Overtraining is a negative state of the body that occurs as a result of too intense and exhausting training loads, when the body's recovery abilities are not able to cope with the number and volume of training. Overtraining causes a state of chronic fatigue and a halt in progress, a decrease in strength indicators and further growth of muscle mass. We will talk about what overtraining is, whether there are ways to avoid “overtraining” and what is the prevention of this phenomenon in this article.

Overtraining can be encountered in almost any sport, but it is one of the most common problems in bodybuilding and fitness. The main and main reason for overtraining is an excessive desire to achieve quick results. An imbalance between physical activity and the body's capabilities, training and recovery, usually arises from insufficient rest time between workouts. Each new trip to the gym, when the body and muscles do not have time to recover to the original level (not to mention supercompensation), depletes the body's reserves more and more.

The state of overtraining often occurs among beginners who subject their unprepared body to serious stress. Not paying attention to this condition, they continue training in the given mode, exposing the body to even greater stress. This increases the risk of getting it and can lead to contraindications to further sports for a long time.

The majority of newcomers to the gym are inclined to believe that the more an athlete “works all out” in training, the greater the results will be, but this is an absolute misconception. Just like any medicine, sport can both treat and cause disorders, the only question is the dose. Strength sports require a special approach, which must be harmoniously combined with human physiology.

Experienced athletes clearly understand the regenerative abilities of their body thanks to their experience, and in addition to this, they also use all sorts of ways to increase them (changing training programs, and special supplements, and much more). Beginners, due to lack of experience, have no idea how the body should respond to power loads, and, even if they don’t feel very well, they continue to train intensively, considering poor health to be a process of adaptation of the body.

Symptoms of Overtraining

• Lack of training progress or regression
• Fatigue and loss of strength
• Depression, irritability and loss of motivation
• Tachycardia
• Decreased appetite
• Constant muscle pain
• Weakened immunity (symptoms of infectious diseases)
• No pumping during training

Very often, athletes do not experience any of the above symptoms of overtraining, although they do exist (the so-called asymptomatic overtraining). In this case, the athlete is in a state of training plateau, the results do not improve or worsen. If you are experiencing signs of overtraining, you must immediately take immediate action to prevent this condition. You should be skeptical about the listed symptoms, since signs of overtraining can easily be confused with a large number of other pathological conditions, so only a doctor can make an accurate diagnosis.

Diagnosis of overtraining

Accurately diagnosing overtraining syndrome is not easy. At the moment, there is no medical method, so it is possible to understand what is happening to you only by indirect signs. Be sure to consult a physician to rule out the possibility of serious illness.

You can make the first diagnosis yourself by measuring your resting pulse. This should be done in the morning, after waking up naturally, before you get up and drink your morning cup of coffee. The normal contraction frequency is from 68 to 72 beats per minute. If your pulse is rapid or, conversely, slow, you have cause for concern.

Treating Overtraining

Fortunately, overtraining is easy to treat. You don’t have to give up fitness and going to the gym forever. First of all, give your body the opportunity to recover: cancel your usual workouts for a week or two, replace them with walks and muscle stretching exercises.

Reconsider your nutrition concept: bring your caloric intake to normal, eat more fruits and vegetables (about 5-8 servings per day), take complex vitamins and minerals. Foods high in vitamin C are especially beneficial. As soon as you make your diet balanced, you will immediately improve.

Preventing Overtraining

Learn to listen to your body and the alarming signals it gives you. It is likely that the reluctance to do the last exercise or run an extra kilometer does not indicate your laziness, but the extreme fatigue of your body. Nobody argues - in order to achieve maximum results, you need to constantly increase the intensity of your training loads. But working too hard means harming yourself.

The golden rule of bodybuilding is: “It is better to undertrain than to overtrain.” This does not mean that you can slack on your workouts or constantly skip classes at the gym without good reason. A surefire way to avoid overtraining is to take short breaks from your training schedule. 4 - 6 weeks of training are followed by 1 week of rest - this scheme allows, in most cases, not to overtrain and gives the body the opportunity to heal minor injuries to muscles and ligaments, which will prevent the development of a serious injury.

The main secret of an ideal body is time. The first visible results come after a couple of months of strength training, but, unfortunately, you will not get a truly perfect body before 2-3 years of constant training. You can’t rush “burning” fat or growing muscle mass. In strength sports, like nowhere else, the main female virtue is valued - patience.

There is probably not a single person actively involved in sports who has not encountered overtraining syndrome. Beginners are especially susceptible to this. Some athletes do not attach importance to this condition, continuing training in the given mode, exposing the body to even greater stress. This increases the risk of getting a bunch of health problems, which can lead to contraindications to further exercise for a long time or forever.

