Overtraining: When Pushing Hard Is Harmful

With so much emphasis placed on increasing physical activity, we hear very little about overtraining. For competitive athletes and some recreational athletes, however, overtraining can be a serious problem.

The definition of overtraining is personal. It is the point at which an athlete is training so hard and for so many hours that recovery does not occur with usual periods of rest. Athletic performance demands a balance of extreme effort and recovery. The athlete must expend a tremendous amount of energy on some days and also determine an adequate, but not excessive, number of days off, to be spent either resting completely or exercising with less intensity.

Many recreational and competitive athletes tend to think that more exercise and effort is always better. Even if they are aware of the facts, the tendency is to want to exert themselves a little longer and little harder during the next workout.
Symptoms of overtraining

Fatigue is one of the earliest symptoms of overtraining. Some experts call the earliest symptoms, those that resolve quickly if you just decrease the workout intensity on every third or fourth day, overreaching rather than overtraining.

If you continue overreaching without recovery, you may experience some of these symptoms of overtraining:

Tension

Irritability

Decreased appetite

Restless sleep

Loss of sexual desire

More aches and pains

Declining athletic performance

In the more severe form of the overtraining syndrome, the following can occur:

Depression

Menstrual irregularities in women

More significant sleep problems

Prolonged muscle soreness

Markedly diminished athletic performance

Trusting Your Hunger Vs. Exercising Willpower

These days, thanks to my transformation from walking womb to 24/7 milk bar, I am a girl with a hefty appetite. They say that nursing requires even more calories than pregnancy and I believe it. I'm not counting calories (yay!) but just guessing from the huge amounts of food I consume every few hours I'd say it's a lot. Like NFL linebacker a lot.

This frightens me.

But before we delve deeper into my neuroses, I have a confession to make: I have a serious case of envy for anyone who has figured out to eat when they're hungry. Yes, I am still trying to master this life skill that infants, dogs and the Tasmanian Devil do with gusto. Many of you blog friends have already figured out how to do this. Heather [who Eats Almond Butter], MizFit, Quix, Leslie [who Never Says Diet] and many others of you have written about how you made peace with your hunger pangs. And every time I read one of your inspirational stories I think to myself, "someday that is going to be me."

But someday is not today. And today I hate that I'm so hungry. It seems like a cruel trick of nature to saddle women who are still holding on to half their pregnancy weight with an appetite that makes werewolves look reserved. In the past I've embraced my hunger, sometimes too much, enjoying that dizzy emptiness. But being solely responsible for providing a little person's nutrition keeps me from going that route again. She needs calories and I can't produce those out of thin air.

So I eat. I eat mostly healthy things, albeit loads of them. Case in point: for lunch I ate an entire 1-lb box of baby spinach as a side dish. Who eats an entire pound of spinach in one sitting? Even Popeye exercised portion control with those puny cans. (We won't talk about the jumbo jar of mixed nuts that contains 35 servings that I ate in one week.) I also eat things I would never normally eat. Pizza, sausage, cookies and entire packages of gummy worms disappear before my kids even see them, much less get a chance to complain that I'm not sharing. I hate that I do that.

Every morning (question: When does morning start, exactly? Is it at the 12 a.m. feeding, the first official one of the new day? Or is it the 3 a.m. feeding because I can't get back to sleep after? Or perhaps the 5:30 a.m. feeding because dawn is hinting on the horizon?) I resolve to not eat everything in sight. And every evening I fall into bed disappointed with myself.

I suppose it all comes down to control. We're always told that the secret is to exercise more will power, control our appetite. But these days my appetite is controlling me. My hunger feels like an emergency that I must respond to. It will not be ignored, distracted or otherwise toyed with. If I do manage to stave it off, it slaps me down with a fierce case of of the low blood sugar crankies.

When I do finally manage to string a coherent thought together - no mean feat in this household - it scares me that I'm not even three weeks post partum and am already freaking out about food and weight. (But hey at least I'm not freaking out about freaking out!) I won't always be nursing so I should just trust my body and give it what it wants, right? Trust. Gah.

I have serious trust issues with my body.

Short of begging Geneen Roth to switch brains with me, what can I do? How do you tell the difference between real hunger and just eating? How do you strike that balance between controlling yourself and trusting yourself? Is it even possible to do both or do you fall into one camp or the other?

Calves Spy collection 1

I LOVE her legs.... ♥

Maria Butyrskaya

Celebrity Calves collection 7

The Cure for Exercise Headaches [Help a Reader Out]

If this is how you hydrate, then I think we found the problem...

Seeing as you all did such a great job with Laura's question last week regarding buying cardio equipment for a home gym, I thought I'd throw a bit tougher question your way this week. (Yeah, yeah, you can take the teacher out of the classroom...) In this week's installment of Help a Reader Out, the feature where you guys help answer questions that I don't know the answer to, Sunny writes:

"Lately, after my runs, I have been getting these massive headaches, even though I drink a ton of water before and after. A colleague suggested I start drinking some Gatorade (G2, w/ less sugar) to replace lost electrolytes, but I am not a fan of drinking those dealios, even the less sugar variety. I have also read they aren't all that great at replacing electrolytes anyway. Any suggestions? I don't want to keep taking Advil after I run and nothing else seems to work. "

First, Sunny, I love that you used the word "dealios." Since reading your e-mail I have resolved that I must find more occasions in my life to work that one in. (Although the only ones that come immediately to mind are naughty. Stop that!)

Second, my completely uneducated guess would be to wonder if you are suffering from hypoglycemia or low blood sugar. You don't say how long your runs are or what your pre- or post- workout nutrition is like but for me - and everything is about me, right? - I get the sugar shakes and a headache pretty easily if a) my workout is intense and goes longer than an hour or b) I didn't eat beforehand.

If you've ruled out both dehydration and hypoglycemia, other common sources of headaches include hormones (seeing as this is the Internet and all, I will refrain from asking where you are in your girly cycle), neck/back strain, and stress.

Lastly, there is such a thing as exercise-induced headaches/migraines. I know about them because Gym Buddy Candice suffers from them and has had to severely curtail her workouts because of them. Unfortunately, that is pretty much all I know about them. But I'm guessing at least some of my readers know lots about headaches and exercise. What do you guys say? Anyone have some tips for Sunny?

Well, they're a vegetarian's nightmare but who knows - they might help with your electrolytes. Or with your mid-run cravings for Peking Duck. PS> Why is "beef stroganoff" blue??