- Loss of motivation

- No matter how much sleep you cannot recover

- You can’t understand why you can’t overcome a plateau even though you are still training and working hard

Overtraining (Burnout) – Rest and Recovery

As you approach your offseason and think about how to best approach your training, remember to try to achieve the proper balance of work and recovery. Too little training and you are underprepared, too much training and you risk burnout, underperforming and possible injury. Over training has serious consequences such as injury or poor performance, so you want to be sure you are adding the RIGHT kind of stress to your body and not making things more difficult for yourself when it comes to the season and game time. Athletics is now a year round activity, and it needs to be viewed as such, whether you are in season, or out of season.

For example, often times you hear in the training room “don’t be soft” or “come on, you can’t do that?” All of the natural peer pressure that is very typical in athletic locker and room that can be both fun and at the same time taken seriously. This is good - to a point, because the ego is fragile when one does not want to look bad, lesser than, or not tough and strong in front of his or her team mates. A player can rush to come back from injury, try to impress their team mates by lifting more or doing more than they than they can, and simply exercising and training more than their body allows them. These are recipes for failure (or injury) - not success. As a young athlete this is one of the hardest things to see and learn as you have both enthusiasm and peer pressure to “compete” and outdo not only your opponents but your friends and teammates in the training room and practice field. It is simply competitive nature. This is particularly evident in the more aggressive and physical sports such as football, hockey, MMA and even basketball.

I will illustrate my point with a story. I remember when I was testing for football during pre-season before double sessions began my sophomore year in college. (The testing methods are vastly different now, and much safer. We used to “max” lift for squats and bench press, which is very dangerous. Now the testing is designed by maximum repetitions with a safer, set weight). I was competing for a fullback spot on the team and was very focused training in the offseason, and thought my testing numbers were pretty good. A freshman arrived who was recruited by Division 1 schools but subsequently had a knee injury and fell down the chain to division III and saw an opportunity at a good school like Amherst. He still ran a 4.5 forty yard dash, weighed 225 lbs and arrived as a freshman as probably one of the strongest players on the team. His first day of testing he put 400lbs on the bench press for a max lift. I was blown away: 400 pounds would be great for an NFL running back. He had three teammates spotting him, as he attempted to bench press 400lbs...he then proceeded to completely tear his left pectoral muscle and subsequently missed the entire season. Needless to say, my chances to play that year were better than his!

There are several important points to this story, but the research states that overtraining reduces the ability to handle stress during and after performance as an athlete’s emotional and physical resources are depleted. (citation) The role of the coach, physical therapist and trainer is critical in intelligently delegating training time and intensity, as most competitive athletes are prone toward impatience and want to return too fast and too soon. Any competitive athlete is desirous of getting back on the playing field as soon as possible (Anshell, 1997). This is also why athletes are a vulnerable population to steroids and painkillers. In addition, overtraining places athletes in a more vulnerable mindset to use performance enhancing substances or painkillers. Psychologically, it’s is also very difficult to not perform how you were prior to injury. PED’s accelerate your recovery time and pain killers help you ignore the pain you are already in. Either way your ignoring the facts at hand and hurting yourself in the long term.

Clear training schedules need to be followed, not just for recovery but for supervised rest time as well. With fierce competition, many athletes pride themselves on being the first to get to practice and the last to leave. The unspoken message is that overtraining, fatigue and burnout are more indicators of dedication than they are of harm. This is a fine line, and one that only you truly know. These traits are often given positive feedback, even if the long-term consequences are greater physical stress injury (Greenleaf, Gould, & Diefenbach, 2001.)