Identifying/Recovering From Overtraining

[jimoots]

Originally Posted by HenryA

How many and what quality of miles are you riding per week?

I’d be interested to know hours on the bike, weekly tss, how you structure your weeks and any information on your background in cycling.

Ultimately there’s overtraining and there’s overtraining. The first version being a little bit tired, the second version being a chronic condition that takes months to come back from.

My take would be to give yourself a few days with no bike and then introduce it gently with no intensity, sticking to zone 1 and maybe zone 2 if you feel like it. But definitely nothing past zone 2.

From there you really need to look at your structure, some pointers:

- 2-3 rides with intensity per week (ie sustained efforts above 75% ftp). Absolutely no more than 3 unless you are doing this as part of a training camp (ie intentional overload) that is followed by copious rest.
- The rest of your week should be zone 2 or below.
- Time outside of zone 2 (ie 75% ftp+) should not make up more than 20% of total ride time. This holds true even if you’re training 6-8 hours a week.
- Rest week after 3 weeks of training. Rest week should be half tss of your average when training.
- FTP test every 8-10 weeks to make sure you are training to the right numbers
- Get appropriate rest and recovery. Eat the right stuff. Avoid alcohol after a hard ride.

You can layer on more and more complexity but honestly if you follow those rules it’s difficult to genuinely overtrain.

[deluz]

I have had a long history of overtraining which I think is due in part to medical conditions, mainly Addison’s Disease.
Typically it would happen during a period of increasing intensity and duration with fewer days of rest or easy days. For me the symptoms are:

Insomnia
Chronic muscle soreness
Fatigue and weakness
Lack of recovery even after periods of rest.

Once I start to notice the symptoms if I don’t let up then after a few weeks it is like going off a cliff into a deep state of fatigue. Recovery time has been about six months. In bad cases I would have to stop all exercise for extended per of time. Not fun or pleasant. I have gotten better at noticing and acting on the warning signs and I also monitor my intensity with a heart monitor.
Being the competitive person I am it can be difficult to hold myself back at times, but the alternative is not good. At my peak I was riding about 200 miles a week with a 100 mile hilly ride once a week. This would be fine for many but was eventually beyond my capabilities.

[jrynb]

Originally Posted by jimmy-moots

I’d be interested to know hours on the bike, weekly tss, how you structure your weeks and any information on your background in cycling.

Ultimately there’s overtraining and there’s overtraining. The first version being a little bit tired, the second version being a chronic condition that takes months to come back from.

My take would be to give yourself a few days with no bike and then introduce it gently with no intensity, sticking to zone 1 and maybe zone 2 if you feel like it. But definitely nothing past zone 2.

From there you really need to look at your structure, some pointers:

- 2-3 rides with intensity per week (ie sustained efforts above 75% ftp). Absolutely no more than 3 unless you are doing this as part of a training camp (ie intentional overload) that is followed by copious rest.
- The rest of your week should be zone 2 or below.
- Time outside of zone 2 (ie 75% ftp+) should not make up more than 20% of total ride time. This holds true even if you’re training 6-8 hours a week.
- Rest week after 3 weeks of training. Rest week should be half tss of your average when training.
- FTP test every 8-10 weeks to make sure you are training to the right numbers
- Get appropriate rest and recovery. Eat the right stuff. Avoid alcohol after a hard ride.

You can layer on more and more complexity but honestly if you follow those rules it’s difficult to genuinely overtrain.

I can try to give a shortened explanation, but I'm happy to share my Strava or Intervals.icu if that would prove more helpful. I am writing up said explanation right now, but it's lacking enough data that I feel like sharing a link might be more helpful.

Looking through my data my main thought is that most of my easy or recovery rides have been pushing towards Z3 rather than staying within Z2.

[jimoots]

Originally Posted by jrynb

I can try to give a shortened explanation, but I'm happy to share my Strava or Intervals.icu if that would prove more helpful. I am writing up said explanation right now, but it's lacking enough data that I feel like sharing a link might be more helpful.

Looking through my data my main thought is that most of my easy or recovery rides have been pushing towards Z3 rather than staying within Z2.

That will do it, I would think if you correct that behaviour you’ll be sorted.

Some appropriate rest in the short term is warranted to get you back to “normal”

[Tandem Rider]

Originally Posted by jrynb

I can try to give a shortened explanation, but I'm happy to share my Strava or Intervals.icu if that would prove more helpful. I am writing up said explanation right now, but it's lacking enough data that I feel like sharing a link might be more helpful.

