5 Signs You’re Overtraining and Don’t Know It Yet

This podcast is brought to you by Trivalo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Gerard Donnelly. If you think that the way to get fitter faster is just to train more, you're wrong. Improvement comes from training and recovery, not just training. And the risks of overtraining are high in endurance athletes and the consequences can be severe. Overtraining can take months or longer to recover from. And if you think this doesn't apply to you, Studies estimate that 30 to 60% of endurance athletes suffer from some form of overtraining at some point. And true overtraining syndrome, which leads to long times, long periods of fatigue and performance decline, occur in 10 to 20% of endurance athletes at some point. That's one to two out of every 10. So we need to ask ourselves, are you not training well or are you just too tired? We thought this was a really important topic to readdress today. Dad, welcome back to another episode. It's been a bit of a break between episodes, so we apologize for that. But let's get back into it with our normal opening segment. What are you grateful for?

Thanks, Jord. This is going to be a great topic. And as coaches, you and I have often said we feel like the party poopers or the fun Nazis where we're trying to stop people from doing stuff that they want, but we're actually trying to look after their well being and not not allow them to get so fatigued that they actually can't function. So I sort of apologize for that. But in the other hand I don't because I want to make sure our athletes are able to stay consistent. And that's kind of one of the things we want to get right into in this conversation. But the gratitude thing, as always, I'm really keen on getting this across to our listeners. And I know a lot of the listeners really love the gratitude and it's been spread because I have athletes come up to me and you a lot of the time when we're out and about saying really love the gratitude. And it's really made me think and focus on other things other than myself. And so for today, my gratitude is a big congratulations to two of our athletes. One is a guy who lives in Canada, Beecher and Catherine Rooson, and they've had the new baby rip, which is a great name. Love that. And our super coach, Nick Lecandro, and His wife Tegan have had their new baby, Ruby. So, yeah, big congratulations to two new Trala athletes who have just arrived in the world. And congratulations to the parents. And I know, Jordan, that most people say your life will never be the same when you have your first child. And you haven't had to experience that yet, but one day you will. But that is one of the funniest things. I've had conversations with coach Nick Lecandro about his training and his goals and are they going to change. I'm really interested to watch this space about how he goes and look, to be fair, baby's really doing all the right things, which is great because I think she's four weeks old now. Four or five weeks old. So, yeah, he's slotted into fatherhood really well and he's maintaining his training program to the best of his ability. And it's another example of just you managing whatever life throws at you and trying to organize yourself so that you can do all the things that you need to be doing as a father and as a husband and as a worker and as an athlete. And that takes, that takes a lot of organization. So, yeah, a lot of, in my gratitude, but a big, big shout out to those two.

I love the sentence when you say that the baby's doing all the right things. It's such a coach's thing to say. But I wouldn't expect anything less from, from a child of Nick Lecandro because he is one person that does absolutely all the right things when it comes to training. So we can't wait to see what kind of athlete Ruby will be. And for my gratitude, I just picked up a new Giant propel this week, which I am so thank for Giant for helping me out with that. It's my first propellant and I will say that these things do fly a couple of rides in. They are very aerodynamic, which I absolutely love. But the reason I'm so grateful for it is because I got a new power meter and I've actually been out of a. I haven't had a power meter for about six weeks now. I got back from a ride in Indonesia where the roads are really quite rough in the middle of wet season six weeks ago and went to clean my bike because the bike was absolutely filthy. And to be honest, I was pedaling through at some points, knee deep water. That's how flash flooded some of the roads were. And I was cleaning the chain underneath. And then I looked below and sure enough the power sensor was completely smashed and a rock must have hit it or something and it was completely caved in and power meter was gone. And it's been really interesting to ride with no power for six weeks when we're so power focused. It's been a kind of interesting experience to go on all my endurance rides and try and do some sessions just to feel and heart rate. And that included the Tour down under where we spent a great week cycling around Adelaide, the first pro race tour on the calendar for the year. It's such a great event. We loved going to Adelaide where it's super hot. It's good for the pros to get out of the northern hemisphere climate and come race in Adelaide. And we just, we were just basically on one big training camp where we were riding massive volume. But we actually did a Gran Fondo race during the week which is super fun, 130k gran fondo through the Adelaide Hills. And to do a race like that, we were properly racing. And it starts with a. Once you get out of the neutral zone, out of the city, it starts with a 15 minute pretty famous climb. And so yeah, to try and manage your effort in a race around others, up a climb where power is quite important, all to feel was a pretty interesting experience.

Yeah. And a really good point for the listeners. You know, if you're in a race situation and you're trying to be at the pointy end, it is important that the power is helping you, but you need to stay with the race. So the power is almost something you'd look at after the race and say, oh, how did I ride up? And the hill you're talking about is Norton's Hill, which is pretty famous in Australia but not well known around the world. But the, the actual race did go up, the pro race did go up Norton's hill as well a couple of times. So. So yeah, there's some PBS being set on that course. And yeah, it is, it is interesting when you don't have a power meter that you have to ride the race according to the people around you.

Yeah. And the goal on that climb is just to stay with the front of the race. But you're kind of assessing going, am I blowing myself up here? Because it's right at the start of the race and you've got 120k to ride afterwards. And we had some good chats as Trabelo team because there was kind of eight of us there all riding. And what was the plan? Do you go into the Hurt Locker and write a potential FTP test at the start to try and stay at the front and know that you've got 120k of undulating riding after or do you conserve a little bit because you still want to be able to ride the rest of the race. So that was some interesting tactics and we ended up going, yeah, go on, coach.

