Avoiding Overtraining: How to Stay Active Without Harming Your Body

Pushing your body without proper recovery can lead to overtraining syndrome (OTS), a condition that drains both physical performance and mental well-being. As athletes age, this imbalance can become easier to overlook and more important to recognize early.

We spoke with HOI’s Chief Division of Sports Medicine, Dr. David Gazzaniga, to discuss OTS, the symptoms, treatment options and how to best work through it.

Q: What is OTS? What are some of the symptoms and complications?

A: OTS is the basic concept of doing the same thing over and over again leading to problems. Confining this to athletic endeavors, it entails a loss of function and performance from repetitive training that doesn’t respond to periods of recovery. All training is designed to challenge our bodies to adapt and improve. If this is not done with sufficient recovery, then it will impact the mental and physical health of an athlete. This can come from an increase in training volume through repetition or prolonged times of training without rest.

The symptoms are felt physically as fatigue and persistent muscle soreness, but can also include difficulty with sleeping, lack of motivation and mood changes.

Q: Is there a difference between overtraining syndrome and burnout?

A: There is a distinction between OTS and burnout, but they are similar concepts. You can experience burnout without OTS, but one of the consequences of OTS is burnout. OTS has a number of symptoms and problems with burnout being one of those. Burnout is a purely psychological response.

Q: For the aging population who are focused on fitness for overall life and health, what are some red flags that they may be overtraining?

A: We need to consider the differences between overuse syndrome and overuse injuries. You can also lose the ability to perform and maintain activities due to overuse injuries to tendons. This loss of function from tendon overuse is another key element of overuse syndrome, much like burnout.

Looking at the aging population, it is important to note that even though there are people who can maintain a high level of training and performance as they age, they still have changes to their tendons. This includes loss of viscoelastic properties, increased volume, loss of cellularity, loss of tendon cell (tenocyte) ability to proliferate and generate matrix through protein synthesis. As a result, training in the same way every time you train - whether it is running, jumping or lifting weights - runs the risk of overtraining the tendon and not allowing for recovery. Unfortunately, these tendon problems can be very insidious and slowly worsen over time. By the time symptoms arise, you may already have a tendon injury, so prevention is the best strategy.

Q: What is your general recommendation for treatment of OTS? What’s the average person’s best first step to turn things around and work through it?

As a general recommendation, the idea to prevent problems of OTS, overuse injury or burnout is to cross train. In particular, for older athletes staying away from loading, joints and tendons rapidly is a good strategy. Exercise like yoga requires isometric strengthening, but you have to be careful not to over flex the knee or overload the shoulder. Yoga blocks can help ensure you can position yourself properly to get the benefits of the exercise without causing damage to muscles by over flexing them.

Excessive stress on a tendon often results from rapid or uncontrolled loading. Activities like jumping sports or heavy lifting can contribute to this risk. For young athletes, it’s key to focus on recovery and nutrition. Sports sampling and playing multiple sports during different seasons has been shown to decrease injury, improve chances of becoming an elite athlete and decrease burnout.

The bottom line is to cross train and recover.