Overtraining is a physiological reaction of the body to heavy physical activity that exceeds the body's adaptive level. Of course, progress in sports is unthinkable without a planned increase in the volume and intensity of training. This prevents the body from adapting to the stress and allows it to progress. But progress must be based on competent training programs that provide for a gradual increase in sports performance.

The nature of the syndrome is that as a result of intense training, the body does not have time to adapt, which leads to microtrauma in the muscles and increased stress on the heart and central nervous system.

Overtraining syndrome can occur for a number of reasons:

• intense training after a long break, especially after illness;
• a sharp increase in training load, significantly exceeding the usual volume;
• training too often and not recovering enough between workouts;
• insufficiently balanced diet low in protein;
• training during illness;
• presence of sources of stress in everyday life.

The consequences of the syndrome can affect the state of the human nervous system, cause cardiovascular diseases and other unpleasant consequences.

How to Recognize Overtraining Conditions

Very often, overtraining can be confused with ordinary fatigue or even the onset of an infectious disease. However, it is quite easy to distinguish overtraining. Let's look at the main symptoms that indicate that the load received during training was higher than permissible:

• worsening sleep or even the occurrence of insomnia, especially the night after intense training;
• decreased appetite;
• irregular heart rhythm and increased heart rate at rest;
• lack of desire to go to the gym and loss of motivation to workout;
• aching muscle pain and a feeling of body aches, sometimes even a rise in temperature may occur;
• the occurrence of depression or nervous breakdowns;
• decreased immunity;
• decreased athletic performance.

The manifestation of three of the above symptoms with a 90% probability may indicate that you have exceeded the level acceptable for the body and are in a state of overtraining.

Rehabilitation for overtraining

The very first thing to do is stop training for a while. The duration of rehabilitation depends on the degree of overtraining. If you detect the symptoms in a timely manner and draw the appropriate conclusions, then a few days to a week may be sufficient. In more severe cases, you may need to abstain from exercise for 2-3 weeks.

Once you have identified signs of the syndrome and decided to stop training, carefully analyze your diet. It is necessary to adjust it in favor of protein foods, but you should not forget about the other elements either. It is also necessary to add to your diet, if you do not take multivitamin complexes, vitamins C and group B. You also need to drink more plain water.

On the first day after a hard workout that caused you to overtrain, it would be a good idea to take a hot bath.

A good effect is achieved by a massage, which will allow you to stretch your muscles and improve blood flow, and during the rehabilitation period, muscle stretching exercises are highly recommended.

A number of herbal-based drugs, such as ginseng tincture or Eleutherococcus extract, help well in recovery. It is better to take them in the first half of the day.

In severe cases, especially with pain in the heart area and fever, it is better not to delay, but to consult a doctor.

After recovering from overtraining, you need to reduce the training load for 1-2 weeks, this will help your body smoothly get back into work.

How to prevent overload of the body during training

In order to avoid overtraining, you need to learn to listen to your body and wisely plan your training and rest regime. For beginner athletes, this is quite difficult, since they cannot yet understand from the first signs how heavy the load is in each specific workout. This comes with experience and regular training. Ideally, you should start playing sports under the guidance of an experienced trainer who will help you create a program that is optimal for your level of physical condition.

So, in order to avoid overtraining you need to:

1. If you are still a beginner, then you should not torture yourself with daily training. 2-3 workouts per week are enough. Later, as you adapt to the load, you can determine whether it is necessary to increase the number of training days or whether it is better to increase the intensity of each workout.
2. Sleep for at least 8-9 hours, and at high loads, even 10. This will allow your body to fully recover.
3. Eat well, control your protein and carbohydrate content, as well as your calorie intake. It is not easy for an athlete to get the required level of vitamins, micro and macroelements from food, so it is worth looking into multivitamin complexes. Also, in case of increased loads, it makes sense to use sports nutritional supplements such as amino acids and protein.
4. Drink more water.
5. Don't neglect warm-up and cool-down. During your cool-down, be sure to do stretching exercises for the muscles that were used during your workout.
6. There is no need to train for more than 1.5 hours if you are not a professional athlete.
7. Adjust your training program periodically to avoid stagnation. As a rule, athletes, faced with a halt in progress in results, begin to force things and, as a result, overtraining syndrome.

Most recreational athletes fail to recognize the early signs of overtraining.

True, recognizing the symptoms is half the battle; you need to know and understand how to respond to them, and without delay.