I was going to say look for those who have qualified for the World Championships road race, the World Masters, which happens all over the world every year. This year it happens to be in Australia, here in Victoria, down in a place called Lawn. And interestingly enough, the very first start of that race, it's 130k with yeah, over 2 or 3,000 metres of climbing. And the start of that race is a 24, 25 minute climb straight up hill called Ben Weren. And you know that Adelaide race, that Gran Fondo was almost a little bit of a replica, except it was for you it was a 15 minute. I did laugh for you. You said it was only 15 minute ride. But for most of the athletes out there doing the Gran Fondo it was somewhere between 18 and 28 minutes for the majority of riders. So it is still quite a tough start to a Gran Fondo.

Yeah, for sure. Super fun though. And my gratitude is I've got a working power meter again which is really nice to ride to. So before we get into the episode, we just want to do a quick shout out and welcome to the newest members of the Trivalo coaching family. These are athletes who have all jumped on board with the hopes of improving their results. And big welcome to Wayne Varney from Victoria. David Cummings also from Vic. James Bedford, another Aussie, David Payne from Queensland. Two brothers, a pair of twins have rejoined up. Andrew and David Tierney, big welcome to them. And James Drew from. And a big welcome back to the program for Laura Healy. Craig Crouch. Sorry. And Lachlan Kilpatrick. We can't wait to help you all improve on your journey. And if you'd like to join these athletes and guarantee your own improvement, you can go to our website, tribellocoaching.com as a reminder, as you just heard, we do coach athletes from Australia, but internationally from anywhere around the world. Now just quickly before the topic, we do want to go to our mailbag because we get a lot of questions in and we do really want to touch on these even though it makes the episode a little bit longer. We do want to help out people sending in any questions and as a precursor to all malebag questions. We don't know your entire situation, your training history, where you're at, so we're going to give Very generalized advice based on general questions. But today's question comes from Cooper and he asked, when coming off races into more of an off season, is it just about training a couple of times a week for that three to four week period with, with no real intensity before heading back into that base phase again where the volume intensity increases? How do you approach that question and that kind of in between period?

And I'll start the year off with something that we talk about a lot. It depends. And that famous statement, it depends and it does. It depends on so many questions that you'd have to ask yourself. So without being too specific about what you should be doing, it depends on how big a season you've had or how big your off season is going to be. And we know that if you take too long, your fitness base will start to decline. But it does take a fair bit of detraining for that to happen, a fair bit of not training for that base to disappear. So you're in your off season or your recovery from your previous big race, whether it's an Ironman or a massive Gran Fondo or something you've been training a long time for. And that's the pinnacle of your season. And you do deserve to have some downtime post that event. It is really critical that you work out how long you're going to have in this off period. So that will determine about the intensity of what you're going to do in that, in that recovery sort of phase period. So it's another opportunity for you to go and have some fun as a triathlete or as a cyclist or as a marathon runner, depending on what sport we're talking about. And all those sports have periods where you need to have off season. So you can't just stay up all year for 52 weeks of the year. You have to have some time during your, your year where you've got, you know, good preparation, race ready stuff, getting into your races and then having some recovery and so depends on how long that recovery is, will determine the intensity. So we know that you can maintain and we're not talking about improvement here, we're talking about maintaining and not losing fitness. We know that if you did some hard sessions in your recovery period, whether it's just one session per week, you will absolutely maintain your fitness regardless of how much volume you're doing. You won't lose anything in, you know, one or two weeks when it starts to get three or four weeks. If you don't start to do some sort of endurance where it's a Bit of a longer, longer session, then your aerobic fitness will start to decline slightly. But it's not great. And it depends on how long you've been training under a program for. If you've been with the Trivalo program for seven years, I wouldn't have any hesitation in telling people to take, you know, two or three, two or three weeks of a different style of training. But if you've only been doing it for six or seven months, then you may not have the base that that will allow you to maintain your fitness. The less training volume or the less fitness you have in your aerobic bank, the quicker the detraining will happen. The more aerobic fitness you have in that bank, the longer that takes. So. And people who've had injuries or sickness or actual intentional periods of off training, when they bounce back within two weeks, they're actually almost back to where they were. We've had countless examples of athletes who have tested after a down period where they've tested exactly the same number where they did just before their A race, which is pretty astounding when you think about it. And so there's so many examples. And that's why it does depend on who you are, what your history is, what your fitness bank's like, how long you've got. So yeah, hopefully that gives some sort of idea that, you know, you can have this period and you should have this period.

And we want to be really careful of using the term break there because when we say break, we never ever mean a break from training because we just see too often, we almost see this every time. When you use the words really accurately there you said a different form of training, not a break. And that's the key because if you just go on a break, you will lose fitness quite quickly and it's just harder to come back. And instead of doing FTP test, you know, shortly after returning to training and getting either the same or an improvement, like you just said, you will be a fair way backwards. And it's a rude shock. And the big mistake we see a lot of athletes make is that they feel this need to have a quote unquote break. And they, when they go off structured training, a structured training plan, and this is just human nature, when we don't have something in front of us, we don't stick to anything. And we watch over the period of a few weeks where the training becomes less and less frequent until it goes off the rails. And it's this momentum thing that we talk about. And once you've got momentum Just keep it going. It's a different form of training, but you just keep it going, keep the consistency. Whereas once you stop that training momentum, it becomes really hard to start the train again. It's a really slow, heavy process. So I really wanted to make that point.

