BEYOND THE RAGGED EDGE: ARE YOU OVERTRAINING?

Afew weeks ago I was approached by a 38-year-old cyclist looking for advice on overtraining. This rider – let’s call him Rob – had returned to training four years ago after an extended break and was now building up towards the cyclo-cross season. But he had noticed an unwelcome pattern in his training. Each time he put together a consistent eight to 12 weeks of hard work, he told me, he would then experience a lack of motivation, prolonged fatigue and an inability to complete his usual sessions. Freshness would return only after several weeks off the bike. Rob wondered whether he was becoming overtrained at the end of each training block.

There was no easy answer. The symptoms Rob described to me – lack of motivation and fatigue – can be a necessary part of healthy and normal training, given that, in order to induce an improvement in performance, we need to apply training stress. In the short term, this results in feelings of fatigue and a drop in performance. The upside is that, with adequate rest, the body adapts to this training stress and we see something called ‘supercompensation’ (see diagram below), i.e.