Are you overtraining? 4 signs to look out for

Overtraining. We all want to push ourselves, achieve more and make sure we’re maximising the time we have to reach our goals. We’re all guilty of biting off more than we can chew from time to time, but it’s important to understand how overtraining can actually detract from our body composition goals.

What is overtraining?

It looks different for everyone, making it extremely difficult to define. Essentially overtraining is the decline in performance in the gym as a result of failure to tolerate or adapt to the training load, hence the individual exceeds their capacity to exercise.

It’s important to look out for the following signs: 

• Struggling to progress with reps or weight- if you’re struggling to hit your rep count in your program consecutively each week or struggling to increase the weight to create progressive overload, you may be overtraining. If you’re also feeling weak or that you can’t hit the right technique with each movement this is a key sign too. 
• Struggling to recover in between sessions- If it’s taking you longer than two days to recover and you’re still feeling sore days after a session.
• Feeling watery or feeling like you’re not making physical progress- this goes for any goal whether that be if you’re trying to build muscle or lose weight. Alternatively, you might be seeing increases on the scale and feeling watery as your body is unable to recover from the inflammation caused from training.
• Feeling sleepy and sick-  If you're feeling fatigued and tired all the time no matter how much you sleep, you’re overtraining and putting too much stress on the body. You’ll also find that our immunity decreases when we overtrain, making us feel run down and we can increase our risk of infection and might even get a head cold or flu like symptoms. 

Do any of these sound like you? If so, be sure to tune into my blog post next week where I’ll give you 6 ways to handle overtraining and a lack of results!

Soph xx