7 Signs Your Program Has Made You “Overtrain”

I say to people, I'm going to be in your personal space and I don't mean to do that intentionally, but that's the only way we're going to work well together. As if I know everything about what's going on in your life and that is really interfering in your personal life.

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo 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 Trivelo Coaching, Jared Donnelly. The scariest part of overtraining is that we often don't realize it's happening until it's too late. Overtraining can have wildly varying consequences. You might get lucky and get away with something mild, or you might end up with a long term injury, illness or the loss of motivation to train or compete in any way. On this podcast, we're huge proponents of enjoyment being the number one goal and a loss of enjoyment usually means something has gone seriously wrong. So today we're talking about 7 warning signs to look out for overtraining before it's too late. Just before we get into it, a quick note. Our application portal for one on one coaching was malfunctioning recently and we had many people managed to contact us saying that they had applied to join but hadn't heard back from us. So if this was you, our sincere apologies. We have good coaches but sometimes not good tech experts. But if you haven't gotten back to you about an application, we always do some. I'm afraid it might have been lost in the interweb somewhere, so please reach out to us again. The webpage is definitely working now. Tribalocoaching.com you can apply by the website or you can contact us somewhere easy like on Instagram. Tribalo Coaching as always, this episode is brought to you by our proud sponsor, Giant Australia for all your bike training and racing needs. Ride life. Ride Giant Dad. Welcome to another episode. And on the topic of enjoyment, let's start with our normal segment. What are you grateful for?

Thanks Jordy. I'm looking forward to this topic. It is an interesting one and we do think we know a lot about it. But yeah, it'd be good to get our views across today. I'm looking forward to it. My gratitude today. I don't want to bore people with my progress with since my back operation, but I'm actually at week 20 which is a bit of a milestone and things are generally progressing quite well. I'm A bit of a hard taskmaster, I reckon, because it's slower than I'd like it to be. But I am absolutely grateful the fact that I have gone through this operation and now it's given me the opportunity to allow me to pursue pretty much everything I want to do from this point going forward. And if I hadn't have done this operation, I would have been absolutely limited and got to a point where I wouldn't be able to ride or swim or run. I can't run anyway, but I certainly wouldn't have been able to ride or swim down, down the track. And that, that might have been the next two or three years. But it's so good to actually be able to go training and not have my vertebrae impinging on a nerve, causing me all sorts of pain through my back. And any exercise that I was doing before and now that' it's really. I'm really grateful for that and looking forward to the future.

It's actually been a good little case study and I won't dwell on this too much, but since we've been quite public about the story, we've actually had a lot of our own athletes reach out to you and say, wow, they've had something similar and then they've ended up going through a similar process and ended up on a path to have the same surgery. And it's quite common for cyclists to have back issues. And for me it just brings up this point of cycling. From what we know, the position on cycling is just not, it's not a good or ideal position for the back. And so whether these issues stem from cycling or their previous issues and cycling just exacerbates them. You know, it's, it's probably down to the individual case, but I was talking to a friend of mine who was actually a guest on the podcast, Dr. Jordan Moncrief, and he was laughing not at the surgery aspect, but at the fact that, you know, he just looks at bike positions and he sees many cyclists in his clinic and he's just going, it is just so far from an ideal posture. So he's just saying it's no wonder people have cotton back problems. And the funniest, the interesting part for your story was you've had this problem for so long and it is, you know, so clearly a, a nerve problem. But when you were doing as much work as possible off the bike, into strength training, DNS work, movement work, that was probably the only time over a six month period when you were going full on on that that you had relief from that. And that wasn't a long term fix, but it was definitely a short term fix to alleviate some pain. So that's just an interesting thing to think about. So we hope that anyone listening can get value, value out of the story and it's definitely been an interesting one to watch from that perspective. Don't know if you want to comment on that.

No, I totally agree with everything you've said and we are quite concerned that there are a lot of bike riders who could possibly have nerve impingement like I had. And, and in fact, my surgeon's actually going to do some research on it to see if it is a common thing. Is it? Because some of it can be genetically based and mine was a little bit of that. Genetics caused my problem initially because I started this issue back in 1988 when I was literally 27 years old. So, you know, I'm now 65 nearly and you know, that's a long time to have an issue like this. And there were certain things that I could do that alleviated, as you alluded to, with some structural work off the bike that, that saved me. But, but that was never going to be a long term solution because one, you know, once vertebrae is hitting a nerve, the pain is too much and there's no not amount of medication you can take to, to stop that. So it is an interesting topic and one that I'm really interested in in now because it's, there's been, when you start talking about it, people go, oh, look, I've got similar symptoms. And, and if, you know, in the early days there was no such thing as an mri, you know, the only thing we had was a X ray. And it doesn't tell you a lot about what's going on in the detail of your structure, except for bones. So yeah, now that we've got better opportunities to see what's going on in the back or in any injury, you can make better diagnosis. And that's a good thing.

Yeah. And I didn't want to go too much into detail on this topic just for the sake of talking about it, but I did want to because I think it's important for a lot of athletes out there, especially if we're cycling a lot of volume, to just be aware of that. And you know, our approach is you, if you're a listener of this podcast, you will know that we come from such a holistic approach and our goal is, is so much around how much this can amplify your life and amplify your enjoyment of life, your Quality of life, your overall health. But we don't want something like cycling to have a negative impact on your life. And if this is happening, then it might cause you to ask some questions and go, what could I be doing off the bike? Or is there something more serious? Is there someone I need to go see? And we hope that this story might highlight that for you. My own gratitude. I realized recently that my gratitudes are so constantly around summer and warm weather. I think my one last week or the week before was on, you know, the spring weather coming through. And I thought to myself, actually that's not good enough because then you're just relying on sunny days to feel good and you actually have to learn to appreciate the opposite as well. And we had a pretty recently rainy and very cold spring. After some really nice 20, mid 20 degree days. It went down to, I think it was 12 degrees or something. And I would normally just turn off the day. I just hate it and it's just miserable. And I actually decided to embrace it and go, you know, it's nice to have that cold, fresh feeling. Go for a walk, breathe in the cold air. If it's raining, just embrace it. You know, go for, go for a run in the rain. And you're laughing at me because I was waiting for a bit of a break in the rain and it was just torrential downpour. And after probably two hours of waiting for a break in the rain, I ended up running in the rain anyway. And it stopped after 10 minutes. And once you, I rugged up and um, it was kind of a fun run. And so, yeah, it's, it's good to appreciate the opposite. So I wanted to make sure at that point that I don't just have to rely on the, the sunny weather to feel grateful.

