Signs You Might Be Overtraining

Before you had a regular fitness routine in place it was probably hard to imagine getting to a point where you might be overtraining, but it happens all the time. And for those who are used to getting more out of life the more work they put in, overtraining can be a tough habit to break. Overtraining can not only put the body at risk for injury, but not giving the body enough time to recover can also lead to lower outputs therefore lower results over all. Here are some signs that you might be overtraining.

You Can’t Finish a Normal Workout

If you’re simply too tired to get through a normal round of sets, or your sprints are seriously lagging, you just might be tired and need a day off. It’s not a sign of failure to have reached the point of muscle fatigue, it actually means you did a darn good job getting there. You should be getting stronger as you workout, so when you reach weak stages it’s a good sign you’re due for some resting to recover. Take a day off or switch to different muscle groups and see if anything changes with your energy levels.

You’re Getting Fatter

If you haven’t changed anything dramatic in your diet and you’re hitting the gym every day but you keep gaining fat, it might be because you’re overtraining. It sounds counterintuitive but when you workout too much it creates stress on the body, and that ongoing stress releases excess cortisol into the body, which can literally cause you to start retaining fat. Another that thing happens during excess stress is that your testosterone levels drop, and both of those hormonal changes together can lead to a breakdown of muscle tissue as well as an increase in fat storage.

You’re Having Trouble Sleeping

If you’re training hard every day and laying awake tossing and turning at night, it might be because you’re working out too much. In healthy amounts working out should actually help you sleep, and skipping sleep means that your body isn’t getting the proper time to recover that it needs. But overtraining can keep your nervous system hyped up, and it’s easy to see how this could continue to go in the wrong direction if you don’t take a day off here and there.

Your Body is Hurting

Muscle soreness is normal, but often when we reach a point of overtraining everything starts to hurt, even weird parts of our body that we didn’t know we were working out. Just feeling run down in general or getting sick more often can be a sign that you’re over training as well. When you over train and throw off your hormones it can lower the immune system, inviting in sicknesses you would be able to avoid in a fully healthy state. To reverse over training, all you need to do is back off for a couple days and make sure that you get plenty of sleep. You should start to feel energized again pretty quickly.