 | Sport Articles |
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| Sport Articles |
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Avoid Overtraining |
| You thought you were ready to peak. But in your last race although you thought you were working hard, you were 30 seconds a mile off your regular pace. Funny, your resting pulse is up, and you feel kind of irritable and you've lost a couple of pounds, too. Several studies have shown athletes thought to be overtrained really had low carbohydrate stores in their muscles; they were not eating enough to support their training. Then if you eat a high level of carbohydrates so that your muscles are loaded with glycogen can you avoid overtraining? No, says a study led by Ann Snyder, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of Limburg, The Netherlands. Good nutrition won't save you if you train too hard. Eight competitive cyclists switched from normal training to 18 hours a week of mostly high-intensity intervals for two weeks. At the end they had a maximal performance test, and were checked for physiological changes of overtraining. They were given a daily questionnaire about how they felt about their training.The cyclists all ate plenty, and there were no significant changes in muscle glycogen by the end of the program. But all of them had at least three symptoms of overtraining. This means you can't avoid overtraining just by having plenty of muscle carbohydrate in your muscles.Then what can you do, since the first sign of overtraining is when your performance has already begun to dive? An increasing number of studies show that psychological markers flag warnings at the same time or even before physiological changes occur. The latest of these, from the University of Queensland in Australia, used the sense of well being, rated by sleep pattern, muscle soreness, and feelings of stress, fatigue, and staleness. These not only marked overtraining, but were effective predictors of improved performance of swimmers during recovery and tapering. These kinds of studies show that you can learn to monitor how you're doing during training, and if you are alert to your sense of well being you should be able to avoid an unexpected performance nosedive. Most of us would not go to the trouble of setting up some kind of personal psychological testing, but a few words in your training log on your daily sense of well being takes only a few seconds. Even more practical is to avoid constant striving to prolong indefinitely those wonderful times when you're on a roll of PRs. Most of us can peak for about four to eight weeks. At some point you need to recognize that it can't last. It makes sense to regroup and recover for a while before planning new goals. This is the way to avoid overtraining altogether. (Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 1995, Vol. 27, No. 7, pp. 1063-1070, and Vol. 27, No. 1, 106-112). This article is compliments of The American Running Association, a non-profit association. Whose mission is to encourage people to improve their health and performance by running and maintaining an active and healthy lifestyle. In next week's edition, learn how to keep your tank full! |
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