How To Recover From Overtraining
In yesterday post we discussed the signs of overtraining that you may begin to see as time passes on. Recognizing these signs in yourself is going to be important since it will help you prevent overtraining before it even begins.
Unfortunately though, if you didn’t make note of these and kept on training, you’re now likely dealing with full blown overtraining.
So now what do you do?
Overtraining can be a long process to recover from, but it will depend on how you approach it. If you are serious about wanting to get better, you will do everything you can to speed up the process, regardless of what your mind may be telling you.
Here is how to recover from overtraining.
Rest
The very first and absolutely most essential thing that needs to happen is rest. By rest, that means no workout sessions, no cardio sessions, no other types of ‘unplanned’ activity – basically, avoid doing anything more intense than walking around your house, work, or school.
If you have a job that requires you to be active (such as an electrician for example), then it will be slightly more difficult since obviously you cannot stop work, but just be sure whenever you can rest, you do.
Also make sure you’re making the effort to get at minimum 8 hours of sleep a night. 9 would be better to just give your body that much extra time to heal itself. This is not the time to start overcrowding your schedule, taking on more than you can handle.
Proper Nutrition, Including Increased Carbohydrate Intake
Next, you also want to make sure your nutrition is where it needs to be. If you’ve been on a diet, bring your calories up to maintenance. Those who are diets, especially low carb diets, are much more prone to overtraining due to the lack of readily usable fuel coming in.
If you don’t come off the diet, this will significantly hinder your recovering from overtraining – in fact, you may not recover at all. Many people are scared to do both of these – rest and come off the diet – for fear they are going to gain body fat. But, you need to ask yourself. Eventually if you keep going you aren’t going to be train at all, and then it will be really hard to lose body fat.
Plus, when you’re severely overtrained and if coupled with a metabolic slow-down, your body isn’t going to be responding all that well to losing fat anyway, therefore you’re not really doing much benefit anyway by continually trying to push through.
Monitoring Of Stress Levels
Stress, even stress that’s non-exercise related, is also another major contributor to overtraining syndrome. I would highly recommend you also start taking some steps in your life to reduce your stress levels since this will just make the situation that much better.
When someone is verging being overtrained and then they start adding outside stress to their life, that is what could actually push them over the edge and leave them full blown overtrained.
By keeping stress levels down all the time, you create less that your body has to recover from, therefore less chances that overtraining happens in the first place.
Re-Evaluating The Workout Program
Finally, the last thing that also must happen as you are recovering from overtraining is re-evaluating your program. Obviously there is something wrong there – either not enough rest, too much volume, or something else at play that needs to be changed or you’re just going to keep ending up overtrained.
Note that this could be nutritional too again. Perhaps the amount of volume in the workout would be okay given more food, particularly carbs. It’s a trade-off when it comes to exercise and diet. The more food coming in, the more exercise the body can sustain.
But, and this is a big but, there does come a limit where it’s just too much exercise. You will have some people saying that you can avoid overtraining completely by just eating more, but I personally believe this not to be the case.
There will come a time when too much exercise will just be too much exercise regardless of what you’re doing diet-wise.
So, be sure to keep all these points in mind. Overtraining is a very unfortunate situation to be in but you can reduce the recovery time from months to weeks if you do follow all of these steps.
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