and stiff. You may not feel like going to the gym. Blood work would likely show a depressed T/C ratio and other markers of stress. You’re suffering the effects of fatigue and the stress-response, certainly.

But if you show up, it’s possible to keep training near or at your best. Even floored by the dreaded Arnold workout, restoration will come about with a week or two out of the gym, sleep, and good food.

Researchers have wisely separated overreaching ― which appears quickly and reverses easily ― from genuine OTS for exactly this reason. No matter how bad you feel, indicators of physical stress don’t always reflect decreased performance.

For some reason, people seem to have it in their heads that overreaching, being a short-term form of overtraining, means that OTS is both imminent and inevitable if you don’t cut back on your workloads.

It’s certainly true that many athletes, especially nationally- and internationally- ranked, often walk the edge between productive effort and overtraining. They also stick to grueling full-time schedules that aren’t remotely indicative of your 4-10 hours a week in the gym.

Here’s what I think: overreaching, what you might variously call the “squat flu” or the post-training blues, is a biological response much like that of the sore muscles you get after training. You’ve posed a challenge and the body responds with stress-mode’s profile of neurological, hormonal, and immune-system signals meant to cope. In mild cases, it just means you’ve outdone your body’s current ability to do work, be it intensity or duration or both. You lifted heavier, did more sets and reps, or some combination thereof, and now you’re feeling the effects of that.

Of course it’s still very possible to overdo it and experience extreme DOMS to such a degree that you can’t even move your arms or legs the next day. The muscle is legitimately trashed and needs rest; you’ve done a degree of damage that won’t regenerate inside that 24-72 hour window.

All this means is that there are degrees of trauma. That you can largely ignore mild DOMS is in no way suggestive that you can ignore the kind of DOMS that hospitalizes you with kidney trauma.28

The unsophisticated view argues that any post-training indicators of stress mean that we should rest. This position doesn’t allow for the motion of adaptation. This blip of stress- markers might be transient and, ultimately, tolerable by your body. As evidenced by the findings of Hartman and Pendlay, the body reacts strongly to a large and unfamiliar stress ―

and then it stabilizes.

As with DOMS, there’s squat flu, and then there’s squat flu. What the vast majority of gym-trainers experience is low-grade overreaching. You’ve stressed your body to be sure, and it will display all the symptoms we’d call “being stressed”, but you’ll adapt. Collapsing into a neuro-endocrine disaster area because you trained too hard is unlikely in the extreme. Genuine overtraining, in strength athletes, has more to do with psychology than physiology, and in fact I’m hesitant to even call it overtraining. Overtraining Syndrome is identified by a profile of symptoms which are largely physical, with loss of performance and no immediate sign of recovery with rest being number one on the list.

I think that leads us in the wrong direction. Many an “overtrained” lifter will say “I feel fine” with confidence. They aren’t lying. They really do feel just fine, and might even be lifting just fine. But they don’t feel quite right about it, and probably notice motivation waning. Without any obvious physical symptoms, no muscle soreness or lethargy or anything obvious like that, they assume they’re okay.

Overtraining for “high output” activities like lifting weights is first and foremost a problem of mental ― or neurological ― output. To understand why I say this, we have to move past our body-centric prejudices and realize that psychology is physiology (and vice- versa).

The Russians had an even better way of defining this phenomenon, using the term

staleness to describe a burned-out athlete with flat-lined performance. In Science and Practice of Strength Training, Vladimir Zatsiorsky notes that staleness comes not from

volume but from regularly lifting weights which are too heavy. “Because of the high motivational level needed to lift maximal weights, athletes using this method can easily become ‘burned out’,” he writes.29

“Burn out” or staleness in strength training is a consequence of training too heavy, with high emotional and psychological arousal, rather than the amount or volume of training. When you go stale, performance plateaus, weights feel too heavy, and motivation evaporates.

That sounds a lot closer to what gym-lifters and even serious strength athletes experience. Staleness is a problem of intensity: weights are too heavy and athletes are pushing too hard, emotionally, to lift them.

When gym-rats feel themselves “overtraining” with high-volume or high-frequency training, it’s likely that they’re coming in psyched up and throwing everything into their workouts. In strength athletes, “overtraining” ― and its late-comer friend “CNS fatigue” ― is more like a code-word for “I worked too hard and now I feel bad.”

We fear the idea of daily training because we relate it to how we feel after a hard workout. You feel sore and stiff. You may feel warm and feverish. You feel like you got hit by a truck on the worst days. The idea of getting under the bar to grind out more sets is the last thing on your mind. Feeling bad doesn’t say much about what you can do, if you actually make it to the gym, and in fact “feeling bad” might not imply what we’ve been taught.

PART TWO