I think I agree. Jordan and I was listening to Johan Bruneel not long ago during one of our drives up to the country for a training camp up at Mansfield, which is famous for Phil Anderson and for many other athletes who have. Who have done well. And Johan was talking about what's the difference between the way athletes train in the modern era compared to in the 80s and 90s? And the difference, he was saying, was when they had their off period, they had six or eight weeks of no training, you know, drinking beers and eating pizzas. And then they. Because they trained so hard during the period when they were training and they. They had to lose, you know, four or five kilo that they'd spent so much time, you know, getting off all season. And. And he said it was a crazy way of doing it. We should be doing what the modern. We should have been doing. What the modern athlete does is staying fit the whole year round and just having periods of more training volume and intensity and less periods. And therefore, you're not trying to lose and trying to regain the intensity and the form that you work so hard for for eight months of the year just to give it all away. And, you know, they're the things we're trying to avoid. And I suppose that question is, you know, that's what we're trying to say is give your body and mind a bit of a break for some variation in training, but don't stop, you know, otherwise you're gonna have to fight like hell to get back to where you were. And then, as we've said in many podcasts, you have this roller coaster of I get to seven out of ten, take this break, I'm back to four out of ten, and by the time six months back comes, I'm back at seven out of ten, and you're never progressing past seven. And if you keep that consistency going, you will be a different athlete in two or three years.

Matt Hanson had a really interesting example of this over the break because we had him on the podcast before the World Champs, and he was feeling quite tired before the World Champs, but opted to do it because of the Ironman points and placings. And he was confident that if he could just get through the day in the shape that he knows he's capable of, he'll cement his position as I think it was fourth or fifth overall and get that prize money. And he ended up having a bit of a disaster day in terms of he was almost at a sprint finish at the end to secure that place. And he lost and he was just too tired and. And he lost a place in the Ironman Pro Series which for him was really quite disappointing to end the season like that. And he just said he was, he was so tired going to that race. He just had such a long season. And that is the nature of the Ironman Pro Series. Last year in the PTO Pro Series that there's a lot of races for these athletes. You know, he was peaking for Kona Ironman world champs and then backing it up with 70.3 world champs. It's just all the athletes were reporting feeling very fatigued at the end. And he's come out this year and just said after that he took basically three weeks off because he was just too tired from the year. And this is an extreme example that you kind of don't want to get to. And he can get away with it because he's a pro athlete at this level. But even he was saying on video it's really unideal to do that, but I just needed it. And so there's this fine line between if you feel like you're getting to that point, this leads into our topic for today. You're probably over training a little bit. Yeah. And if that's the case, then you need to back off the training a little bit so it doesn't get to that point where you need a full on break. But the flip side of that is understand that when you're coming up to a race that's your highest training load, you're training the most end. So you're going to feel very fatigued. So that's not quite training, that's just very much overreaching.

Yeah. And look, don't forget Sam Long at the end of the race in the last race for the P1, the T100 series, having that interview in tears about how tired he was. And you know, that's another example of we're learning so much about. And because now there's so many events available to the team, the pro triathletes, they're having to actually rethink their whole season. And you know, it's a great question we got from Cooper to stimulate discussion and it leads straight into our overtraining. And you know, were a lot of the athletes triathlete, the pro triathletes, were they, were they over trained by the time they got to Kona or by the time they got to the T100 finals? And the guys who managed their effort over the year had better outcomes and, and you know, we had some new world champions because of that.

Yep, yep. It's. Yeah. And as we're about to talk about some of the signs of over training, you probably see that some of these athletes had these signs. Some of these pro athletes we were seeing in interviews. So look, great question. If you'd like to ask a question for the podcast, you can send us a message on Instagram. That's probably where we're most active. So message us there. Ivellocoaching. Very, very simple. But let's get into the topic. Five signs that you're over training and maybe don't know it yet. And I think the first point we want to make here is that we really talk a lot about the long term health and longevity of the age grouper. And we do see a lot of burnout in this sport and we see a lot of athletes doing this kind of yoyo effect like you just spoke about with the roller coaster. And I think it does stem a little bit from the expectation that an age grouper can do what the pros do. And it's just a big reminder to start with that. Do not underestimate the toll of triathlon training. It's the most extreme training. You're training for three sports here and age groupers are often training way too hard or too long, lacking recovery while still working full time. And most not a lot of the time having a family. And so just understand the pros train, you know, similar as hard, but they have double the amount of recovery you do. They're basically just training and recovering. That's their life. So it's a really important distinction to make when you have your own expectations of how much training you can handle.

Yeah, there's no doubt about it. And it's great that we watch what the, the best athletes in the world do, whether they're marathon runners. And I know there's a huge marathon running boom in the world at the moment. And if you see a lot of the marathon runners as a good example, who guys can run 120 to 180ks per week. And so all of a sudden a young guy or a young girl, I want to do a marathon and I look to what the experts are doing and the experts are doing these huge amounts of kilometers. Well, you just can't do that because your body A won't be able to cope with it and you'll break down. And marathon's a really good example. And I love these running burns. But Jordan, I always worry about these running burns because we've got a lot of people through social media being channeled into marathons and their body's not ready for it. And a huge percentage, and I've already seen it from people saying, I got through the marathon and I did 4 hours 50. I'm so proud of myself. I can't run for the next six weeks or six months because I'm so injured from that experience. And that's another example of just getting it wrong in your sport at all times. In our coaching, we are trying to look after the athlete's health and well being and over training is a result of that. And if we're not on top of that, we will be guilty of causing the overtraining. Some of the athletes are so motivated that they'll do extra and that's hard to control in a coaching group. But certainly you can't focus on what the experts are doing as professionals and try to simulate that as an age grouper. That's the main point you're making.