Yeah. And look, we are people from the northern hemisphere who have real serious winters would be absolutely laughing at our, at our whooshing out at such, you know, temperatures that are quite mild compared to what they're used to, you know, some amount of number below zero. And here we are woosing out at 12 degrees and. Yeah, so I think there's some irony in that. But, but look, I have, I have a rule on the bike. If it's, if it's raining before I go out, I'm not going out. But as a runner, I absolutely love running. It is, yeah, but as a runner, I absolutely loved running in the rain. It just didn't phase me because I knew that the risks were less. As a bike rider, it's really, you know, high risk to come out of the rain with, you know, you only have to hit tram tracks and understand how easy it is to come down. And I've done that many times and, and just, you know, the, the new brakes that we've got, the disc brakes made it so much easier in the rim brakes. Rim brakes never worked in the rain. You. You barely stop fast. So it was a dangerous way to train and we've got so many options indoors now, so. But as a runner it's. Yeah, look, just. You're going to get warm anyway. So yeah.

Moving on to what's caught our attention. And you know, it's great timing to talk about overtraining because we've had, you know, a lot of marathon talk and there's a lot of marathons kind of happening right now and they kind of go hand in hand where Marath with people getting over fatigued over training, losing motivation. I've definitely spoken to a lot of people who are just getting to the last part of their marathon training block and they're just so sick of it. They're just so sick of the long training and it is on that borderline of over training. So it does kind of tie in together. But it's Melbourne marathon this weekend, which is really exciting and that will be done by the time this podcast comes out. We also had Berlin Chicago Marathon over the last few weeks tour the majors around the world and they are absolutely worth talking about because my goodness, we saw one of the greatest human performances of all time. And Calvin Kipton breaking Elliot. Elliot Kipchoge's famous world record. There was a lot of talk about whether he could do it or not. Chicago isn't as fast as course as Berlin. And he did it incredible. He beat it by 35 seconds. I think, wow, that for me the, this performance is just, it's, it's just ab. No matter which way you look at it, it's almost incomprehensible how fast he is running for 42km.

I did see a YouTube video on some guy who said that he couldn't run 200 meters at that pace. And you know, that puts it in perspective. You know, to run 2:50 pace for 42 kilometers is phenomenal. If you know, for anybody who goes out and tries to do 1k repeats, you know, you know, fresh, you would be lucky to do. Some people would be lucky to do 4 minute k pace for 1k repeats and people classed as runners.

Yeah.

And here we are. You know, there's a whole lot of people in the world who can run under 3 minutes per K for 42K. It is phenomenal the level that athletes can achieve. And just the way he did it, you know, the negative split which you know we, we do bang on about a lot and love that concept. But to run 10k in 27 minutes in a marathon, wow, that's, that's special.

Yeah, look, I think the fact that it, it made such major news and you know, it made my, my friends group chat which none of them really care about running or marathons and to be talked about in their shows, kind of think how wild this is because they all understand that. Because when the news says he averaged 2 minutes 51 per km, everyone just goes, hang on a second. Yeah, you average that for a marathon and people start questioning could I, could I do that for a kilometer? And there's those famous videos where they put the treadmill at that speed and get people to run on it and people are just sprinting and they can't last 10 seconds. And that's just non runners. You know, even the average runner understands how ridiculous it is. But like you said, he's, he's, he's known for his negative splitting. But he went under 60 minutes in the back half which we just absolutely love. He came home like a steam train. But some of the, like I said at the start, if you look at any way you look at this, it's just ridiculous. Some of the stats that I was, I was reading about the times his Fastest mile was 421. You know, that is absolutely flying. That is sprinting. You see guys run a mile around the track of 421. They are absolutely moving. It's about 4 minutes or maybe sub 4 minute 1500 pace. It's just ridiculous like to run that in a marathon and yet he's fast as 10 kilometers in there. I think it was potentially the 30 to 40 kilometer mark or the 25 to 35 kilometer mark was sub 27 minutes. You know, that is almost Olympic standard 10 kilometer running. Not it's 40 seconds off or, or less. It's 35 seconds off Olympic standard 10 kilometer running. And he's done that in a marathon. We have to do it four times. His 5k splits were continuously around the 14 to 14:30 mark. With his best 5k at 13:51. Again that's exactly 13 or 34 seconds off the 5k Olympic standard. It's just again you look at the, you look at the two half marathons, you know, his first half in a minute 48. His second half sub 60. You look at the 5K splits, you look at the, his fastest mile, you just can't comprehend how well this guy is running for 42 kilometers. And, and again it was, it was 2 hours and 35 seconds. So it was about 36 seconds faster than Kipchoge's. He might go faster, he might go to Berlin. And everyone's talking about can he run under two hours. But it is just the absolute peak of human movement and performance. And I just can't understate how, how wild it is.

But also the, all the stats you've just read out, sometimes it's easy to gloss over them, but just dig into that half marathon. Like there aren't a lot of people who can run a sub 60 half marathon. Sub 60 minute half marathon. And he's done that in the second half after he's already run a half marathon. He's run a sub 60 half marathon for the second half. And when I saw him finish, it looked like he hadn't hardly run. He was wahooing, yahooing, high fiving, cheering, you know, getting the crowd to, he had both arms waving and like he wasn't a guy who, who was in trouble. You know, you wonder had, you know, had he a bit more in the tank? And, and they're the things that, that I think about as a coach is, well, maybe he was too conservative early. And look, we are really into the negative splitting method of running. You know, give yourself some conservative start pace strategies and watch, watch yourself just get faster. And that's a great way to, to do a triathlon or, or a time trial or, or a 10k or a 5k or, or a marathon. In this case is the concept is that you wouldn't expect to be running minutes faster in the second half. You'd expect to be, you know, 10 or 20 seconds faster in the second half. Not, you know, it's not, it's not. That would be poor execution. If you are two or three minutes quicker, it means you're really too conservative early. And, and that is, there's nothing wrong with that. It's actually, that's actually a better way to run than running too fast at the start and then, and then absolutely fading so that you, you know, you're losing three or four minutes in your second half. That, that's not an enjoyable way to do it. And we've talked about that many times. But I just want to get across to people that the negative split, you know, don't be, don't be thinking that you should be smashing Your first half as a negative split to the second half. We're really pushing more even pace running.