Athletes are strong-willed people who are accustomed to overcoming difficulties. This is a great trait until it comes to overtraining. A strong character can bring you considerable harm. The will should not drown out the arguments of your reason. You cannot train with all your strength and thoughtlessly deplete the body’s resources necessary for its restoration.

What is meant by a state of overtraining?

Overexertion syndrome (as overtraining is correctly called) is a complex of physiological and psychological responses to excessive stress during sports activities. Most often, this condition occurs when there is insufficient time to recuperate or during preparation for and participation in major tournaments.

This condition can also be triggered by emotional stress, frequent travel, poor nutrition and sleep. Progress stops, performance decreases, and a decrease in muscle mass or volume may be observed.

Overexertion occurs if you continue training without paying attention to fatigue, or start training without having time to recover from an illness. This condition often appears with a lack of calories and vitamins, with a predominance of carbohydrate foods in the diet.

Infectious diseases quickly join the state of overtraining and all kinds of injuries become more frequent, because:

• the immune system ceases to function properly during exhausting training;
• muscle elasticity decreases, ligaments become less elastic;
• coordination is impaired due to activation of antagonist muscles;
• attention decreases, which provokes frequent injuries.

Known Causes of Overtraining

Signs of this condition are often observed:

• for beginners who do not spare their own body, subjecting it to high stress,
• among professional athletes who are faced with a decrease in results and want to improve the situation by increasing the load.

A thoughtless zeal for high performance and records forces you to give your best in training, but this turns out to be a cruel mistake. It turns out that sports training, depending on the dosage, can either heal or disrupt human physiology.

Recently, researchers have proven an interesting fact that overtraining occurs due to addiction to sports:

1. During and after exercise, endorphins are released into the blood, causing a state of joy and euphoria.
2. Many people note an emotional uplift after classes, and in the absence of training they talk about a decline in mood and strength, and the condition resembles drug withdrawal.
3. Trying to go to the gym as often as possible, a person brings himself to a state of overtraining.

Symptoms of Overtraining

At first, signs of fatigue from training are almost invisible; a person does not pay attention to the body’s signals that it is time to rest. Because the body is overloaded, there is no strength to complete the workout: apathy sets in, appetite disappears or increases excessively, and thoughts about exercise machines and treadmills only cause anger and irritation.

Every aspiring athlete or sports professional should be able to easily identify the signs of overtraining. These include:

• loss of strength and fatigue,
• noticeable regression or lack of progress in training,
• loss of motivation
• irritability, depression,
• sudden change in appetite,
• reduction of the body's defenses,
• persistent muscle pain,
• tachycardia.

You can more accurately determine overtraining using your pulse. If your heart rate in the morning differs from normal by 8-10 beats per minute or more, this may well mean that you are overtired in training. This means it's time to reduce stress and recover.

The problem of overtraining can be observed by various signs that relate to different areas of the body.

During the recovery period, which takes from a day to several weeks, an increase in results usually occurs. It takes a month for muscle tissue to fully recover after an intense workout.

If the condition is mild, the athlete should stop training for several days or reduce the intensity of training until physical strength is fully restored.

In severe overtraining conditions, there is a steady progression of symptoms. Recovery takes several months.

Physiology of the overtraining state:

• Muscles do not have time to recover from microtraumas common during training.
• There is a lack of proteins and amino acids in the body.
• When there is a nutritional deficiency during fasting, muscle tissue is destroyed.
• Joints hurt.
• Cortisol levels increase during stress, insufficient recovery and illness.
• Fatigue becomes chronic.
• Sleep and digestion are disturbed and headaches occur.
• The time for wound healing and recovery of the body after illness increases.
• Immune reactions worsen.

Psychological component:

• Lack of resistance during emotional stress.
• Decreased self-esteem and self-confidence.
• Apathy and depression.
• Decreased concentration.
• Overload and complete exhaustion of the central nervous system.

Biochemical processes in a state of overtraining:

• decrease in testosterone in blood serum,
• increased levels of cortisol and globulin, which affects sex hormones,
• decrease in glycogen in muscle tissue,
• dysfunction of the hypothalamus,
• decreased iron levels in the blood.

How to treat overtraining?

Treatment is a last resort; it is better to prevent the development of a state of overfatigue from sports training. This way you can achieve much better results in less time.

The main recovery measure is physical rest. In this case it is necessary:

• stop training for a few days,
• after rest, reduce the volume of training,
• sleep ten hours a day and no less,
• eat well,
• apply sports massage and other restorative procedures.

Early detection of symptoms will reduce the time to full recovery.

During the rehabilitation period, it is necessary to exclude long and intense activities and exercises aimed at training endurance. You need to start classes with exercises of the usual general physical fitness complex. When your general condition improves, you can return to your usual volume.