So the first thing we want to say is that we just want to get this principle right. Do not buy into the belief that more training equals better performance. More training does not equal better performance. We want to get this balance of training plus recovery right. And so I want to talk about these two terms that I really love and that's over training versus overreaching. And again, it's. You can see why this happens so easily because the whole goal of training is to stress the body and create a response that the body has to adapt to. That's the overreaching part. If you do that in a healthy, sustainable way, you're training effectively and you're improving. But if you do that too much, there's too much volume, too much intensity, that overreaching, that stress response on the body becomes overtraining and you become too fatigued and burnout. So I really want to start with that point and a small example of this. I want to talk about an athlete we just had a couple of weeks ago where she went to do a session on the Friday and just could not hit the numbers. Wasn't even close. And we went through all the factors. How are you feeling? What's happening? And she just felt exhausted. And we looked at the week and just said, you've just had a massive week, you're just too tired for this session, it's pretty obvious there's not too much more we believe around that. Let's just freshen up for a couple of days. And she retried the session on Sunday, had a really easy Saturday, recovered, tried the session again on the Sunday and was able to hit the numbers really quite comfortably just after a couple of nights of good sleep and good recovery. And that is a world of difference. And for the athlete, the Friday session is such a demotivating, brutal blow. It's almost like a slap in the face going, what's wrong with me? And then once you get some recovery and you freshen up and then you do the session again and it's a totally different feeling, you go, oh, wow. Actually there was nothing wrong with me, I was just really tired. And so to be able to identify that and rectify that quickly is really good. But if you don't look at that warning sign straight away and do something about it, you're going to risk over training and getting some long term consequences.

Yeah. And there are many athletes that we coach who are super motivated to never miss a session and want their training peaks to be green and to adhere to the motto that we push on our podcast, which is consistency is king. But it's not clever if it's going to put you into a hole. And you've got to be able to monitor how you're coping with the load. And that's the, that's how a good program will work. If it says that you have to do a high intensity session on Friday and you know in your mind when you're warming up, you're not going to be able to cope with this, then you have to do something different. You have to actually step back and say, I'm sorry, Coach, and to yourself, I'm sorry, I can't actually reach this goal today, even though I'm disappointed because I've had 45 days in a row where I haven't missed a training session and I've done everything to the, to the letter that doesn't, you know, that's great, but it doesn't mean you're going to be a better athlete because you haven't missed any session. In fact, it could mean that you're worse off because you haven't listened to your body and taken some, some time off when you should have and you just push through. So it is a hard one to work out when you are trying to decipher whether you're too tired or it's just you're lazy or you're demotivated or whatever, there could be a whole number of reasons, but generally, if you're feeling like you're too tired, you probably are. And, and you need to listen to that. You need to listen to your own feelings. And, and you and I have talked about in a lot of our podcasts. You know, we'll just jump into the warm up and see how we go. And our warm up is very specific. We have a section where we're just gradually increasing the power and then all of a sudden we do a bit of a ramp and then we do some really high intensity 30 second efforts. And that's a standard warmup that we do a lot. And I know if I'm getting through that ramp and I'm starting to feel better as I get through, even though I felt very average at the start, I'm okay to continue. But if I feel average like I normally do at the start and then I keep feeling average in the ramp and then the 30 second efforts, I'm worse. I know it's not the day to be doing that session. So you've got to take some in some information that you're feeling as part of your risk factors that you're going to take into consideration whenever you make these decisions. Because every decision you make has a consequence for the day and for the next few days and possibly for the month or the season.

So this is the first sign is that you can't hit your power numbers. And it is assumed then that you need to know your power numbers. But again, as you just said, you do need to be careful because we're talking about power numbers specifically here. But what does your heart rate generally equate to with those power numbers? Because if you're going off power, you just have to make sure that. And if someone doesn't hit a session, we kind of go through a bit of a checklist and say, okay, are all other conditions the same? Are you in a normal training environment? Was your power meter calibrated? Just making sure there's no fault of technology because this has often happened where a person has failed a session and might be thinking, I'm just too tired, I can't hit it. But it turns out it was a technical glitch and the power meter wasn't working or wasn't calibrated or something was off. But if you go through that checklist, everything was as normal and you can't hit your numbers well, then that's probably a sign of early sign of fatigue.