Yeah.

Rather than the negative split where the margin could be, you might, you might have done five seconds slower in the second half. That to me is good enough for a negative split. I'm trying to see if you can run evenly from start to finish and, and that means you're going to get the most out of yourself and not have any thing left out on the road. You know, you're really delivering as much as you. You can. And you probably won't be able to high five anybody in the last 2 or 300 meters because you're, you're running on empty at that point. And that tells you that you couldn't have given any more. And I'm wondering whether Kipchum had a little bit more to. Yeah, you know, he's only 30 odd seconds under the, the holy grail of marathon of two hours.

Yeah but you think, you think about he has to wipe off a second per kilometer. He have to go, he has to go 250 pace. You know, something that's. To go from 251 to 250 just seems so hard. You know, when you absolutely maxed out like that, it's like where can you find 35 seconds? But you know, if you, if you had a hologram of Kipchoge's world record versus Kiptum's, Kipchoge was almost a minute ahead of him at the halfway point. And then, you know, fades a lot. If you look at the 5k splits, Kipton's first 5k was almost his slowest. I think it was his second or third slowest of the whole thing. Whereas Kipchogi when he ran his first 5k was top four of his fastest and his, his slowest 5ks all the three slowest 5ks all came from 25 to 30k, 30 to 35, 35 to 40. So he was really fading at the back end. And he's. Yeah, his last 5k was absolutely his slowest of the entire run. So you know, it's hard to criticize the potentially the greatest marathon runner of all time. Depends on how Kipton goes. He's only 22 or 23, so he might have an even more decorated career over the next 10 years. But you know, it's interesting to see yeah their execution strategies and one might suit the other more. But we would definitely be big advocates of, of Kipton's, Kipton's way of going about it. And I just, I was even doing the math on if you think about the world's best 1500 meters runners, Inger Britons and these guys, they're running for 1500. They're running 2:23 pace or something, you know. And then if you take. The more you increase the distance, the more for me the runners get more ridiculous and their talent gets more ridiculous. Because the 5k world record is 231 pace. I think. So yeah. It's incredible. They're only like less than 10 seconds slower than the 51 meters runners over per Cave and. But they're doing that sprint for 5k and then the 10k is even more ridiculous. It only jumps up to 230, 234 pace or something. I can't remember off the top of my head. But it's something marginal like that, you know. So they're running double the distance, but they're only just going fractionally slower, 3 or 4 seconds per K. And then you jump up to the marathon and he's running 251, you know, it's, it's only 10 or 15 seconds slower than these guys for the world record 10 kilometer pace. I just, that just astounds me. I just, I really wanted to make that point.

Yeah. Look a bit of a controversial view on it as well with Kipchoge running the 15950 with the Nike experiment and how that's not really been. Everybody's dismissive. Yeah, I, I still, I struggle with that. And I know the, the reason is because of pacing, but there was pacing in every marathon that's been run around the world. The only difference between the pacing that Kipchoge had was people came on and off, whereas pacing, that's, that's being done currently. The runners can only run until they can last and then they peel off and the runner has to run the rest of the race themselves. So it's still pacing. It's just a variation of pacing. So. So it's a bit frustrating for me that Kipchoge doesn't get recognized. Even though all three runs have been brilliant. You know, the 159, the 230 and the 250. Two hour, 32 hour 50 there. They're unbelievably great, great results. But, but I think every, you know, the guys still run it. He's still broken two hours. So.

Yeah, yeah. His body. If he moved 42.2 kilometers in under two hours. But yeah, I understand. And that's why I think Kipton's run is actually More impressive because he was by himself for a lot of it. It's a course with a lot more turns. You know, Kipchog is breaking. Two hours was just straight and then a really nice wide turn. So you don't lose any speed. That makes up a lot of difference. So yeah, Jesus. Fascinating. And then on the women's side, we haven't even touched on, on that aspect over the last couple of weeks. It's been crazy movement in the winter side. The Ethiopian runner Tigsa Sefer broke the world record by three minutes, which is just ridiculous. She's. She jumped it down from 214 to 2 hours 11 minutes 53 seconds, which if you actually watch the footage at that was at Berlin, you can see Liam Adams finishes just in front of her. And you pointed that out saying, geez, that looks like Liam Adams. It turns out it was. That's a great run by L. Adams there. To run 2 hours 11 minutes as well. But that is just a ridiculous performance as well. To break it by three minutes and suddenly you know you have the best woman runner in the world running 2 hours 11 minutes. Far out. That is good running. And then what has blown my mind is we've spoken about Stefan Hassan before. She is probably one of the most accomplished athletes among all distances. She has notoriously gone for the 1500, 5k and 10k triple at both the world champs and Olympics. Hasn't managed to do it because it's such a tough schedule. But she ran at Chicago. She just ran 213, which would have broken the old world record by a minute. And like I said, A month ago, six weeks ago, she was in the 1500, 5K and 10K at the World champs and competing for the gold medal. She lost the gold medal by inches. She got podium in or in two of the three events. And then she's come out and broken what would have been the world record for the marathon except for it was, it was broken down to 2 hours 11 minutes a few weeks ago. So again, insane running all around. Look, there's a lot of comments around putting this down to shoe technology, which is absolutely making the impact, you know, new training. But it's just exciting to see and it's, it's making marathons so, so exciting to watch.

But I can't see shoe technology. Jordan. Look, I, I don't know if this is completely accurate, but within the last 10 years the women's marathon record has come down from 220something to 280. So Mike, it's seven minutes shoe shoe technology is not going to make seven minutes over a marathon. Maybe I'm wrong there, but I just find that hard to believe. I just think, I think the athletes are far superior now. The shoe technology is helping. I'm not saying it's not, but, you know, 208 was the 1980s, 1990s was the best. The men marathon runners were doing 207, 208. That was the world record from 1960 to 1980 something. And, you know, a lot of the male runners who were coming in the top 10 and any of these big marathons were running between 208 and 212. And here we are now we've got the best female runners, two of them who can run, you know, 211 and 213. And that to me is that that shows the perspective of how far the women have improved in endurance running. And, and I just think it's brilliant that they are so competitive with the males now. It's, it's, it's absolutely fantastic.

