5 signs of training burnout and how to fix it

February may be the shortest calendar month but it can feel like the longest as winter drags on. Athletes have been slogging away at their winter training programs deep in the pain cave for weeks.

When winter shuts us in, and the volume increases as training moves into the build phase towards race season, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of overtraining that leads to burn out.

With little else to do when it’s cold and miserable outside, the treadmill and trainer are there to help break up the cabin fever. While it’s important to move everyday, it’s even more important to ensure you are taking full rest days to avoid physical and mental burn out. Digging yourself into a hole this soon in your training will have dire consequences when it is time to hammer the sessions as you build and peak to your first race.

Lack of motivation

Winter is a great opportunity to focus on building speed, strength, and endurance. But if you find yourself dreading the next workout, your training load may be too high or the number of rest days too low. That feeling of dread, or lack of motivation, is one telltale sign of burn out. Wearable technology and online coaching platforms offer data that can help you determine if you’r recovering enough, but how you feel is the most accurate indicator. Trust yourself above all else.

You can expect to have the occasional day when you don’t feel like working out, but if those days seem to string together and evolve into weeks it’s a good idea to review your training data. To get back on track, take a few days of complete rest. Try not to focus on training at all. Instead, spend time with family. Get a project that has been on your to do list for a while out of the way. Choose activities that keep you moving but aren’t structured. Even a few days of turning your attention away from your training program can help you reset.

Irritability and poor mood

Another red flag is your mood. Sometimes the best informant about how you are feeling is your best friend or spouse. If the people around you notice you’ve been short tempered or negative this can be a sign that you are overtraining.

We don’t always notice it ourselves when we start to feel irritable or foul, but those around us certainly feel the pain. Have a conversation with your friends, family or coach and invite them to tell you if they think you’re mood is out of alignment with your normal disposition. It can sometimes be that you are having a great day, rolling along just fine, but then something trivial upsets you and the next moment that workout you were looking forward to feels like an impossible goal. This is not a lack of will power. This is a good reminder to check in with yourself and see if you are taking on too much, including outside of your training goals.

Trouble sleeping

Not only will lack of sleep exacerbate overtraining and burnout, but it can also be one of the first signs you are overdoing it. Trouble falling asleep, waking up in the middle of the night unable to go back to sleep, or only averaging four to five hours a sleep a night should turn the lights on for you. Training causes stress. This is generally a good thing as stress is what elicits adaptation. But stress is only manageable if we offload stress long enough to adapt from it.

Day after day we are adding to our stress if we are not taking time out to reboot. The stress hormone cortisol builds up in our system and interferes with quality sleep. Until you can recover enough your cortisol levels will stay elevated. At this point you are no longer optimally adapting from the stress you are applying during your workouts. You are putting in the work but your body isn’t able to fully convert that work into adaptation when it doesn’t get enough rest to do so.

One of the key factors in adaptation are growth hormones. These hormones are generally released while we sleep. If we don’t get enough sleep, we short change the release of growth hormones. That means we are also short changing the benefits of our workouts.

Signs of injury

When the body is under too much stress without an opportunity to rebound, it breaks down. If you are starting to notice aches and pains popping up these may be early warning signs of a full blown injury that is waiting for you further down the path of overtraining. Niggles are a red flag. Usually, pulling back on volume and intensity for a few days can resolve an angry muscle or joint. Continuing to flog it will most certainly lead to bigger problems.

Athletes are ingrained to push through pain, or follow the “no pain, no gain” advice. This makes it difficult to train smart. Early warning signs of an impending injury need to be heeded with a decrease in training or complete rest. It may only be a few days before the body is able to resolve the issue and support a return to normal programming. Fear of detraining or losing fitness is difficult to combat, but it is far better to pull back for a few days than to loose weeks or months to a serious injury that could have been avoided.

The amount of fitness you stand to loose in a few days or even weeks is not as great as our fears often are. You will be back on top within a few weeks or less.

Quality of workouts

Inevitably, our motivation, mood, sleep and injury status will have a profound impact on the quality of our workouts. A common scenario is trying harder to raise power levels or reduce run times only to see power dropping and run times slowing. This is a classic and definitive sign of overtraining. When performance dips the natural instinct is to do more. But doing more in this situation results in digging yourself into an even deeper hole.

At this point the body is carrying so much fatigue it can no longer reach the bar we set for each training session. This is a difficult mental aspect for athletes as the feedback from their sessions appears to be telling them that their performance is declining, so they train harder. And so the cycle continues until a major injury or long term burnout sets them back for months or years.

It cannot be overstated that what is actually needed if performance declines when an athlete is continuously pushing themselves is more rest. This is not the time to increase load in attempt to get better. That will only makes things worse. At this stage what is needed is time off and attention to fuelling. Get enough sleep and enough calories – and enough time off of training altogether if needed, to let the body heal.

Whether your burnout is caused by overtraining or an imbalance of work, life and training stress the results are the same and so is the remedy. Train smarter, not harder. Gains are made when we are healthy and happy. Always include the fun factor in your training goals. Strike a balance with all the things in your life that matter so that training does not overshadow your health and relationships.

If your motivation or performance is dipping, always remember in order to adapt from a workout you must recovery from it.