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.

Bodybuilding Myths, Nonsense and Lies!!!!

This article is not going to list all the nonsense and myths that are out there, as there seems to be more of that on the internet then there is reliable information. It is an article about why there is so much nonesense out there.

If anyone has any ideas that I have not touched on below then please email me at mike@proteincomparison.co.uk.

When I first started becoming interested in fitness and began scouring the internet and bodybuilding magazines for useful information I was under the impression that there was a big conspiracy regarding bodybuilding information. I knew a lot of what I was reading had to be garbage because it was so inconsistent. I thought people were lying just because they didn’t want to share valuable information that would create more competition in the bodybuilding world. Now I know there are a whole host of reasons which I have listed below and I hope you find enlightening.

1) A lot of people are trying to make money of you. There are no bodybuilding secrets that you can buy in an ebook for $49.99 that will give you rock hard abs in 6 weeks. There is no information contained in these books that isn’t already out there and no one can tell you how long it will take you to gain rock hard abs with out you telling them first your weight, percentage of body fat, metabolism and current diet and training regime
2) A lot of people are trying to make money of you! But this time they are doing it by writing an article that they think is useful info that they just picked up from other websites. They are hoping lots of people will visit the article and then click on adverts or affiliate ads and therefore they make money. Not all people doing this won’t know what they are talking about but a fair share won’t have a clue. Tomorrow they’ll be writing about how to change a bicycle tire and setting up affiliate schemes with bike retailers. [I don’t have any websites on changing a bicycle tire just for the record :-) ]
3) Some people, usually those who have not had much success in their half hearted attempts at fitness prefer to try and become coaches on the subject instead. Trying to help people where they think they went wrong without having any actual success.
4) The human body is immensely complicated so a lot of the time people are just wrong. If you had designed the perfect workout and did it every week the laws of diminishing gains would kick in and anything else you tried no matter how bad an idea it is would appear to work better, just because it is a change. Sometimes people experiencing this think they have made some sort of great fitness discovery.
5) People are in different circumstances, the main one being that the majority of successful bodybuilders are on steroids. Look at a bunch of massive bodybuilders and tell me how many still have hair on their heads. You think it’s a coincidence that they all prefer to have short or no hair. It’s a side affect of serious steroid abuts. A better thing to do is to look at pictures of natural bodybuilders. They are the biggest bodybuilders that can pass a drugs test and they are not very big at all compared to professional bodybuilders! A workout regime that works for someone on steroids will not work for someone who is training naturally. Steroids is just one example that makes a big difference to how we should train and eat, there is also age, gender and lots of genetic factors including natural testosterone levels, how fast you recover from a workout and your metabolism.
6) Some people have already been paid to write the nonesense they are going to write e.g. ‘scientific studies’, especially studies sponsored by supplement companies. There is nothing worse then reading about two studies that come to the opposite conclusion. This is insanity at it’s worse. Usually this relates to supplements. I once seen a study where a product designed for providing you with protein through out the night had a graph comparing the product with the affects of having a cup of hot chocolate before bed. I assumed the hot chocolate was made with milk. You’ll be please to know it did a little bit better then hot chocolate.


Please email me with any more reasons you can thing of and I will happily add them. Sorry for the negative article!