Whether you’re a fitness enthusiast or really motivated to lose weight, it can be super easy to get caught up in an intense exercise routine. I speak from personal experience. There have been seasons in my life when I worked out all the time. I was running, strength training, and doing high intensity interval training (HIIT) almost every day. I started to become obsessed with working out.
One of these seasons was when I was training for my first half marathon back in 2012. I was running after work and on the weekends. When I wasn’t running (or working), I was doing strength training and HIIT workouts. On the weekends, my hubby (boyfriend at the time) and I were either hiking or climbing up the sand dune at the beach. Looking back, I probably didn’t give my body the appropriate rest it needed. However, I was 31 at the time and my younger body was able to recover faster and more efficiently than my current 44 year old mid-life body.
Today I’m sharing 5 signs you might be overtraining. While they’re all intertwined, you may experience all, a few, or only one of them. No matter how many you experience, if you notice something is off about how you feel I encourage you to take a look at your training and recovery schedule to see if you’re overdoing it.
Chronic Muscle Soreness
When you exercise your muscles don’t actually grow while you’re doing squats or lunges. During your workout your muscles get micro tears in them. The growth (and healing) process begins after your workout which means this is time when your muscles get stronger. You could experience muscles soreness during the growth process since your body is actually healing from a micro injury. Soreness can also be caused by not enough lactic acid moving through your muscles efficiently. This can be mitigated with low level intensity movement such as a leisurely bike ride or walk.
When you do intense workouts too often you don’t give your muscles time to heal properly. It’s like when you have a scrape on your knee and you keep picking at the scab, you’re not giving your skin the opportunity to do it’s thing and create new, healthy skin.
Weight Loss Plateau
When you notice the number on the scale isn’t going down, it could be a number of different variables. I talk more about one of the variables with weight loss plateaus in another article here. When I meet women who tell me they workout for 1-2 hours every day and can’t lose weight the first thing that pops into my head is that they might be overtraining. Of course, this depends on the type of workout they’re doing but this is a red flag for me.
When you do a HIIT workout 5-7 days a week, spend 30 minutes lifting weights and then go for a run or do a spin class for an hour you’re probably overwhelming your nervous system. Think about your nervous system like the boss lady. It has different systems that control your hormones and tells it what to do depending on how you eat, exercise, and rest. If you’re exercising too much and not getting enough rest, it will tell your stress hormones to kick into high gear along with your hunger hormones to make sure you’re eating enough calories. You’ll most likely be craving starchy carbs because your blood sugar levels are going up and down too often. I’ll dive more into this later.
Unable to Sleep
In my opinion, sleep is the ultimate recovery method. This is when your body kicks into high gear and calls in reinforcements to repair your muscles, tissue, and nervous system from the physical stressors (i.e. workouts) of the day. When you can’t actually fall asleep to get enough sleep, your body can’t do it’s thing.
Sleeplessness from overtraining can be caused by intense muscle soreness, high cortisol levels, high blood sugar (or insulin), or all of the above. The most effective exercise routine is designed to give consistent energy levels throughout the day and help you fall into a deep and restful sleep at night. If you’re feeling fatigue during the day yet unable to fall asleep when it’s time hit the hay, something is off balance and not normal.
Increased Sugar Cravings
The combination of not getting enough sleep and your cortisol levels increasing can be the catalyst for your sugar cravings. Even if you don’t necessarily crave sweet treats, this can make you want to eat more bread, rice, potatoes, pasta, and all the other yummy carby foods. When you give into your cravings and eat that bowl of pasta with garlic bread (my go-to dinner back in the day!), it throws off your blood sugar which then causes your body to produce more insulin. This causes chaos in your body and can lead to weight gain or at least stalled weight loss.
Giving into your sugar cravings can also intensify PMS, PCOS symptoms, and pain due to endometriosis. If you’ve been diagnosed with PCOS or endometriosis, creating an exercise routine that weaves in adequate rest has been known ease symptoms so you can go about your daily life with less interruptions. You can go here to check another article I wrote about PMS relief.
What’s the solution?
While it might take time and a few brainstorming sessions, you can find a solution to your over training routine that works for you. Often times my solution for overtraining comes to me by default, meaning sometimes life gets in the way of my training schedule and I need to prioritize something else that’s come up unexpectedly. Other times I schedule it into my workout routine. For example, if we go on a two hour hike carrying backpacks on a Saturday, I’ll plan on Sunday being a rest day where I do chores, go grocery shopping, or browse REI for two hours (yes, we’ve been known to spend two hours in REI).
This is where working with a health and fitness coach can be super helpful. When you talk through something with a person (specifically one who’s an expert in habit creation) who can give you an outsider’s perspective to see your situation from a different angle. This is often when you’re going to find the solution that works for you. Your body is made up of complex systems that knows exactly what to do to keep you alive to survive or alive to thrive. You just need to tune into your body and learn how to listen to it.