Looking through my data my main thought is that most of my easy or recovery rides have been pushing towards Z3 rather than staying within Z2.

My first full season as a newly minted CAT2 I had the opportunity to train frequently with a member of the National Team. The takeaway is that the easy days were so easy I rode at the same effort with my non-racer GF whenever he was out of town on a mission. That season saw my biggest jump in fitness in my lifetime. Recovery is vastly underrated by most cyclists. When in doubt, err on the side of recovery.

[jimoots]

Originally Posted by Tandem Rider

My first full season as a newly minted CAT2 I had the opportunity to train frequently with a member of the National Team. The takeaway is that the easy days were so easy I rode at the same effort with my non-racer GF whenever he was out of town on a mission. That season saw my biggest jump in fitness in my lifetime. Recovery is vastly underrated by most cyclists. When in doubt, err on the side of recovery.

Also, riding z1 and particularly z2 in volume has huge benefits for your aerobic system while not triggering “fatigue” in the same way that 75%+ of ftp will do.

But as you say; recovering properly is more important than doing the work… it’s the difference between adaptions and no adaptions,

[LouDeeter]

We all react differently. I'm not a racer and now in my 70s, but back 40 years ago, I did like to ride longer and harder. I found that the symptoms that caused me to take notice were general stress that led to increased irritability; immune issues such as colds and infections when they should not have happened; muscle soreness; and finally, lack of interest in going longer and harder once I warmed up. A couple of days of easy rides was all it usually took for me back then. Now, it's a sore knee that has convinced me that I can go long or I can go hard, but I can't go long and hard. Oh, I'm talking about biking...

[duff_duffy]

Anyone ever deal with overtraining? How long did you take off? How do you know when it’s time to get back into it the game?

[Baron Blubba]

.

[prototoast]

Are you feeling mostly mental or physical symptoms? There's a pretty wide spectrum of what might be considered overtraining.

Mild/physical overtraining: you're riding too much that you can't hit your best performance measures.
Severe/physical training: you're riding too much that you're chronically fatigued and it's impairing your ability to function both on the bike and off.
Crazy overtraining: rhabdomyolysis.
Mental overtraining: you're riding too much that you have lost all enthusiasm for it, and you're doing it out of some sense of obligation.

What exactly are you feeling right now?

[AngryScientist]

merging as we recently did this with some good input...

[Likes2ridefar]

I did one race season when I went from April to November racing pretty much every weekend both days and training 4 to 5 days a week plus commuting 20 miles a day on my bike Monday thru Friday. By September my legs were toast.

It wasn’t obvious and probably set in over a period of time. I lost my snap in the legs, would crack earlier than expected, and couldn’t recover during a race like I normally would. No matter what it felt like I’d hit a wall after a certain time period into the races, and as I was moving into cat 1 then the distances were long and levels were intense it didn’t help matters.

I ended up taking 2 weeks off not touching the bike in late September, and that helped but i still wasn’t back to normal until the next season with more focused training over the winter and a big reduction in miles for a period of time. The next year I came back stronger than ever and had one of my best seasons later in that year.

[.RJ]

I went through this in 2021, partially due to poor mental health and covid boredom. My training crashed and it took me a solid 6 months to dig myself out of the overtraining part.

A few thoughts that might help -

- The total training load is important, but only part of the whole story. As humans we're complex systems, interacting with other humans. You need to look at both the training load, both current and historical context, and also the load on the rest of your life - work stresses, relationship stresses, sleep quality, recovery or lack thereof. Its messy and hard to quantify.

- Get a handle on your overall health - do you have a history of any conditions? Any history of blood work tracking? If not get a full panel done - and not just the usual stuff that your GP might recommend as part of a physical, really dive in - thyroid, testosterone, or anything else based on symptoms that may warrant further examination. Now would be a good time to find an endocrinologist if you dont have one - for a baseline if nothing else. But you may have contributing factors, I sure did - my endocrine system was an absolute mess, and I think this was the symptom and not the cause.

- Diet and rest - is it good enough? Just be honest with yourself about it. If you sleep poorly, dont have a good mattress, drink too much, or arent eating healthy, simply prepared food then you're not recovering well.

- What does your regular training schedule look like? If you are constantly smashing yourself, or not taking lighter/rest weeks, you'll dig yourself into a hole - and combined with other factors can accelerate overtraining.