It's such a great point. You Make. And I've had many people who are distraught because they've failed a training session. And they'll start to think, why? Why have I failed this training session? They'll say, oh, maybe I didn't get enough sleep. I am a little bit stressed at work. I've been training hard. And, you know, that would normally make sense. My heart rate's really low and I can't push. They're all indicators. But as it turns out, I've looked at the numbers and it turns out they're. Their power meter is actually reading inaccurately. And all of a sudden you can go on this spiral, downward spiral in your mental capacity to cope with a failed training session. But you're blaming it on your fatigue, your stress. You just didn't get enough sleep. And in fact, it's a technical thing. And I've had this conversation more than 20 times with athletes who are just saying, there's something wrong with me, I need to take weeks off. They go the other way. And the response is not. It's not equal to what's happened. And, you know, you have to work out whether it's a technical thing or whether it is actually a physical and mental thing. And so they all count. They are all going to be one of the reasons. And you've just got to be very accurate about which one it is. And don't lose your mind until you've actually worked out what it is. And I've had so many examples of people doing an FTP test where they just absolutely can't hit the numbers. And it turns out their calibration was 10% out. And, you know, their heart rate was where it should be for 30 watts more. And it felt extremely difficult, but it was just basically they had, you know, the wrong reading coming back at them, but all of a sudden they start to feel depressed about their performance when it's not warranted.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. The next one we want to talk about is heart rate, and we want to talk about both forms of how overtraining can appear in heart rate variability. And we're not talking about HRV necessarily in terms of your HRV score that a lot of your smart gadgets can say now. But overtraining can appear as high heart rate or low heart rate. And it's kind of like a stress response versus a burnout response. And the high heart rate is that stress, that high cortisol often associated with restlessness, difficulty sleeping, you get that increased heart rate. And we saw that a lot with something like that covert period When a lot of athletes were getting covered and their heart rate was just through the roof in sessions. And for me personally, I did my all time highest heart rate over the last six years a week after having covered, you know, pretty much 8 to 10 beats higher for a, for a time trial than it would be on the bike normally. So it could appear that way. But more commonly for endurance athletes, it's the, it's the opposite. It's the burnout heart rate response. It's that, that really fatigued, lower heart rate than normal, lack of kind of that sluggishness feeling where you actually just can't get the heart rate up. You go to do a session and you're supposed to be in a VO2 zone and you can't even get close to there. You know, you might be trying to hit 300 watts for an effort and your heart rate's normally 170 for that. And your heart rate can't even go above 160. And that's that heart rate burnout response.

I really have a love hate relationship with heart rate because you could have a low heart rate and it could be two reasons, and they're both polar opposite. You could have a low heart rate because exactly what you just described. You're over trained, you've got burnout, and you just feel like you just can't push. And on the other hand, you could be actually riding really well, hitting your numbers and have equally as low a heart rate. And that's actually a good sign of aerobic fitness. So, you know, determining which one it is. Oh, geez, my heart rate's quite low. And the opposite, with a high heart rate, when you're fresh and tapered, you have an experience. I have many times experienced the highest heart rate ever in any races because I'm well tapered. And I've also had the highest heart rate after being sick. So, you know, I'm struggling with a high heart rate because of my illness, yet I'm not struggling in a race with a high heart rate because I'm tapered. So we've got both those extremes happening. So that's why I kind of hate heart rate sometimes and I really love it at other times. But the resting heart rate is the one that I think is the biggest implicator to whether you're over training or not. And that's one of the key things out of this whole podcast. I want athletes to be more in tune with what their resting heart rate is. That'll tell us everything. And even when I've had very average periods of sickness over the last couple of years. My resting heart rate was one of the things that alerted me to what was going on. Having two or three decades of a resting heart rate between 45 and 52 and having done that for 20 something years, and then all of a sudden my heart rate's 58 to 62, it's gone up 10. And I'm the same level of fitness that I have been pretty much for 20 years. And all of a sudden my heart rate's changed. And that was the first thing that, for me, that was saying something going on here. And you do what I was talking about before you start to stress about, am I over training, am I working too hard, is it too much stress in my life, am I not getting enough sleep, am I, am I pushing myself too much? And that's why my heart rate's struggling. So you really want to take notice. And the only way to know that is have historic data. And so one of the things we really push in our program is every Monday or every Friday or whatever day you want to do it. If you want to do it every day, you could have a look at what your resting heart rate is when you wake up. And you need to do it under the same conditions every time. You can't be testing your resting heart rate if you've already gone for a 40 minute walk. That's no longer your resting heart rate when you wake up. So you need to do it the same routine. So wake up whether you go to the toilet first and then check your resting heart rate, but do that same method every time and that'll give you really clear, historical, accurate values of what your body is doing at any given day. And I found that to be really helpful in making decisions about what should happen in the next couple of days. If all of a sudden your resting heart rate's gone up 10 beats, that's a good, really big indicator that you need to readjust or have a discussion with your coach about, hey, this is what I'm feeling. And if you feel normal but your heart rate's above where it should be, then sometimes it could be something that's about to happen in the next two or three days. And that's why heart rate variability is quite good. But I still think resting heart rate is a better equation than heart rate variability, because heart rate variability, I've found when I've gone to do races, my heart rate variability has told me I need to take a rest day. And here I am lining up for a big race. And all it's doing is measuring my adrenaline, basically, and it's showing that it's very high because I'm motivated for the race. So heart rate variability is often telling me that I should take a rest day when I'm about to do one of my best races. And I've gone and done great racing that race. I've learned to understand that my heart rate variability can be quite inaccurate. And sometimes that's where, you know, the oura ring or the whoop or all these numbers that you get, they're really helpful, but you don't want to be guided by them. First of all, you should be asking yourself, how am I feeling? When you wake up each day, give yourself a rating, then check your resting heart rate and then start to make a decision about what your heart rate variability is telling you. So there's a bit of a process there and it sounds like a, you know, geez, you're getting a bit carried away here. But if you want to, we're talking about stopping you from over training and you could, you know, we know people who've ended up with chronic fatigue who have not been able to train for two years because they didn't listen to their body. So I am being very particular about this point because it is really crucial in maintaining that consistency that we all aspire to. And as you know, I keep saying it, consistency is king, and that'll allow you to be the athlete you want.