Yeah, just. I mean, we harped on this a bit, but I've just been astounded by, by these performances and, and I think it's unreal to see and it just shows what, what humans are capable of. I really, I read a really cool comment on, online watching a video on the marathon, and someone said that they were a volunteer at the end of, at the finish line of the Chicago Marathon. And they said when Calvin Kipton across the line, they said, they. It was just astounding to watch. They could not believe what they were seeing with their own eyes. I couldn't believe that physically happened in front of them. And they had goosebumps and they said it was one of the best experience they've ever seen live. So I thought that was a really cool comment. That kind of sums up how I was feeling when I saw the result.

Yeah, when you think of marathon, you think of how far out. It's a long day, isn't it?

It's.

But when they're doing it with, you know, they just look like they're running fast now. Whereas, you know, you've got so much footage from, you know, back in the day where guys are just coming into the stadium and they're just getting around the track. At the Olympics, you know, you don't see these guys finishing with such power and strength and, and speed. You know, it just, it. The old way was, you know, just get there. And no matter how you got there, just get there. And now it's just so different the way it's run it's. It's really run with a lot more structure and, and understanding of the capacity that they can do and, and the risk is less because they're, they're doing everything well and know what their capabilities are. Whereas, you know, the olden days that the athletes didn't run marathons very often, they would run one a year or one every two years or one every Olympics almost. And, and it was way out of their capacity that. Way out of their lane almost. And, and you know, it's just the way technology's changed with training and, and equipment is just. It's such a better race to watch now.

Yeah, absolutely. Not to overshadow some other big things happening in the world. You know, Kona women's race is on this weekend and we do want to get into the topic because we, you know, the whole goal of the podcast is to help you with training. But yeah, it's just exciting to see some of these events and it's going to be really exciting to see what happens with the women's race again once this podcast comes out. The race will have happened, but it's one of the strongest fields, if not definitely the strongest field ever at Kona. A lot of hype around Kona this year because the men's had their world champs in France and now the women get coned themselves.

Yeah, I'm super excited for this race. And as you said, there's so many women who can win this race and it's, it's. You've got your favorites and, and they're all in form. Having a race just for women, I think is brilliant. The whole focus is. Is not being split between men and women. It's just on. On the women's race and that, that would be a first, I think. I think the PTO do that well as well. But for Ironman and Kona, this has never happened before where Kona just has women racing on its own. And, and now instead of having a small amount of women and small amount of men combined on the one day, we've got a full field of just women. And I think it's given more opportunity for. For, for women to qualify. Some. Some people say that it's thinned the standard down, but I don't think that's necessarily true. And I actually read an article in the triathlete magazine dispelling that theory. And the. They were doing the medium of most of the times had improved, if not the depth was still fine. And it's a bit disrespectful to say that there's only a few really good women in each age group and the standard drops off very quickly. That may have been true a long time ago, but that's actually not the case now. There's some unbelievably talented age group athletes and of course the pro field is as deep as it's ever been and the amount of people who can win this race is not limited to two, it's limited. Ten or 15 people have an opportunity here and I can't wait to see how it, how it pans out. And I love the fact that there's no male riders around them so they have to ride themselves. That has what been happening over the, the, the 10 or 20 or 30 years that triathlon's been running side by side with men and women in the same race. There's, there's artificial assistance and not intentional but just guys are in the way and, and the women you know, are getting, are getting to ride with guys, age groupers who are not assisting them, but they are assisting them and, and.

That not even trying to age groupers, you know, there, there's back end pro guys who are getting caught by the, you know, the front pack pro females. And so that is an even bigger advantage because they're actually, you know, enough to go similar pace.

So yeah, so it's, it's going to be great and I'm excited to see, see what happens. Can't wait.

Quick shout out to one of our female athletes, Leanne, who is rocking representing Tribolo at Kona. Very exciting to have a tribalo athlete go to Kona and yeah, we love it when an athlete gets over there and qualifies. And for her, this will be her. I hate that I don't know the number. I think it's 17th Iron man, something like that. She's done an insane amount. But Kona has been the big one. A big bucket list item that she's never been able to do. And so she's finally able to get there this year and she's had a lot of interruptions. Classic age group athlete managing three kids who have just been sick all of winter, the entire winter, which is completely interrupted her training. She had a lot more interruptions. It's been an absolute war battle for her to get there. And so big shout out to her for getting over there, getting through with it. Even though her training has been completely interrupted. The most least ideal training. You can have a Kona but her mindset is just no, I've wanted this for so long. I qualified, I'M going going to do the race. It's going to hurt. But she's there so I can't wait to see how she goes. A big shout out to her.

Last thing we I was just going to say, yeah, having been to Leanne's house and met her little children, she's just such a lovely human being and I really wish her well and can't wait to see her with a big smile when she comes down Alihi Drive and completes the the event that she's been striving to do for all these years. And it will be such a buzz for her and no matter what shape she's in or state she's in, she'll still be smiling because that's the sort of person she is. She's a big happy person to be around. And yeah, really good luck.

Last thing, we won't, we literally will just mention this, but so much happening cycling that we'll probably get to at some point in the next few podcasts with a lot of team movements, riders moving teams, mergers happening, et cetera, which is, it's very interesting to see, you know, what happens in the next few years or next year or next season with a lot of these changes and not jumbo not being so much for powerhouse anymore if they lose roglage and they just have big guard, etc. But I said it before, I say it again, that the purpose of this podcast isn't for just us to chat about the sport we love. It's to talk about training and the importance of getting over training right. And we really just want to make sure that if you're an athlete, endurance athlete specifically, you're so susceptible to this. But we want to give make sure you understand the warning signs of what over training can be and what you should be striving for to get right. Because dad, constantly you're really pushing athletes to, to adhere to the warning signs because you hear it from them and you get them to stop as soon as you can so that they don't fall into this trap and potentially do some long term damage.