Prevention

An athlete does not need to bring himself to a state of overfatigue; it is better to warn him in time. Treatment and symptoms are unpleasant, and recovery can take a long period, during which the muscles lose tone.

Prevention is similar to treating overtraining. To avoid falling into a state of apathy from overwork, you need to follow simple recommendations:

• get enough sleep
• eat well,
• recover from emotional stress,
• adjust the schedule and optimal frequency of training,
• harden.

To avoid the unpleasant state of overtraining, it is necessary to closely monitor the athlete’s condition so as not to miss the appearance of its first signs. It is useful to keep records of your workouts, recording how you feel before and after each session, changes in weight and appetite, duration and quality of sleep.

Overtraining and recovery

Intensity is a measure of how hard you force your muscles to work. The more work you do in a given period of time, the more intense you train. However, the harder you work, the longer the recovery period your body requires to rest and grow.
Overtraining occurs when you train your muscles too intensely, without giving them the opportunity to fully recover. Sometimes you can hear from athletes that they “tear” their muscles and then let them recover. But such an approach is not entirely justified from a physiological point of view. During a hard workout, minor tissue damage can occur and this is what accounts for residual muscle pain. However, pain is only a side effect, indicating that the muscles need time to recover from the stress they have endured.
Tense muscle contractions are accompanied by a number of complex biochemical processes. The process of using energy in working muscles leads to the accumulation of toxic waste byproducts such as lactic acid. The fuel for energy release is glycogen accumulated in the muscles.
The body needs time to restore the chemical balance of muscle cells, remove residual breakdown products and replenish depleted glycogen stores. But there is another, even more important factor: time is necessary for cells to adapt to the stimulating effects of exercise and grow. Therefore, if you overload your muscles by forcing them to work too hard and without enough rest from the previous workout, you will not give them the opportunity to grow and your progress will slow down.

• Different muscles recover at different rates after exercise. Biceps, for example, do this faster than others.
• The muscles in the lower back are the slowest to recover. It takes approximately one hundred hours to completely rest after a hard workout.
• However, in most cases, forty-eight hours of rest is sufficient for any part of the body, which means that there should be a break of at least two days between training the same muscles.

The initial stage of preparation should take place only at a medium level of intensity, so less recovery time is required here. But in subsequent stages of training, in order to overcome the growing resistance of muscles to change and growth, the intensity level must be increased. We should not forget about another important factor - Trained muscles recover faster after fatigue than untrained muscles. Therefore, the more results you achieve in bodybuilding, the faster you will restore your strength and the richer your training program will become.

Athletic exercise(except for very specific exercises with limited range of motion) should be performed in such a way that each muscle moves with maximum amplitude. Any part of the body must be fully straightened and then bent until the muscles contract completely. This is the only way to affect the entire muscle as a whole and individual muscle fibers.

Overtraining syndrome

Fitness is a medicine that heals not only the body, but also the spirit. However, like any medicine, if the dose is exceeded, it turns into poison. Excessive physical activity has a destructive effect. First, training begins to lose effectiveness, then it takes more and more time for the body to recover, and finally, health problems begin.

The opinion that overtraining only affects professional athletes is fundamentally wrong. They are the ones who train under the close attention of professional trainers and their load dosing is correctly distributed. Unlike those who, in their ardent desire to lose 5-10 extra pounds, do not notice the approaching disaster. And you just need to learn to listen to your body. Perhaps the reluctance to jog or take another approach to performing the exercise does not indicate laziness, but fatigue. Undoubtedly, improving your figure is impossible without increasing the intensity of your training, but working too hard is harmful to yourself.

Time is a necessary condition on the path to a beautiful body. After just a few months of training, the first visible results will come. But only after 2.5 - 3 years can you come to a perfect body. There is no way to speed up the process of fat burning or muscle growth, so patience is the best thing that can come in handy in this case.

I am my own diagnostician.

You can carry out the initial diagnosis yourself. To do this, in the morning, at rest, after waking up naturally and before drinking your first cup of coffee, you need to measure your pulse. For women, the normal heart rate ranges from 68 to 72 beats per minute. A slow or rapid heart rate should be a sign of concern.

The symptoms of overtraining are subtle at first. It may take several months before the feeling comes that something is wrong with the body. Decreased training efficiency, emotional depression, poor physical condition, and sleep disturbances are often attributed to stress occurring at work or at home. It is quite possible that this is the case, but you should not ignore the duration of the unpleasant sensations. If the unpleasant situation is far behind you, and the symptoms do not go away, then it may still be overtraining syndrome. So, listen to yourself and answer the following questions:

Are you having trouble waking up in the morning?
Do you sleep 12-14 hours a day, but still feel sleepy all the time?
Have you suddenly developed insomnia?
Do you wake up before dawn and try to fall back to sleep to no avail?
After sleep, do you feel tired and tired, even though you went to bed on time and slept enough?