We're going to talk about some ways to help you recover and get through any periods like this. And we're not trying to use this as a scare tactic because as the example I just gave before, sometimes a couple of easy days is all it takes to get back on track. And that's not always the case. And so the earlier you can get onto these signs, the better it's going to be. But the next point I wanted to touch on was just your overall mood, and it really declines with your attitude to training when you are getting overtrained, and that comes from grumpiness, brain fog, just really feeling unmotivated to train. Um, it's really this, it's almost dreading training when you start to get that feeling. And, and just overall mental exhaustion. There's some really key early warning signs with your own mood around training. Um, but I really, I want athletes to remember that over training is. It's the. And these things can be a, these, these mood changes can be a sign against your total stress load for the week, not just the training program. So what do I mean by that? It's the training program itself might be an adequate volume for you. It might not be too much, but because work is insanely stressful right now because something else in your life is really, really giving you a lot of grief, that combined with what would normally be an adequate training load, is actually too much. And so that can sneak up on people as well. Where they might think, I normally do this training, I've handled this fine. But other things in life are impacting them so much that it is actually becoming too much for stress relative to what else is happening. And I've always been really impressed at, over the years, how quickly an athlete will call you up. And they're almost hesitant to say this to you because they, they feel like they're letting you down. They feel like they're letting themselves down, but they've just hit breaking point. And they say, I just, I don't even want to get on the bike. I just, I can't train. XYZ is happening and you within one second are saying, you need to stop, you need to stop the program, you need to stop training. And it's the opposite to what we were talking about before with, you know, we're very hesitant for athletes to take a break because we know that consistency is the best thing and that is best way forward. But not in these circumstances. When, when clear signs like this are happening, the first thing you need to do is stop. And athletes are so relieved to hear that because again, they're almost afraid to tell you. But I think that important, that point is really important for athletes to remember that it's okay when this is happening. You're not a weak athlete. There's nothing, there's nothing weak about that. It's actually going to serve you better in the long term.

We don't really want to get to that point, do we, George? We don't want it to be. We want to do the warning signs before we get there. And if we get to that point where someone says to me, I can't run, I just can't, I can't ride today, I just can't. I don't want to. That's a bad scenario. We want to prevent that from happening before it gets to there. And so this is why we're giving these pointers about what the indicators you should be looking for. And we're not trying to do our training program and our weekly and yearly sporting career looking for overtraining symptoms. We want to enjoy the program, but we've got to, got to understand that There will be some things that will be early warning signs that will give you an understanding that, hey, I need to take stock of this. And just because the program says do X, Y and Z doesn't mean you do that. We tell all our athletes who join Trivala that here's the best program for you that will get you to race day in the best shape possible. But if something happens this week, I need to know and I need to be able to adjust it according to how you're feeling. And so, you know, when someone tells me that they're not feeling quite right, I'm going to be the first person to say, oh, we need to actually pull back again. And they'll say, oh, no, but I've got the high intensity session today. I'll just see how I go and I'll say, no, you've already told me that you don't feel well. I'm the voice of reason here. That's why you've told me. And so I'm not going to let you get on with that session, even though you're now disappointed. You've told me because you're going to miss out on this high intensity session because you know that's what's going to get you a better athlete. But in actual fact, it won't make you a better athlete. It could possibly put you in the hole that you can't get out of and you live to fight another day. The example you gave of the Friday athlete taking a couple of days and then redoing it on Sunday, that's the example we want. Defer it, move it. But understand that there are consequences for doing this. And as long as you're on board with what's going on, then that's going to be more beneficial to your overall progress than losing a session here or there. So you do need to take into account consideration everything that's going on in your life. And the example I'll give is we've got quite a few athletes who are quite unwell at the moment who are going through exactly this. And I've actually said to them they need to take a break. Exactly what you said just a minute ago from the program. And I had pushback from that because I didn't want to. And I said, well, we've tried to do reduced training load and you're still unwell and this has been going on for quite a few months. So now we have to actually try something new and that is actually stop training and let your body concentrate on just getting better. And remember when you do something that's going to stress the body, it doesn't matter whether it's training or mentally having stress load that's put on you or physically working too hard, they all add up to the same stress load on your body. So the body is very clever. It will send the help to the areas that most need it. So what do I mean by that? I mean, if you've got a bronchial infection, your body won't let you train well because it's sending all the help to trying to clear your infection in your lungs. And so you will have crap training sessions. You shouldn't be training anyway if you've got a bronchial infection. But the body will do that to you to stop you from doing damage to yourself. So let's not add training load to a body that's having trouble with immunity and coping with an illness. And so that's how far we will go to make sure that we're going to get you back to the person you want to be happy, fit and healthy training person who can't wait to go and do the next training session and is able to cope with the load. And, and they're really important things that you and I are really adamant about our program that we don't want athletes just to be blindly doing sessions when their body's not ready for it and can't cope with it and will be detrimental in the long run.

And this is a good time to remind everyone that A doesn't always equal B. So when we're talking about a lot of these signs and potential symptoms, that doesn't mean if you have one of them, you're over trained. That's not what we're saying. And so in this example, one thing I think about is that if you're feeling grumpy about training or a lack of motivation to train, I don't wake up in the morning and when I'm feeling really tired and don't want to get out of bed and feeling really grumpy, I don't take that very seriously. That first emotion in the first 10 minutes of the day, that's kind of the feeling when you're getting up in the morning and getting on the bike and getting on the bike half asleep and then getting into your session. We've spoken about this before, it's more of it's a consistent feeling that's happening all the time. And if you've had a big day at work, of course you're probably not going to feel that stoked about Training all the time. And so it's just finding this fine line between, okay, here's the potential signs of what overtraining could be. Is this happening for me or is it just the context of this day specifically? So just a reminder that when we're talking about all this, one factor doesn't always automatically mean, oh, I'm over trained right now. And the next point on that is, is athletes who are constantly getting sick or on the verge of getting sick, like that example you just gave, that is a potential sign as well, is that if you're constantly on the edge of always tipping over there, you could be just constantly pushing your body just slightly too much. And again, A doesn't always equal B. Some people are generally just prone to getting more sick sometimes. But if you notice a change, I think that's kind of the thing we're talking about a lot, is if you don't normally get sick and then suddenly your training loads increased and you're worn down and you're becoming more susceptible to getting sick, that's a clear sign as well.