Yeah, and it's really hard when you're an age grouper and it's probably harder when you're a professional. The things that go through your mind are as a professional, I am doing this full time. It's my livelihood, it's my income and I can't be not training. And the perception from outside is that you're not doing enough. And it's really hard to be strict on yourself and be honest with yourself and transparent with yourself about how, how am I going in terms of my fatigue levels. And that's a hard one. And that's, that's where the coach athlete relationship has to be really good. And one of the things that we do in our interviews when we have people join is that I say to people, I'm going to be in your personal space and I don't mean to do that intentionally, but that's the only way we're going to work well together. As if I know everything about what's going on in your life and that is really interfering in your personal life. That, that is a necessary part of the athlete coach relationship. And if you're not willing to do that, then you will hit hurdles along the way. Because if you're not open and honest about what is happening and how you're feeling, because you're super motivated, you're not listening to the warning signs and the coach isn't getting an understanding of how fatigued you are. So you're going to make poor decisions and the outcome is going to be terrible.

Yeah, the poor decision making is the biggest one, isn't it? Because you just don't have that objective view. And yeah, so often if you didn't really have to talk an athlete out of something, they would probably just be making these poor decisions and go down a bad path. And it's important to define the fact that overtraining is not just training too much. And that is, that's a really thing for people to understand. It's over. Training is anything from just an imbalance between too much load for what you can handle, too much load too quickly to what you can handle. But it doesn't matter if you're a pro athlete or a beginner athlete. It's, it's about how much load is it being applied to you compared to what you've been doing, compared to what your level you're at and compared to what you can handle. And it's, it's an imbalance of training versus recovery. It's imbalance of training versus other stresses in your life. You know, you might, your training load might not have increased, but other stresses in your life have, you know, and that can lead to lack of recovery. That can lead to a lot of other things going on in your body and in your world that make it so you're not recovering properly from the training and therefore you end up over training. So, yeah, it's important to start with the fact that it's not just training too much. And so there's other ways that Overtraining can come about. I think that's really important and why people can make poor decisions because they just think, well, I'm not training too much, I'm used to this loader, I've done more than this before. And that's not necessarily what's, what's causing the overtraining for you.

Stress is something that I just think we underestimate stress and load. And I don't mean that in just training. You can have stress from so many variables in your life. If you're single and you're wanting to find someone, have a relationship, if you're married and you've got three kids who are unwell, if you're a grandparent and you're worried about your children and their kids, if you're in an era where work is hard to find and your job is not secure, these are things that have enormous impact on your day to day stress. And that can be a burden that weighs you down so much that you can't actually function. And that's got nothing to do with training. It's totally to do with your life and what's happening in it. And there could be trauma in your family with someone getting terminally ill or someone dying. And all of these things that we don't consider as stressors, we just consider them as normal everyday functions of life. And they are, they are normal everyday functions of life. All of those things happen. But we don't, we don't give it kudos or credit for the impact it has on our day to day existence. And this is the area that I think is so overlooked that it's almost got to a point where I'm saying to people who I feel are heading down this track, you need to stop training, get rid of one of the stresses. And training is probably the biggest stressor on you physically. And you're not going to enjoy it anyway. So let's just stop training, go and deal with the things that are causing you to have a distraction. And I don't mean that in a flippant way, I mean the distraction. If your goal is to, to train for a particular event and there are so many roadblocks being put in front of you, it's almost like, well, far out. Is this really worth it to do this event? And my answer is all the time, no. What's happening in your life, apart from your training is more important than what's happening in your training life. So fix up the stuff that's causing the massive stress so that you can actually enjoy the thing that's your release from all of those things. You know, we, we're doing this sport, whether it's bike riding or triathlon or, or marathon running or cyclocross or gravel riding. It doesn't matter what we've chosen. We're doing it because that's our passion and that's the thing we love to do. We, we love to spend our time, our leisure time doing something that's enjoyable. And the minute that starts becoming not enjoyable, it's just adding to the other stresses that you've already got. So the first thing I'm saying to athletes, and I think they get shocked, is you need to stop training. You need to get rid of this goal and reset and select another goal down the track. Once you're on top of the things that are causing you to be so unhappy. And this is one of the things that is a measuring stick is happiness. And people think that happiness is just something that happens on a day to day. You'll be, you'll be serious for one period of, of work and, and you need to concentrate and you know, there's no time to muck around and, and have some fun periods. And then there's times where you want to have fun and you're in your out socializing and it's all about being happy and fun. But you need to have that continuously through your life. You need to have that every day. You need to have periods of serious or periods of fun. You can't just segregate them into now I'm going to have fun, now we're going to be serious. You need to have that together so that the balance is you are actually enjoying what you're doing. And, and I know for a fact that if I like doing something, I will get a good result from it. And I'm not talking about sport, I'm talking about coaching for example, is my chosen career. I can't get enough of seeing my athletes improve. I just, it's like a drug almost. I just love seeing people get the best out of themselves. And whether that's going from a 1 hour 10k to a 58 minute 30 10k, that's a buzz for me. That's improvement. That they've never broken an hour for 10k running and all of a sudden they've smashed it by a minute and a half. And that's something that's happening to me daily. So I can't wait to wake up and find out who's done what and how well they've done. And of course there's going to be athletes who are, who are doing the opposite. They're struggling, they're having a really tough time, they're not enjoying it, they're not happy, they're not succeeding, they're not improving. And that to me is just as important as the ones who are doing everything well. And that's my challenge, that's my hard days, is to find out what I can do better for those people and the people who are on their journey. I just sit back and watch and go, how good is this? This is so much fun to watch people succeed. And almost every weekend I've got both outcomes. I've got people who are not performing the way they want and I've got people who are outstandingly performing. So, so these are things that I am loving doing and therefore I'm probably doing a better job at my, at my coaching business because I actually like doing it. And it's fun for me because I've set it up in a way that the athletes I'm coaching, if they do it well, will get the outcome thereafter. So, so I've almost set, set myself a job where if I do my job really well, the outcome for everybody that I'm helping will be a positive one. Without going into any more detail, if you enjoy what you're doing, you will have more success than if you don't enjoy it. And that's gotta be the number one goal, I feel.

Yeah, and it's just such a relevant point because we're going to talk about heaps of warning signs of over training, but ultimately, you know, when someone's sick, injured, they've overtrained. You know, training is becoming more stressful in life. It's, it takes away from the overall arching goal are always pushing and that's enjoyment and improvement, but enjoyment as well. So let's look at some key warning signs and what. And warning factors of overtrain. The first one is poor training sessions performance. So specifically in the session, you're not hitting targets. The session feels like crap compared to normal. It's not just, it's not just a general feeling of tired. It's actually when you go to do the session, you, the workouts are a mess themselves. You know, they're, you're way off for your normal numbers or even way off. You just, you really can't get to the top of the range like you normally can. You feel sluggish and heavily. It takes a little bit of recovery.