Even one positive answer indicates a violation of the usual sleep pattern.

Can't cope with your sudden irritability?
Have you started having regular attacks of anger?
Have you become constantly nervous?
Are you in a constantly bad mood lately?
Have you started crying often?

Even one positive answer indicates the presence of psycho-emotional disorders.

Has it become difficult for you to master your usual training program?
Do you feel like your usual weights are starting to weigh more?
Have you found yourself recovering longer after training?
After training, you begin to experience muscle pain and aching joints

Positive answers to questions from this group indicate a diminishing return on training.
Have you started getting colds more often, like acute respiratory infections or herpes?
Is recovery taking longer than before?

Positive answers to questions in this group indicate a decrease in immunity.

If you see symptoms from each group at the same time, then measures should be taken immediately, otherwise everything will become much more serious. Unbridled training combined with a constant diet can lead to hormonal imbalance. And these are: skin problems, menstrual irregularities, thinning of bone tissue.

Prevention can be a diet of normal calorie content, consumption of sufficient quantities of vegetables and fruits, and intake of complex vitamins and minerals.

Causal relationship.

What can cause overtraining? In short: violence against one's own body. In more detail, a number of reasons can be identified:

Reason one– excessive physical activity. Physical activity is stressful for the body, but there is nothing bad about it. It is impossible to change yourself for the better unless you shake up your muscles or cardiovascular system. But any stress beyond measure destroys the psyche and worsens physical condition. Stress accumulates if you constantly exhaust your body with training without giving it enough time to rest.

Reason two- poor nutrition. The most important factor in determining overtraining syndrome is calorie deficit. In order to recover from stress, muscles need amino acids, sugar, vitamins, etc. By depriving yourself of most calories in order to lose weight, you are also depriving yourself of nutrients, which in turn significantly reduces the body’s ability to recover after training. This is a double blow for the body.

Reason three- excellent student syndrome. Excellent student syndrome is the desire to do everything better than others, to do absolutely everything with an A plus, spending a minimum of time on what other people spend many years on. “Excellent students” place their desire to be better than others above all else. They themselves ruin their health with this approach.

And finally, overtraining syndrome can strike those who forget that fitness is a science, neglecting the rules of which can lead to disastrous results.

Basic methods of treatment and prevention.

Overtraining syndrome, fortunately, is easily treatable and you won’t have to give up fitness forever.

First, you need to give your body a break: cancel standard workouts for a few weeks and replace them with walking, yoga or stretching.

Secondly, it is necessary to reconsider the principles of nutrition: the calorie content of the diet should be brought to normal, the consumption of vegetables and fruits should be increased to 5-8 servings per day, and you can additionally take a complex of vitamins and minerals. Foods containing large amounts of vitamin C are also beneficial. A balanced diet will immediately show its positive effects.

However, it is still not worth leading to overtraining syndrome. Following basic preventive measures is not difficult at all.

• Don't get stuck on the same program over and over again. after all, the same exercises affect only a few muscles, which leads to stress. Avoid monotony: exercise outdoors, play tennis, practice extreme hobbies such as rock climbing.
• keep a training diary, where you will record all your approaches and repetitions, the order of exercises and your body’s reaction to them. This will help to identify in time not only delays in growth dynamics, but also overtraining syndrome.
• do not hurry . Remember the 10% rule, according to which the increase in load should not exceed 10% per week. For example, when running a 5 km, the weekly increase should not exceed 500 m.
• drink more water, because even the slightest drop in hydration levels has a very significant impact on the general condition of the body. If your workouts take more than 60 minutes, you can drink sports drinks; if less, you can drink plain still water or diluted fruit juice.
• don't starve! A hungry body cannot be healthy. In addition, the diet must be balanced and contain proteins, fats and carbohydrates in appropriate proportions.

Of the total calorie intake, 50% should come from carbohydrates, 35% from proteins and 15% from fats.

Recovery time

Recovery time

Since muscles are able to recover faster after non-traumatic training than after traumatic training, the recovery time should also be different. Therefore, you should give your muscles more rest after an traumatic workout.