Yeah, and I think I kind of like to use my own years of training where I've done a very good job, except for actual health issues. Whereas we're talking, you and I are talking here in this particular point about getting a cold or getting, you know, a bad cough that's going around. Anything that's going around the crashes or the childcare centers. Most athletes will get it from their kids straight away because their immune system is really compromised because of work and the family and the training. And so it's really easy to get sick when you're around sick people. But if you've got a good immune system that's really coping with whatever's going on in society. And, you know, we've had massive experience with COVID and we understand now how easy it is to spread germs from person to person. And it is easy to get sick. And when you're training hard, you will probably pick up anything that your family brings home. And so the thing to do about that is to make sure that you aren't overdoing that. And the example I'm using, I haven't been sick a lot in terms of just getting colds and getting a cough. I've had my own issues of health, but they're not to do with my overtraining and having an immune system that's constantly getting me sick. I've managed that very well. And that's because I'm constantly trying to make sure that If I'm asking myself, am I coping with a high intensity session about to do today, should I be doing that? I'm continually asking myself that it's not a good idea today I'm going to change the session and I'm so motivated to be a better athlete. So it's not like I'm trying to avoid these high intensity sessions, but I'm just listening to my body and I want the athletes that we are spreading this news to try to implement that into their everyday life. Just because it's written there doesn't mean you should be doing it. And you, you of all people should know that if you are getting constantly sick, it means you're doing the opposite to what we're saying. You are just blindly doing the program instead of actually, you know, going on this, this exploration of how am I feeling over the last three or four days? Is, am I getting to, you know, you know, when you're starting to get sick. So you should actually start to say, I'm not going to do that session because it's going to end up where I might list four or five. Ms. Four or five days of training and that's going to be detrimental to your improvement.

One of the biggest factors and one of the most key indicators of overtraining is just your sleep quality. And overtrained athletes often have some sort of restlessness. Like we spoke about it before, minor insomnia or major insomnia, poor sleep cycles, poor sleep scores. And we just know from everything that is coming out about training and has been coming out for a while about training, is that good quality, deep sleep is so vital for recovery, for actually repairing the worked muscles from the training response to create that response. That actually is what the training is for, to create that stimulus effect for regulation of all bodily functions, both physical and mental. So understanding that your quality of sleep is one of the biggest signs of how fatigued you are. And, and we know that whenever we do a late night training session, asleep is generally compromised, which is pretty frustrating when it's the only time you can do it. You do have that restlessness. And so prioritizing that is key. And we can get away with it a little bit, but when we do that too much, this is where it can come back to bite us.

Yeah, there's not a lot more I can say in terms of sleep is the king. If consistency is the king, sleep is also the king. And if you lack the sleep and if you're used to going to bed at midnight and getting up at 6am and you seem like you're functioning, it would be really good for you to try something else and see if you function better. Just because it seems like it's working doesn't mean that that's actually the best experience for you. There is too much data, too much evidence to tell us that we need more sleep. And everything good happens while you're asleep. You repair everything, the whole body. The brain is working so hard when you're asleep to make sure that everything's starting to get ready for the next day. And if you only have a short period of sleep, you don't have the enough. You don't give yourself enough time to be ready for the next day's activities. And that's as simple as I can make it. You need the sleep. And you could be training and eating and doing everything right. You could be super motivated, you should be inspired. But you don't get the sleep and therefore you're not actually adding that last piece of the puzzle. And we have so much examples of people who are really struggling with their sleep and then all of a sudden they get sick because they're pushing their immune. They're not getting the repair that happens during sleep. And so I can't emphasize how important it is to every program that you, if you are a person who is thinking, oh, that's me, well, what do you do about that? Well, you don't just go from going to sleep at midnight to going to sleep at 9pm that is not the way. It's the same method as we do with overload training. You bring it back 15 minutes to quarter to 12, then to 11:30, then to maybe 11, then quarter to 10, then, you know, 9 o'. Clock. You gradually build it over over a month where you're just slowly getting to bed earlier and waking up at the same time and getting more valuable sleep. And that's going to be a huge contributor into you not over training.

And I don't know about that as well. If I'm so tired that my bedtime's too late and it's really coming by me and I need to go. If I go to bed two hours earlier than normal and I fall straight asleep, that's probably a big sign that I'm not getting enough sleep and the body's exhausted, which does happen sometimes, and you go, oof, that's. That was pushing the limits right there. But look, I do want to play devil's advocate again and just remind everyone of a caveat, that these are all just potential indicators because I had a Hilarious conversation with a mate who uses a whoop and gets his sleep score every morning. And I said, how's it going? How are you finding the score and the data and you like looking at it? And he said, it's a bit of a disaster for me. And this is good candid honesty for him, because he said, when I get up in the morning and it tells me I've slept cracked, I don't go to the gym that day and I don't work out because I use it as an excuse to not train. Because he goes. He says it affects my mood all day because I see the score and I go, I'm tired all day. And he goes, I should stop looking at it, but I can't stop looking at it. So that's where these kind of things can really impact you negatively, because I said the data could be wrong. You should almost write a journal of how you think slept and then compare it to what the score says. Yeah, I just found that hilarious. And I don't think that's the best way to do it because he's just letting this generalized machine kind of of dictate his whole mood for the day.

