Signs of Overtraining

It is traditionally considered that frequenters of gyms, not the home training supporters are more in danger of overtraining. There are two categories of last, who are in risk zone. First are newbies, that put their unprepared organism to the risk in excessive zeal (the guilt is often on taken somewhere another mans program). People, who are into sports for a long time, but for some reasons took a break in their workouts also can feel all the “charms” of overtraining. If they decide to continue their training from the strength values, that they have stopped – the overtraining is unavoidable.
Overtraining is not only uncomfortable feelings. By not giving your organism to recover after previous training, you put on risk not only your training program progress, but your health too. Of course, some of the overtraining symptoms, written below, may be caused not with excessive loads, but some other life situations. But if you constantly observe some of the overtraining symptoms, that you have – we recommend you to slow down a little, make a small pause and analyse your program closely.
So, main signs of overtraining:

• After workout you pulse is going slower to the normal, the next morning your heart rate is bigger that usually (more detailed – in “Heart Rate During a Workout”);
• In addition to muscle pain and muscle tiredness you get joints and ligaments pain, that often doesn’t go away to next workout;
• Your strength and stamina values are worse, performing the planned exercises is difficult, not depending on training period (start, middle or end of the cycle);
• You fall asleep hard, sleep bad (wake up often and for long because of muscle pain), don’t feel like you fully rest in the morning;
• If you used to turn into food-destruction machine after workout, and now you have no appetite or it got way weaker;
• You examine yourself for mood swings, you become dark, disputed and irritable;
• Lower immunity leads you to weather-sensitive, you can easily catch cold or inflammation;
• You feel psychological discomfort, thinking of training necessity, you can find a hundred reasons to postpone your workout or stop it at all.

As you can see, some special numeric (except heart rate) benchmarks of overtraining do not exist. Physical culture – is a whole system, which needs you to wisely pick some optimal coefficients of load and rest. The edge is very thin: if you excuse yourself and dawdle – you will not get the desired result. If you always put your organism to excessive loads – it will cause depletion and increase the chance to get an injury. You should learn to listen to yourself and your body, to get the maximum efficiency from training process. Maybe, you will not manage to rise to the optimal training mode eventually, but I’m sure – you will, with time.
And remember: overtraining – is only one of many problems, which you will have to face on physical improvement way. There is no way to make it an excuse to skip the next workout. You can decrease the load in overtraining period, add one whole day for rest, but you can’t abort the regular training cycle because of it!
It is important to sincerely love workouts. The need of constant physical exercises must cause only pleasant thoughts, that smoothly grow into pure happiness, look for any possibilities to train (home trainings fit best). Remember: the results are equal to the contribution.
Good luck in workout without overtraining!

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Good books to read:

Stuart McRobert. Beyond Brawn: The Insider's Encyclopedia on How to Build Muscle & Might. - CS Publishing, 2012. – 512 р.
The Gold’s Gym Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding / Edward Connors, Michael J. B. McCormick, Peter Grymkowski, Tim Kimber. – McGraw-Hill, 1998. – 407 р.
The High Intensity Training (HIT) FAQ by Rob Spector