“I think I’m overtrained.”

Every now and then an athlete says it to me, and I take it seriously, even when it’s far more likely to be mild overreaching. The terms overreaching and overtraining get mixed up easily, but the signs underneath are real: a small drop in performance, heavy legs, flat or sad days, not wanting to get off the couch. All of that deserves attention, whatever we end up calling it.

Overreaching and Overtraining: What It Usually Is

Real overtraining syndrome is rare in age-group athletes. It means months of lost form, sometimes longer, with fatigue and a loss of motivation that can look a lot like depression, and it’s only diagnosed once other medical causes have been ruled out. What I see far more often is overreaching. Sometimes it’s planned: a hard block or a few extra-hard sessions followed by easy days, which is how you explore the limit and come back stronger. When the easy days don’t come, or the load keeps piling up for weeks, it stops being useful. Performance drops and stays down, mood goes with it, and if nobody does anything about it, it’s a step toward the real thing.

Overreaching is also relative. The same training week can be easy for one person and too much for another, or too much for the same person in a different month. Recovery has to cover everything at once: the training, but also sleep, work, family, worry and the occasional cold. A perfectly ordinary block can tip someone over if the rest of his life is already taking most of what he has.

As a coach, that makes it hard to catch. If an athlete doesn’t share much about his life, all I see is the training: sessions not quite executed, a heart rate unusually high or low for the effort, and feedback like “my legs are heavy” or “I’m getting slower.” Talkative athletes make it easier. They’ll tell me the sessions feel unusually hard, that they’re sleeping worse, that their resting heart rate has gone up, and sometimes they mention problems at work or at home almost in passing, as if it had nothing to do with training. I’ve been down this road myself more than once, so with my age-group athletes I pay particular attention to that part.

Easy Days Are the Hard Part

It happens far more often to the athletes who follow every line of the plan, and then do a bit more, than to the ones who skip sessions. The hardest thing I ask of them isn’t a recovery week. It’s accepting the easy days, staying in the given zone, and lower rather than higher. The thirty-minute easy run is done, they still feel fresh, so afterwards comes a gym session, or a three-hour bike ride with the family, two hours on the SUP, a long hike. None of it feels like training to them, but the body counts all of it.

And when they do keep the easy days easy, sleep is often what’s missing. A glass of wine or a beer after an easy day, a late night with an online series, and sleep gets shorter, so recovery slows down. A day or two later the easy run turns into a medium one, longer or harder than planned, because the body is still carrying the last one.

I’m guilty of it too. Between two races close together, it’s hard to accept that hard training won’t help, and the same question keeps coming back: how am I going to be fast if all I do between two race weekends is light jogging?

When Sleep Isn’t the Problem

Sleep is always the first thing I check when recovery isn’t keeping up. When sleep looks fine and the athlete still isn’t recovering, the next thing is food, the second most important recovery tool. Cyclists and endurance athletes get fascinated by numbers like watts per kilogram, and losing weight often looks easier than gaining power, so they cut what they eat, and not always in a sensible way. A few hours of easy training a week rarely suffers much from fewer carbohydrates, as long as the rest of the diet is in order. Daily training, many hours a week with hard sessions in it, is a different matter. Cut the carbohydrates and skip the meal after training, and the glycogen stores don’t refill before the next session, which then feels flat from the start. An athlete who trains hard and under-eats can look exactly like one who isn’t recovering. A few easy days help a little, because easy sessions need fewer carbohydrates, but when sleep looks fine and recovery still isn’t happening, the weekly diet is worth talking through.

So when an athlete tells me he thinks he’s overtrained, I don’t only cut the training load. I talk with him and try to find the root causes, which aren’t always related to training at all. Training overload shows up in the numbers. Sleep, work stress and family pressure usually don’t, because I rarely have that data, and sometimes the cause is something deeper and more personal, which is beyond what a trainer should handle and belongs with the right health professional. The same goes for fatigue that doesn’t lift after a couple of weeks of reduced training. At that point it’s no longer a training question.

An athlete over forty rarely gets the ideal conditions to live around his training. Even with the boundaries pushed as far as they’ll go, family, work and health are on the plate as well, and it stays a balance game.

Questions People Ask

What is the difference between overreaching and overtraining?

Overreaching is a short-term drop in performance after training more than you can currently recover from. Planned and followed by easy days, it’s a normal part of getting fitter. Overtraining syndrome is a long-term state lasting months, with persistent fatigue, falling performance and mood changes, and it’s diagnosed only after other medical causes are ruled out.

How common is overtraining in age-group athletes?

True overtraining syndrome is rare. Far more common is overreaching that drags on because easy days aren’t kept easy, sleep is short, or the athlete isn’t eating enough for the training.

Can under-eating look like overtraining?

Yes. An athlete who trains hard most days but cuts calories or carbohydrates may not refill glycogen between sessions, and the result looks like poor recovery: flat sessions, heavy legs and dropping performance.

When should I see a doctor about training fatigue?

If fatigue, low mood or poor performance don’t improve after a couple of weeks of clearly reduced training, the cause may not be training. That’s the point to see a doctor.