Yep. And you and I have talked about this before. The Garmin tells me that I should have a day off, and, you know, I barely trained the day before and I'm not tired and I feel fine. And then the Garmin tells me that I'm not training hard enough. You know, if I listen to whatever the Garmin told me every single time, I'd have the worst training program going. And the same with the heart rate variability. Same with the whoop score. Same with the Oura ring. You want to use them as your guides after you've worked out what you feel yourself. And that's the important thing we're trying to say.

Someone just asked us on Instagram, should I listen to my Garmin and what it's suggesting? And I said, my rule of thumb is only listen to Garmin when it gives me a compliment, and otherwise I don't want to hear what it has to say. So, look, with all that said and all these potential symptoms, the easiest solution to finish off with and the easiest reminder is that the best tool is recovery. It's that simple. It's more sleep and reducing your training volume. Just get more recovery in. We know that performance benefit comes from training plus recovery. So the only true way to recover from overtraining is back off the training load, get more sleep, and prioritize any other recovery strategies.

Yeah, and I would Add nutrition into that as well. Jord, you know, probably if you're getting less sleep, you may not be organized enough to be eating well as well and you're probably burning the candle at both ends. Trying to train really early or trying to train really late at night. I mean I'm sometimes amazed when I get a Zwift notification to tell me one of my athletes is getting on the trainer at 11:30pm at night and I know that they start work at 6:30 in the morning and I'm thinking oh that is crazy. They needed to prioritize sleep over the training session. And so we want to make sure that we give ourselves those tools which is getting the training down, getting the volume down. If you feel like things are heading in the wrong direction, then don't keep with the intensity. It's okay to keep training but reduce the intensity so that you're able to cope with everyday functionality. If you're training too hard and you can't cope with your day to day living, then that's the first thing it should go. And then you should, should look at how well are you sleeping and you need more time. So again reduce the training time. And then finally how well am I consuming the fuel that's supposed to enable me to think clearly and to function properly as an athlete and as a human. So they are all interlinked to each other and need to have equal attention and not one over the other. So in order to reduce the impact that over training or overreaching could have on your next year then hopefully a lot of the things that we've said and when it comes down to it, you understanding how you're feeling is probably the key to it. And making good decisions based on the information you're seeing and not getting dictated to by apps that are telling you stuff you are, you want to actually use those apps just like we use in the example I'll use is when we, when we get on our bike we know that what our power numbers are, we know what our heart rate response is and we know what the average speed is. But if we're looking at the power and it feels way too hard, then it's probably because you're not feeling normal or the power meter is not reading correctly. So we listen to our body ahead of what the data tells us. If the data tells us that we should be able to do this, but we can't because it feels too hard. Well I would listen to we can't because it feels too hard. As my first point of call, rather than believing the data. So whenever you feel like it's out of reach for you, that's probably true. You're not making it up. It is real and you should be using that as your number one guide.

And this is the last point I want to make, which is this is why having scheduled deload periods or weeks is really important. And the general guidelines are have a deload load period every three or four weeks. And we are much more conservative than that. We are really scheduling them almost every two weeks or three weeks because we, and we are assessing how the age group is feeling. And some athletes are feeling so tired after two solid weeks of training, they really need some lighter load. But that's a really good indication of whether you're handling it or not because of course you're going to feel fatigued after two weeks of big training. But often athletes just have their three or four days of lighter work and they feel great. They feel refreshed and back to normal and ready to hit it hard again. And they're normally ready for a time trial or some sort of test or something. And so that's good, that's what we want. You've come around, you've recovered and that's a good indicator. But if you're having these kind of de loads, if you schedule a deload and you're still not recovering, then you're probably pretty fatigued and there's a bit of an issue there. So that's the last point I wanted to mention.

Yeah, look, just finally, Jordan, I want to make it clear that having a really good coaching structure is really going to be helpful for this because you can have a discussion with your coach about how you're feeling and you can get to the bottom the of. Is it to do with work stress? Is it to do with training stress? Is it to do with lack of sleep, lack of nutrition? You know, these are the things that you can work out with your coach. And we are so conservative. The health and well being of all of our athletes that we coach is primary and number one goal. And the reason why is because we will get the best outcomes in your performance. If you're feeling healthy as a human being and if you're under strain and stress and just barely getting through the program, you won't get the improvement improvements that you're after. And so we're number one priority is health and wellbeing of our athletes is going to be a better outcome for everybody, for the coach and for the athlete that we care so much about. So this is a really good topic to do at the start of the year because most people are pretty motivated to hook into it. And yeah, you just got to be very careful about how quickly the extreme behavior is unsustainable. And if you start off with, yep, I've nailed every session in the first two weeks and you've set this standard, you know, there's only one way to go. It's like starting a race too high. There's only one way to go is, is to start to fail or start to slow down. And, and we want you to be balanced in it. And that's, that's going to be the best way to get the most out of yourself in your season ahead.

Yeah, that's true. We are very conservative. But don't get us wrong, we train hard and anyone that knows us knows we train hard. But we, we really push and are determined to get that line right between training hard and being able to recover well and really getting that program right. So if you want help with the structure of your programming, if you want to be able to push as hard as you can possibly but get that real balance right between training and recovery and you are interested in coaching, then go to trivalocoaching.com as always, we have our guaranteed improvement that if you don't improve your FTP in the first eight weeks, then it's money back and that's on us. So thank you very much as always for listening and we'll see you in the next episode.

Sam.