In most gyms, bodybuilders train, for example, chest on Monday, no matter what. Whether she recovered from her last workout or not, if today is Monday, that means it’s chest workout day. This is mistake. The recovery time for each muscle should be determined by how quickly it recovers. As I have already noted, if you do not allow the anabolic response to training to fully occur until the next workout, you will lose all the positive effects of training on protein metabolism and will end up with the opposite negative effect - increased catabolism.
Your recovery options are limited.
To make matters worse, the human body's healing abilities are limited. Let's imagine that they are measured in dollars. Let's say you have ten dollars a week in your recovery fund. Non-traumatic arm training costs one dollar, and traumatic one costs two. Non-traumatic leg training costs two dollars, traumatic - four. Non-traumatic training for the chest, back and shoulders costs one dollar each, and traumatic training costs three. If you train each body part in a trauma style for a week, you will need about $15, i.e. much more than your budget allows ($10). However, by alternating between traumatic and non-traumatic training, you can reduce the cost of recovery. Doing a non-traumatic leg workout instead of a traumatic one will save you two dollars. By doing the same with your chest and arm muscles, you'll save another three dollars. Reducing the amount of injury your muscles sustain over the course of a week will allow you to recover more easily. Therefore, if you want to increase the frequency of training one part of the body, you should either reduce the degree of injury from training other parts of the body, or train them less often.
Let's imagine that your arms are lagging behind in development, and you want to tighten them up by increasing the volume of load. If you were only working them, you could do it with injury training five days a week. (Please don't try this; I'm just giving a theoretical example.) If you alternated between two traumatic workouts and two non-traumatic ones, you could train your arms every day. What if you want to have bigger legs? In order to include one traumatic arm workout in the program, you must sacrifice two traumatic arm workouts. Every time you increase the frequency or intensity of your workouts, you slow down the recovery of other parts of your body. While it's true that tightening up a lagging muscle group requires training it more often, many bodybuilders fail if they don't realize that additional work on that group requires some sacrifice.

Even most symmetrically developed bodybuilders have muscle groups that respond better to training. The lag in the development of some parts of the body is due to not very efficient protein metabolism in them. In such muscles, training causes a relatively low anabolic drive and at the same time a rather strong catabolic response. The only way to improve the situation is to increase anabolism in them, while simultaneously reducing the level of catabolism. Most people aren't very good at this. Ask the last two Mr. Olympias why they couldn't get their biceps to match the rest of their muscle groups. Only a radical approach can reduce the imbalance.

How can you speed up muscle recovery?
Training can be an effective way to trigger muscle growth if you give it enough time to rest. The more traumatic the training, the more time it takes. Strong parts of the body usually recover faster than weak ones, which seem to take forever. This distinction has important implications for bodybuilders. This means that you must tailor your recovery time to each muscle group. Obviously, you should not overload a muscle that has not yet fully recovered, otherwise local overtraining will occur. Such a simple statement is completely contrary to what we see in most gyms. Many bodybuilders go three to seven days between training the same muscles. This interval is set in advance and is the same for all muscle groups. Since they decided to work out a muscle once every three days, that means they will have two workouts a week, and individual recovery time is not taken into account. The fact is that lagging parts of the body need more time to rest than strong ones. As noted in previous parts of this article, the degree of injury caused by the training is also an important factor to take into account when determining the amount of rest needed.
The main problem with conventional training schedules is that you load the strong parts of the body more than the weak ones, resulting in unbalanced development. The imbalance is further exacerbated when you re-use a muscle that has not yet fully recovered. This prevents the growth of weak muscle groups, leading to their overtraining. By training them less often, you will allow them to recover and grow a little. Of course, it would be even better to train them more often if you could find a way to speed up recovery. A rest day is the best accelerator of anabolism. The first muscle reaction to training is very negative - increased catabolism and slower anabolism. Your body tries to combat this by increasing anabolism and slowing down catabolism. His best assistant in this battle is a day of complete rest, on which you do not subject your body to any catabolic stress. This significantly reduces the catabolic drive. And since you avoid the training-induced slowdown in anabolism, protein synthesis increases significantly. During rest, the level of anabolism is high and catabolism is low, which creates a very favorable environment for rapid recovery and muscle growth. Unfortunately, this metabolic trick cannot be repeated twice. After 24 hours, the anabolic response subsides, and the ratio of levels of fiber synthesis and breakdown again leans in favor of the latter. This is why people who don't exercise regularly don't grow. The body responds positively to a rest day only if you challenge its recovery capabilities with regular training.

Overtraining and Progress

According to statistics, the main reason that more than half of fitness club clients stop their exercise is the lack of results. And indeed, after a period of quick and fairly easy successes, a moment suddenly comes when the process continues, but no achievements are observed.