Yeah, look, I, I think this is a really tough one to manage because the motivated athlete is always going to put aside in their mind their negative feelings, tired feelings, fatigue feelings because they're so driven. And that's a great mindset to have, but sometimes it actually is detrimental to your improvement. So you've got to really be honest and try and rate your, your feelings each day. That's what, that's what really helps me. If I'm waking up and thinking, far out, I still haven't recovered from yesterday that well, I've got to really be careful on today's session. Even though it says I'm supposed to be doing a VO2 set or a threshold session set, when I warm up, I'm really looking how I'm going in the warm up. And if, if, you know, a lot of our warm ups are very similar. When we're doing high intensity training, we're going to use a period where we're going to get the blood flow, where it's easy pedaling and then we're going to do some sort of ramp and then we're going to do some sort of hard effort to get us ready for the main set. And in that ramp and hard effort, if I'm struggling, that's going to be my key indicator. And, and if I've already got questions on my mind before I start the training session, then I'm looking to the warm up to see how I, how I think I'm going to actually go with the main set. And if I get to that main set and I'm not feeling it, there is no way you should be actually doing that training session. You should, there's many options you can do. You can look at the training session and go, okay, let's do exactly what it's written on the program, but knock it back by 30% or 40% if we have to. Just do the session as it's written, but take off the power expectations and before you know it, you've actually got a good outcome. You've still done a training session, you've done it in zone one or zone two and you've lived to find another day. And that's a hard thing to do for a motivated athlete and it's okay.

To do that for a one off session. Something might have happened, you might have had a repo sleep or it's just that day feeling sluggish and then you find the next high intensity session. You bash norm, that's great. But if, then, if it's repeated then you need to start thinking what's going on here? Why is this repeating itself and why can't I hit any of the sessions properly? Point number two warning number two is sickness or injury. And as endurance athletes our immune systems are constantly on edge and it's so easy to tip it over when you try to balance such a high volume training load. And when you're over training, you might be frequently getting sick or it's taking you longer than normal to recover from sickness and you're much more susceptible to little needles that you know, if, if left unchecked, turn into potential volunteer injuries. And that is just super frustrating. Something to really look out for.

Yeah, there's two parts to this, the sickness and the injury side of it. The sickness is, is a difficult one and, and I've got that many examples of athletes that I'm coaching who've got young kids and some of them are in daycare, some of them are in primary school, secondary school, some jobs where they're socializing in offices. And the example during COVID we had very few people sick because no one was interacting at work because everybody was at home, no kids were going to school or daycare. So pretty much we had a period of, you know, just in our own little area here in Melbourne and Australia, we had a 12 week period where no one is actually allowed to move around the city area. So I had almost no one sick. And that's never been that case in all of the coaching that I've ever had. And it was because no one was interacting and spreading, spreading the diseases that are common in everyday life. And now we're back to normal living. The amount of sickness we've had this winter has been at a high, all time high. And I've had numerous athletes that I'm coaching getting sick three and four times. And we've had these really hard discussions where when you're training with a structured program, your immune system is going to be at its limit. So you really need to be careful about what's happening in your everyday family situation. If people are coming home sick and there's sickness in your house, you need to be really careful about how hard you're training. And one particular guy is, you know, we've actually had to knock off any intensity when there's sickness in his house because he will get it, no doubt about it, because he's sitting on the edge of, you know, training really hard. And your immune system is being stressed to the maximum. But from the training structure and from the program you're doing because you're training hard for a particular event and from the stresses of life and your kids Being sick and all those things are really putting you on the limit. And you know, any hesitation you will get sick because you are sitting on the fence of, of over training. And so the goal is, and it's hard again if you're motivated to pull back when you know that there's sickness in the house and just be careful and, and do things like look at your heart rate variability or your resting heart rate when you wake up and you know, I, I put that on our notes in training peaks each week for our athletes. You know, watch your, what's your resting heart rate on a Monday morning and if it's you know, abnormally different, lower or higher, then it's, it's cause for us to have a discussion. And you know, I encourage people to have that every day but if at least doing it once a week, you know, from the, the sessions you've done over the weekend will, will make or break what, what's going to happen in that next week. So sickness is something that, that really does cause almost the most problems in, in consistency in training.

Yeah. And that's our next two points. Point three and four is you know, check your daily resting heart rate or check your heart rate variability and you know the, the daily resting heart rate again that, that could change due to many factors but it's more the consistent, you know, kind of exaggerated change that you're looking for. If suddenly your heart rate is, is 5 to 10 beats plus higher than normal and you start to and it happens over one period after one day then that's kind of a warning sign that you need to look for. And one other point to mention with, with injury of super medicine is muscle soreness is also can also sometimes be a warning sign that you're getting way more sore than normal and that that isn't could be abnormal and something to look for.

Look with injury, the second part of the sickness injury point you've just got to be sensible with your injuries. You can't push through them. That is the worst thing to do. You need to rest the minute you're injured. Don't try and push through things that's going to cause you long term problems. So it's easy to say oh it's only a slight niggle here and there but it could turn into something chronic and that's what we want to try and avoid. So you've got to be aware of what's happening and make notes in your training peaks again about how you're feeling with, with niggles and if they become daily then stop what you're doing in terms of if it's a running injury or a riding injury or swimming injury.

The next one is low motivation. And this can be low motivation to train or just low motivation in general. And people can describe being so fatigued that they've got, you know, brain fog, mental fog, or they've just lost the will to train. And how many times have someone called you up data? It's taken you, taken them a while to kind of muster up this call because they might feel like they're letting you down and they just say, I'm so sorry. You're kind of going, what's going on? Training? Like it's just not making sense and are you sick? Are you injured? And they just go, I'm so sorry. And I'm not, I just, I just can't do it. I just can't train. And this is not a one off conversation about, you've had it many times and it's important to have that conversation. You just go straight away, stop, stop what you're doing.

