Overtraining Symptoms

My Personal Experience of Overtraining Symptoms

The damage caused by overtraining is seriously underestimated by a lot of athletes and bodybuilders. Looking back I can identify over a whole year where I was in a state of overtraining and didn’t realise. I was recently advising a friend in the gym that he was overtraining and his response was:

Me: “You’re overtraining”
Friend: “So?”
Me: “You won’t grow any more muscle.”
Friend: “I just want to get stronger.”
Me: “You won’t get any stronger, you’ll loose muscle and strength.”
Friend: “You don’t loose strength from overtraining” (look of disbelief)
Me: “Never mind…..” (me giving up on a lost cause)

From my own personal experience I did not know I was overtraining. I was struggling to make gains at the gym and spent a whole year hardly gaining any strength or muscle and not losing any body fat. I was sucked in to a vicious loop and was unable to recognise my own overtraining symptoms. Then I took a week of because I had a cold and gained more muscle in that week despite having a cold then I had in any of the 52 weeks before. Ironically enough getting ill more often is one of the overtraining symptoms but it was the only one that made me realise what I was doing wrong. I’d like you to compare the two scenarios set out below and identify the overtraining symptoms.

Scenario 1:

I always feel tired when it comes to time to go the gym but I see my self as a dedicated athlete and force myself every time. Once I’m in the gym I wake up and I’m glad I forced myself to go. I train with weights and do cardio in the same session believing this will help me to gain muscle and loose fat without any knowledge of catabolism. I feel as though I’ve had a good workout, I haven’t made any big gains in a while but I believe I may just be at a stage where gains are harder to make. I also come up with some other beliefs like people who are bigger then me MUST be on steroids or have some sort of superior genetics. I get home and as usual don’t feel that hungry after a work out. The next day I feel fine. I very rarely get sore from a workout as I’m used to them now.

Scenario 2:

When it comes to gym day a hoard of wild horses couldn’t keep me out of there, I’m bursting with energy before I even get in there. I manage to make a gain every work out weather it be an extra rep at a certain weight or I go on to the next weight for a particular work out. After my work out I eat like a horse to feed the muscles. The next I feel pretty rubbish! It’s what I call being “Gym’d Over” because it feels like a hangover. I start to feel more and more sore as the day goes on (this is called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS for short). The second day after my work out I still feel a bit gym’d over and sometimes the muscles are still getting sorer, especially if it was a leg workout. A hoard of wild horses COULD NOT drag m into the gym! I wait until I’m recovered and bursting again before I enter the gym.

Some of the overtraining symptoms were easy to spot but some were not! I want to tell you about the harder ones to spot. Scenario 1 was obviously me when I was overtraining. I felt proud of the fact that I was forcing myself in to the gym! The truth was I was an over trained endorphin addict! The feeling of being gym’d over where I feel tired and dry, this was probably what I felt like all the time when I was overtraining but it is something that build up gradually so you know no different!

The DOMS I attribute directly to muscle growth. If I only give my muscles enough time to repair but not to grow before I jump back in the gym I short circuit this growth and therefore no DOMS. Eventually the overtraining is so much that I can’t workout intensely enough to create the stimuli needed for muscle growth. My body in a way has protected me from further over training by gradually reducing my ability to train!

I have come a long way since then but the reason I tell you all this is to help you recognise overtraining symptoms that took me too long to recognise. Now I work out less, gain more and feel better, that’s what working out should be about.

For my next blog I will take a more general look at overtraining, it’s symptoms and how to recover from over training. How you feel and your psychological state as you may grasp from what I have written above is the best way to diagnose if you are overtraining.