Neither increasing the load nor introducing additional training into your schedule can influence the situation. In addition, there is a feeling of constant fatigue and apathy. “Apparently, fitness is not for me,” the man thinks disappointedly and sadly leaves the club
It’s a pity, we shouldn’t have capitulated so quickly to the difficulties that arose, especially since they are all temporary. This period of failures and disappointments is just a test of strength, from which each of us can easily emerge victorious. To do this, you just need to know what is happening to us during this period, and respond in a timely manner to the signals that our body sends us. And then the period of physical improvement will last for a very long time, and the process itself will bring only joy and pleasure.

Success in improving physical fitness depends on how effectively we are able to implement the basic principles of fitness - training, nutrition and recovery.
Practice shows that, as a rule, enough attention is paid only to training and nutrition, and the process of rest and recovery is left to chance.
This omission is quite understandable and understandable. In everyday life, the bulk of our time and energy is devoted to work, study, raising children and household chores. What if we add to this regular training in a fitness club? But all the main processes in your body occur outside the gym. Our muscles strengthen and grow not during the training itself, when only the adaptation mechanism is activated, but when we passively rest - we give the body the opportunity to direct energy to “repair work” to restore the muscular-ligamentous apparatus and to strengthen its “combat positions”.

This also applies to the fat burning process. The main task of training aimed at reducing body weight is to configure the body to obtain energy in everyday life from fats and speed up metabolic processes. But in a state of overfatigue and overtraining, the metabolic rate automatically slows down and the effectiveness of the training inevitably decreases, or even comes to zero.

If, after a high-intensity workout, we continue to actively expend our energy, do not sleep enough, and are also in a state of constant nervous tension, then we greatly increase the risk of falling into a state of stress. And then there will be no need to talk about any muscle growth - I would have to preserve what I had. Moreover, long-term under-recovery leads primarily to the loss of muscle mass, since it consumes the largest amount of energy and, under conditions of energy deficiency, becomes economically unprofitable for the body.

Rules for a good holiday
Our recovery period needs the same careful planning as the training process. There is nothing overly complicated about this, especially if you know the basic rules of the recovery strategy, also known as the rules for combating overtraining.

Rule 1. Get enough sleep!
The textbook eight hours of mandatory sleep is a very relative figure.
Each of us needs our own sleep time, which is necessary for good health. So in this matter, focus solely on your individual characteristics and needs.

Rule 2. Follow
Even if you are a pronounced night owl, try to fall asleep no later than 24 hours (at least make it a time of passive rest). It is at night that regeneration processes occur most intensively. One sleepless night can set you back far from your fitness goals. If you have difficulty falling asleep, your sleep is restless and interrupted, try to determine the reason for this and, if possible, eliminate it. Do not forget about the methods of auto-training and psycho-emotional relaxation.

Rule 3. Recover!
Is your goal to increase muscle mass? Then “heavy” training for the same muscle group should be carried out only if they are fully restored, otherwise your training will take place in the mode of catabolism - the destruction of muscle tissue.
The ability to recover is different for each of us. For some, two or three days of rest is enough, but for others, even a week is not enough. Different muscles also require their own time to recover. And each of us must clearly define this time for ourselves. An indicator of muscle readiness for new work with weight - if, when performing a working approach, you feel that you could add one or two more repetitions.

Rule 4: Take Supplements!
During high-intensity training, take a complex of antioxidants and/or adaptogens.
Antioxidants (vitamins A, E, and C, synergistically acting in combination) promote tissue regeneration and protect against the damaging effects of free radicals, the number of which increases sharply during periods of heavy physical activity.
Adaptogens are natural preparations that increase the body’s resistance to adverse environmental influences - for example, Eleutherococcus, Rhodiola rosea, Leuzea, ginseng. Their positive effect is achieved by optimizing metabolic processes, and not by sharply stimulating the nervous system (as, for example, when taking caffeine-containing drugs).

Rule 5: Break up your workouts!
It has been proven that a cyclic training regimen is the best prevention of stagnation in training results. This mode will help you maintain a high level of internal motivation.

Break the training process into cycles, between which there must be several days of rest from training. The duration of the training period depends on its intensity and varies from one and a half to three months.

Rule 6. Don't overwork yourself!
If you, overcoming yourself, train in a state of general physical fatigue, you thereby increase the risk of injury (both during training and outside the gym), since the muscles that have not recovered for new work shift part of their work to the ligaments and joints. Overwork also threatens the development of overtraining syndrome, which is characterized by a feeling of depression, apathy, a sharp decrease in immunity and muscle weakness. This syndrome can last for quite a long time.

How to determine in time that you are living at the limit of life's possibilities?

