Training for an endurance or ultra endurance event is similar to a dose-response assessment.
The goal of this type of scientific test is to determine the required dose to produce a specific outcome (or response). Sadly, when it comes to endurance athletes, far too many athletes are doing work without eliciting a positive or beneficial response.
As it relates to training, the right amount of stress can produce significant fitness gains but too much stress results in high risk of injury, sickness, overtraining and burnout. Not enough stress is simply exercising and doesn't induce favorable change in physiology for race readiness. Training stress shouldn't be associated just with weekly volume as the athlete training 8 hours a week can be as vulnerable to overtraining as the athlete training 20 hours a week.
So why is it that so many endurance and ultra endurance athletes are training so much and so hard but struggling with recovery, body composition, health issues and/or performance gains?
As training stress increases (often in the form of increased intensity, frequency and volume), your lifestyle choices must also change in order to respond to the added stress on your body.
- Energy/calorie/nutrient needs to increase
- Recovery needs to increase (ex. easy workout, rest days)
- Sleep needs to increase
- Lifestyle stress needs to decrease (work, emotional, travel, relationship)
Unfortunately, this is rarely the case.
Endurance athletes fall victim to green-box syndrome (checking off workout so the workout turns green or pass, instead of red or fail) and will prioritize the completion of workouts at the cost of poor sleep, poor nutrition and inadequate recovery in an already stressful and busy life. It's not uncommon for athletes to sleep, eat and recover less as training volume increases - talk about the contradiction of what is needed to optimize performance and to support health!
Overtraining is a physiological state caused by an excess accumulation of physiological, psychological, emotional, environmental and training stress. With overtraining being heavily misunderstood and misdiagnosed, there are strong links between overtraining and undereating. It doesn't matter how much/little you are training - if your body is not responding well to training stress and you are not balancing your training with lifestyle stress, you'll consistently struggle to make improvements and even worse, you'll experience setbacks related to mental and physical health.
As an athlete, you have a responsibility to your body to provide it with proper nutrition, fuel, sleep and recovery in order to support all the physiological functions needed in order to maintain optimal health. Eating enough, timing nutrition with training and utilizing well-formulated sport nutrition products are critical to the healthy functioning of the nervous, metabolic, nervous, cardiac and musculoskeletal systems - all which must be at full strength in order to encourage adaptations.
I constantly struggle to understand the reason why as training volume/intensity increases, athletes assume it's ok to eat, sleep and recover less.
A well-planned and organized diet, with enough energy (calories) and nutrients to fuel and refuel the body is essential to overall health as you train for an endurance event. Your daily diet provides the nutrients needed to rebuild and repair muscle tissue, restock glycogen (fuel) stores in the muscle and liver, maintain immune system health and keep vitamin and mineral stores within the recommended range. Because overtraining and overfueling walk hand in hand, if you are underfueling, your body has to work harder to complete a workout. Many cases of overtraining attribute to underfueling.
Signs of Underfueling (which are also common in overtraining)
- Fatigue, low energy levels
- Decrease in performance or fitness plateau
- Low motivation and difficulty concentrating
- Decreased muscle strength
- Constant hunger or no appetite
- Irritability, mood changes
- Difficulty sleeping at night
- GI distress
- Muscle cramps
- Cold intolerance
- Frequent sickness or injury
- Stress fractures
- Changes in menstrual cycle (for women)
- Significant changes in body composition
- Low sex drive
- Unintentional - Not all undereating is intentional. Lack of proper knowledge about how much food/calories is needed to support endurance training can result in undereating. Additionally, limited time for grocery shopping/meal prep, dislike for cooking, financial reasons, poor meal planning, busy schedules and a loss of appetite can all impact undereating.
- Desire to lose weight - You must fuel your current body, not diet in an attempt to try to achieve the body you think you should have. Forcing your body to lose weight from food and sport nutrition restriction adds extra stress to your body. By eating enough to fuel your specific training needs, you can make sure your body has what it needs to adapt to training and to rebuild during recovery.
- Social pressures - Similar to the desire to lose weight, body dissatisfaction can increase the risk of disordered eating patterns. It's important to remember that the so-called "ideal" body doesn't exist. Bodies come in all sizes and shapes. Don't let social pressures to look a certain way cause you to undereat.
- Unintentional - Busy schedules and stressful lives leave little time to recover well from training. Remember - adaptations from training occur through recovery. Just because you complete a workout, this doesn't mean you are "gaining" anything from the session. If you are not making time to adequately fuel, hydrate and recover from your workouts, it will be very hard for your body to adapt.
- Training program - When a training program is appropriately designed, it will allow for gradual progression of volume/intensity and consistent adaptations. This will likely result in meaningful performance improvements. However, if training is rushed, developmental steps are skipped or too much volume/intensity/frequency is loaded on the body at once, the athlete has not built up resiliency and tolerance to training and thus, overtraining may result from too much training stress and fatigue.
- Personality - Athletes who have a compulsive and perfectionist personality type are driven to work hard. While in moderation, these traits are beneficial to staying motivated to train, the concern is when athletes go to extreme. Additionally, a preoccupation with body image, food and exercise obsession can cause an athlete to push the body beyond healthy limits.
Do yourself a favor and look out for your mental and physical health. As an athlete, you are nothing without your health. Because overtraining (and burnout) is heavily linked with undereating, here are a few questions that may be helpful for a weekly check-in:
- Are my energy and mood levels stable throughout the day?
- Am I sleeping well (falling asleep quickly and sleeping restfully throughout the night)?
- Is my HR elastic when I train (can easily increase and decrease dependent on the effort/intensity)?
- Am I able to be present and focused to life outside of training (ex. work, family, relationships, etc.)?
- Am I relying heavily on caffeine to stay alert throughout the day?
- Do I constantly feel hungry or no urge to eat throughout the day?
- Am I increasing my recovery, sleep and nutrition to support my increase in training load?
- Am I enjoying my training load?
- Am I enjoying foods that I normally enjoy eating?
- Do I feel deep fatigue/soreness which is affecting my ability to execute workouts as planned?
- Am I taking my recovery and easy days seriously?
- Is my mood significantly affected by my training?