Signs You’re Overtraining (And What To Do About It)

Did you know that you don’t have to be an elite athlete to overtrain? Most women have 1,000 things on their plate in addition to training—jobs, kids, houses to clean.

Which means you’re probably not recovering that well. And unless you have a training plan or coach, there’s also a very good chance that you’re going too hard on your rides and not planning in enough recovery days.

We’re particularly prone to overtraining when ramping up for a big goal without an adequate base.  Going from zero to one hundred can burn you up quickly.  

We’re also more susceptible to overtraining when we have a lot of life stress off the bike. Your body doesn’t distinguish between training stress and life stress.

So if you’re dealing with a new job, going thru a divorce or breakup, experiencing financial stress–any of these types of situations can push you toward overtraining if you haven’t backed off the volume or intensity of your training to help compensate.

There are three categories of red flags that you might be overtraining: these include physical, performance, and mental or emotional signs.  Notice that I said “may be overtraining.”  Individually, many of these issues could be caused by something else, such as not eating enough or other underlying health issues.  But if you have enough of these red flags, and you’ve been training hard or had a lot of stress on your plate, there’s a good chance you’re overtrained. 

Age can also contribute to overtraining.  As we get older, we need additional recovery time, so if you’re doing the same training you were doing 10 or 15 years ago, you’re putting yourself at greater risk of overtraining. 

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Physical Signs Of Overtraining

Physical signs include:

• Persistent fatigue (waking up exhausted even after a full night’s sleep)
• An elevated waking heart rate
• Sleep issues (tossing and turning all night, just not sleeping well)
• Frequent illness (catching every little cold that’s going around)
• Weight gain or weight loss
• Changes in appetite
• Changes in your menstrual cycle

The bottom line here is that you’re just not feeling your best.

Performance Red Flags

In additional to physical issues, you’ll notice decreased performance on the bike.  This might look like:

• Decreased power output
• Trouble hitting your heart rate zones during interval workouts
• Slower times on frequently ridden segments
• Perceived exertion feels higher than your power or heart rate would suggest

Any signs that you’re going backward in terms of performance is usually a sign of overtraining.

Emotional And Mental Signs

And then the third category are mental or emotional signs:

• Irritability
• Feeling depressed or anxious (especially if that’s not something you usually deal with)
• Lack of motivation, feeling unenthusiastic about riding your bike
• Obsessing over missed workouts or feeling guilty when you need rest

If you’re overtrained, you’ll usually see signs in each of these three areas.

Recovering From Being Overtrained

So what do you do if you think you are overtrained?  Step one, is to back way off and get some rest. Take a week totally off the bike, or stick to zone 1 recovery rides. 

When you do feel like riding again, go back at 50% of your usual volume.  So if you usually ride 10 hours a week, cut it back to 5.

As you feel better, the more you can start gradually adding in again.  If you caught things early, you might recover pretty quickly.  If you’ve been digging yourself into a hole for a long time, it’s going to take significant time and recovery to climb back out of that hole.  

How To Avoid Overtraining

To avoid overtraining in the future, there are several important things you can do.

The first is if you’re training for something big, make sure you have a solid base and start ramping up training gradually rather than going from zero to 100 overnight.  This is particularly important for folks who are newer to training.

Secondly, intentionally schedule rest into your schedule.  I did a recent podcast episode on rest and how to do this so make sure to go back and listen to that one if you didn’t already. But the cliff’s notes version is that you need to incorporate periods of rest into your individual workouts, you need rest days every week, you need a rest week every month or so of training, and you need a longer period of rest (an offseason) once a year.

You also need to prioritize recovery.  The most important things you can do there is to get plenty sleep (8 hours or MORE), and to fuel your body adequately.  If you’re not getting enough sleep or enough food, you’re not going to be able to handle hard training.  

Finally, if you’re training hard, make sure you’re working with a coach.  This might be in the form of a training plan or 1:1 coaching, but the idea is that you have someone creating a plan for you that incorporates adequate REST. 

A coach provides accountability in that regard.  Most of us are pretty good at pushing ourselves to train. What we’re terrible at is giving ourselves permission to rest.

If you have a coach who is reviewing your training data, they will often be the first to notice the early signs of overtraining.  It’s easy as an athlete to ignore the signs and just keep pushing through, but a coach will notice if your power is declining or if you’re not able to complete your workouts as planned.  

And if you think you’ve been overtraining and you don’t have a coach, it’s not too late to get one.  A good coach can help you climb back out of that hole you’ve dug.  You can learn more about working with me as a coach OR you can find a coach at usacycling.com if you’re in the U.S. or your own country’s coach licensing body if you live elsewhere.  

My final reminder on the topic of overtraining is one that I talk about a lot.  And that’s tracking what is going on with your body and how you are feeling. 

I’m a big fan of journaling about just about everything–how your workouts feel, what you’re eating, where you are in your menstrual cycle.  When you do this, you learn to know what’s going on with your body and you can recognize when things are off and address them before they become a bigger problem.  

If you want my free downloadable, printable daily journaling sheet I use with my clients and that I use myself, you can grab it below.

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