It's a key one and I think that it's the most underrated one. If you're, as we said at the start of the podcast, if you're not enjoying what you're doing and, and that will lead to, there could be a lot of reasons for it. And you know, one of the reasons could be that you've actually been training to the wrong number and you can't hit all your targets and you lose motivation because you're failing every training session. That's a simple example of how I could be so demotivated because I can't even do the training session the way it's supposed to be performed. But it could be because you actually not got the right FTP number or right pace per, per kilometer to run to. And that could be as demotivating as actually losing the want or the desire to train to keep your fitness going. So there's so many variations in this motivation that can come out to the same outcome that you've lost the desire and the will to want to continue. And my conversation is really a hard one. I'm always saying, look, if you're not enjoying this and you've lost motivation to train, stop doing it and wait till you're actually ready to train again. And you'll know, you'll know when you're feeling like, oh, you see some runners going as you're in the car driving to work and you see people running along the road or riding their bike and look like they're having fun and, and you, if you've got that desire to, to want to do that again, that's a sign that you're ready to, to start again. But you've got to have think long and hard about what's caused the motivation to be dropping off. What are you not happy about? You have to ask yourself those hard questions before you just come back and re. Return to the cycle that actually got you to, to be low motivation, low motivated again. So there is a real lot of questions you have to be asking yourself here, you know, around what's causing it in the first place.

And people are so often relieved when the coach says, just stop, it's okay. And just to hear that objectively, people just go, oh, wow, that is a, that is a weight off my shoulders. And, and whether it was the fear of letting the coach down or fear of letting, you know, family members down because you committed to this goal, or fear letting themselves down because, you know, they really wanted to do this race and suddenly they put so much pressure on themselves to get there. And for someone else to say, you don't have to do this, you know, there are other races, there's other opportunities to come. If you're not enjoying this, stop for now. It will come back and just that weight off for a little bit. And sometimes it's, it's much shorter than anticipated. You know, sometimes people go off the program and then very soon after, exactly like the same. They see other people training, they might watch an inspiring race, they might listen to an inspiring podcast and bang, it comes back pretty quickly. So sometimes it is about just taking that pressure off.

And look, that's, that's another indicator over training. If you're just so fatigued that you can't actually think straight, it's more than likely you're training too long and too hard and, and, you know, just taking a rest. And I've got one great example of one of the athletes last year who has always nailed the training sessions. And it's been one of those guys who's, who absolutely does everything to, to its, its description and I love the way he goes about it. And all of a sudden he started to not do well in the training sessions and was getting a little bit frustrated with himself that he couldn't hit the targets. And, and it was a clear sign to me. Eventually we worked out that he was absolutely overtrained. And, and it wasn't from the training that he was overtrained. It was because of his work. There was so much stress at work that he was absolutely exhausted by the time he got home to start to train. But he still wanted to tick off the training sessions. But he was so fatigued, hadn't drank water during the day, hadn't eaten well, had stress from meetings at work, was working long hours and trying to fit in these sessions. And it was actually that was what was causing him absolute issue where he couldn't train properly. So eventually we said, right, take the whole week off. And you know, that was hard for him because he's so, so motivated and didn't want to do that but, but it was the best thing. And literally three to four weeks later he started to train properly again. And I think four or five months later he's, since that happened, he's nailed his 10K PBS, he's nailed FTPs and his swim, swim performances in time trialing and you know, he's knocked off three and four minutes off his, off his 10k time trial. And that's a great outcome from someone who just listened to the advice and then took the time off and almost started fresh again.

Yeah, the next point is, kind of follows on from this slow motivation, but it's significant changes in mood. And the keyword there is significant. So, yeah, know if you find that you're more agitated or irritable than normal or you're sad or you're more tense than normal, maybe depressed or angry or confused, again, that brain fog you're talking about, you can't think straight. These are all pretty clear indicators that something might be going on. But as I said, the key word is significant because you can't generalize it to just being agitated or sad. It's if you're more agitated than normal. Because if you're an easily agitated person or an easily tense person, then that doesn't necessarily mean you're a train. But if that change is more than normal. So, and that's a really key point to make and the next one off that is it kind of relates to the first point about finding the training sessions tough, but it's higher perceived exertion. So not only are you training probably worse, you're not hitting the numbers, but everything feels a lot harder than it should.

Yeah, well, both of those points you've made with the significant changes in your mood and then the sessions are way harder. They're kind of related, but they're, but they're not. But just on that significant changes in mood, you know, if you, if you, if there's something happened in your life that's, that's caused you so much anxiety that you can't even think about training, then that's a sign, like over training that you need to stop doing that. You need to sort out what's happening in your life before you can actually get focused back with, with the training. You've heard me talk about the triangle of love, where work, family and your training, your passion, if one of those sides of that triangle is under stress and collapses, the whole triangle collapses. And to even consider to train is a bad idea. And you just need to park the training for one day, one week, one month, or whatever it takes you to get your life anxiety problems, issues sorted. And, and that's, it's a hard one because everybody's on a scale of getting this. You know, things are going well each day. You know, this can, this can build up over a period of time. It only takes one thing to tip it over the edge and before you know it, you're actually quite depressed about everything. And one thing can cause issues that will skyrocket and spiral out of control. And, and that's the time where training becomes insignificant to some people, but can actually be a lifesaver for others to let them not focus on the things that are really getting them down. Going running for an hour or half an hour, where you have to concentrate or get any other bike, we have to concentrate on other things other than the things that are depressing. You can be a good thing, but it also can be a bad thing. So there's both ways to look at it.

That was the key point I wanted to make, is we probably haven't done a good enough job in this episode of clarifying exactly what we mean by parking the training. Because there are the extreme examples where you're telling someone, stop training entirely, do not touch the bike. Like just have some time away from it. And that is quite an extreme case, but it does get there. Whereas sometimes when you're saying park the training here because there's work, life struggles, you're not saying don't train at all. You're just saying start with the structured program, Start with The high intensity VO2 sets that are, that cause a lot of stress in the body. You know, just for the next couple weeks, just ride your bike for enjoyment, just go for running, for enjoyment, just get in the water, swim, go for an ocean swim, do zone one and two stuff. Go ride with your mates if you need to. That's the kind of thing you're talking about when you say back off the training. It's often the training structure and the you know, the really intense kind of training load and week that happens when you're preparing for an, a race that can be a problem. And so you're saying that I think this is really important to people to know that we are, we love training and racing and it's our whole profession but you're so willing to park that to make sure that other things in life are taken care of and that's really important. But yeah, we really want to make that distinction that we're not always saying stop trying entirely because as you just said, exercise can sometimes be the best thing for you when you're having a bad day and you really want to get your mood back up.