The appearance of the following signs should at least be a reason for you to reduce the intensity of your training, and at most, to take a break in your training process for a week or two:
-Lately you have to force yourself to go to training.
-Even after a sufficient period of sleep in the morning you feel lethargic and weak.
-Post-workout muscle pain lasts longer than usual.
- Joint pain appears.
-You have difficulty falling asleep even after a busy day.
-Your appetite is out of control. You either start eating too much (and leaning on foods that are prohibited by your diet), or, conversely, too little, having difficulty forcing yourself to swallow something.
-Concentration drops sharply, irritability and aggressiveness appear in behavior.
-You become too susceptible to fluctuations in atmospheric pressure, react to weather changes.
-During training, an increased heart rate appears, blood pressure rises more than usual, and these symptoms persist for a long time after training.
-You strive to reduce your workout time, feeling that you are having difficulty coping with the planned load.

And please remember: overcoming yourself at all costs is not always the best way to achieve your goals.

Causes, diagnosis and prevention

Overtraining (“overtraining”) is a state of the human body and psyche that arises as a result of an imbalance between the load that the body receives during training and recovery resources.

Signs of overtraining in bodybuilding typically lead to cessation of training activity.

The main reason is that the body does not have time to recover between. Among the factors contributing to the development of muscle fatigue, you should first of all keep in mind:

insufficient rest;

household stress.

In practice, overtraining usually results from:

• monotonous training program;
• neglect;
• violations;
• irrational daily routine;
• weakened immune system;
• intoxication (alcohol, nicotine and others).

Signs and symptoms

It happens that an athlete does not feel the symptoms of “overtraining”, but objective signs are present - so it is important to know how the condition manifests itself.

Overtraining in bodybuilding can be classified according to several parameters.

Performance:

• fatigue;
• inability to complete the workout started;
• muscle heaviness;
• aching

Neurology:

• insomnia;
• unexplained night awakenings;
• sleep disorders.

Physiology:

• increase in heart rate (heart rate);
• decreased lung volume and, as a result, a feeling of lack of oxygen;
• weight loss;
• disturbances in the gastrointestinal tract (gastrointestinal tract);
• weakened immune system;
• disruption of the menstrual cycle in women.

Mental processes:

• apathy;
• irritability;
• loss of appetite;
• dehydration, accompanied by a constant feeling of thirst;
• loss of libido.

Diagnostics

It is worth noting that the listed symptoms and signs of overtraining are often found in many different diseases. To more accurately determine what state the body is in, you can use a couple of well-known methods:

• Ruffier's test;
• Heiki Rusko orthostatic test.

The first method is focused on measuring the body's regenerative abilities. The Ruffier test algorithm is as follows:

• measure your pulse for 15 seconds at rest and record the result as P1;
• perform 30 squats within 45 seconds;
• lie on your back and measure your pulse during the first 15 seconds of rest, record as P2;
• 30 seconds after the last measurement, repeat the measurement within 15 seconds - record the result as P3;
• substitute the results obtained into the formula: IR (Ruffier index) = (4 x (P1 + P2 + P3) – 200) / 10.

Decipher the result obtained according to the following criteria:

• from 0.1 – 5 – good,
• from 5.1 – 10 – average,
• from 10.1 – 15 – satisfactory endurance,
• from 15.1 – 20 – the body requires recovery.

The second method involves measuring heart rate at rest, at the maximum value while standing, and after adaptation, also while standing. It is necessary to carry out the following sequence of actions:

The three measurement results obtained must be evaluated based on the following difference standards:

• from 0 to 12 is a good indicator,
• from 13 to 18 – average result,
• from 18 to 25 – satisfactory result,
• more than 25 – the body is overtrained.

Treatment

Overtraining requires treatment only at the second and third – pathological – stages of its development. At the first stage of the syndrome, preventive measures will be sufficient to return to working condition.

So, what should you do if your body is overtrained:

• stop training for an average of 2-3 weeks;
• resume classes, gradually increasing the load and not forgetting about preventive recommendations;
• consume (complex carbohydrates and);
• receive: complex, mineral, groups C and E;
• use adaptogens (ginseng, lemongrass, rhodiola, etc.);
• get enough sleep;
• attend massage and physiotherapy sessions (if necessary).

Adaptogens are biologically active substances that tonify the body and strengthen the immune system.

Prevention

To maintain the body's ability to adapt, it is necessary to adhere to a number of principles that can help avoid overtraining:

A properly organized training process can take a person to a new level of sports development. Therefore, awareness of the causes, symptoms, treatment methods and principles of preventing overtraining makes it possible to reach the goal in the shortest possible way.