And look, most of the people are in this for the long term and the short term gain from, from just having a little bit of a break from that. And then a year or two or three years later, that little two or three weeks you had off, you're still a way better athlete in two or three years time because of that decision you made. Because you love, you obviously love the sport and that's why you've engaged a coach and, and you've committed so much of your time and your money into, into this sport that you're doing. Just look at the big picture and you know this is something you want to be a part of for quite a long time, then it's okay to actually not be consistent. We do bang on about consistency as king. It's okay to not do that for a short period of time. And in over, over two years, two or three weeks is so minor. Over a month, two or three weeks is most of the month. So it becomes really major in that small minded thinking instead of thinking of thinking of the big picture and down the track.

Well, consistency is king and it's better if you back off the training and stay consistent and keep your frequency of training up then continuing the high intensity training and then running yourself into the ground and over training. So the last point here is poor sleeping. This one's very self explanatory. But yeah, if you're sleeping poorly again, more abnormal than normal than usual, that can be a clear sign of over training. And we've both had experiences, dad, where you might just do a session that's just far too hard, not necessarily over training, but you just do a session late at night that just pushes your body below what's capable and you have a shocking night's sleep after and that's just a one off. But if that's happening continuously, then yeah, that's that that can be a clear sign and that's a small one to finish off with. But I did want to kind of point everyone to finish off the last couple of minutes just with some, some key do's to do instead. We've spoken about throughout these topics but just some really quick solutions. And the first, first one is, is your kind of go to and that's just kind of rest or back off.

And these are really important. We talked about all the issues, now we want to actually come up with some solutions as you just said. So resting is the number one thing you should do when you're under any type of stress, tension, anxiety over training, feeling sickness, injury. The first go to thing is rest and that can't be any more self explanatory and it doesn't mean rest forever. It means find out how long you need to and then monitor that period until you're ready to go again. An example would be I've just had one of our athletes twist her ankle in the, in the finish line of a race on the weekend. Twist her ankle really badly and looking like she's going to be out for three, four weeks with some key important races coming up. We've done everything right from Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday and all of a sudden the three days of rest that we've, we've forced her to do with no swimming, riding or running and all of a sudden the ankle's feeling way better already because we've done all the right things and before you know it she's going to be back training again actually tomorrow, which is quite a remarkable turnaround by just doing the resting properly.

And that's kind of the overarching theme here. And I'm going to fly through the rest of the kind of solutions just to be aware of or just to look for. And we have kind of touched on all these throughout the episode. But one is the tribal of love. Assess that the life balance work, life training, what's happening there? Is there part of it that's, that's making the rest of it crumble? Yeah. Prioritize recovery. We spoke about that. Prioritize good nutrition. That is a key one. If you're really not, if you're not recovering well for training sessions, are you getting your nutrition right pre and post, pre during and post training? That's a massive one. I often see athletes not doing well, going for the endurance rides and they're not feeling properly after monitor your increases in training load. So we've had experts on here before that really talk about not doing Dramatic increases of training load of over 10 per session or per week. And that's just a kind of rule to look at. If you start to think you're over training, look at your progression of training load. It has it been too aggressive then? The last one I want to say was if you're concerned about your sickness or your health, potentially an injury or nutrition, you know, you're not fueling yourself properly, see a professional about any area that you're concerned about with any of this. If you're not sleeping well, go see your doctor and talk to them about that. Yeah, if you're feeling recovering fuel wise. Yeah, go see a nutritionist and yeah, if there's any area that you're kind of concerned about and you're getting these warning signals. Yeah, go see a professional and just see if it's something to be worried about or if it's just a one off. Any comments from you on that?

Yeah, absolutely. The seeking help and advice is almost critical to getting the right outcome. And I'm a big believer in taking notes each day whether you use your training peaks post activity notes section to alert the coach who's reading, reading everything. Looking at your session and reading your notes gets a really quick, clear picture of your mindset and how you're feeling. And, and two or three days of I feel fatigue, I don't feel like I'm going well, I'm on, you know, I'm intervening straight away because I've got good communication from my athletes. So, so seek help whether it's your coach and then the next step is medical advice or so some sort of a professional in the area where you're struggling. And, and that is, that is a key thing. And look, the other one we talked about was the, the training load and I've just had a classic example of one of our guys training for the Basso Ironman where he's absolutely nailing the swim and the bike and his running has come back from an injury. It's been a long period of injury where we've, we've tried to bring him up slowly with all the rules that we use, where we're just trying to improve the load, you know, at a slow priority. But because the event's coming closer, we've had to jump the load a little bit quicker and instantly we got the injury niggles back. And that's a classic, classic example to me of even us making that mistake because we want to get the guy ready for a marathon. And you know, he's already, he's only running 20k and he needs to be running 25, 30. And we jumped up too quickly and the body can't cope with it. And, and so that's an example of, you know, picking a race that you're not actually ready for. And we've come to the conclusion already that, that, that we shouldn't be doing that race. And that's the decision we already have made. So they're examples of, of having to make hard decisions based on, you know, things that are going on in your life.

Yeah, and it's, it's almost like a blessing in disguise because his body clearly wasn't ready for that load. And sometimes if, if you went into something like a marathon under prepared like that, you might end up just injuring yourself in the race so badly because your body's not ready for it. So, yeah, it's kind of sometimes lucky that you get those little needles in training without, you know, getting the full injury. So that's it for this episode. We hope you enjoyed it. Join us again later this week for our weekly case study episode where we get real life examples of how our athletes have improved and what changes we made to get them there. If you'd like to be coached by us, you can go to our website. Apply for one on one coaching@www.tribalcoaching.com which again, our portal was malfunctioning recently and we had many people manage to contact us saying they hadn't heard back from us. If this was you, again, we are sorry. Please reach out to us again either by the website or you can contact us directly on somewhere like Instagram if you'd like to sponsor an episode of the podcast. If you think you'd be a good fit to sponsor an episode of the podcast, also please reach out to us directly. Thanks as always for being a listener and we'll see you in the next episode. It.