Hans Selye, a Canadian endocrinologist, had coined the term General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) with which he described how the human body adjusts positively to stress. If, however, stressors are not well monitored or the body experiences chronic exposure to stress, then a negative adaptation follows and the body is susceptible to disease and weakness.
Fitness trainers are stress engineers
The recipe for a strong, fit body lies in the correct balance of food, rest, sleep, recovery and exercise. Get this equation right and you will enjoy all the benefits of good health and wellness. However, if this balance is altered, it could be a recipe for disaster.
The physiological signs of overtraining include chronic fatigue, chronic muscle soreness, increase in body temperature, elevated blood pressure, increased frequency of headaches, upper respiratory infections and a suppressed immune system. In many subjects, sleep and appetite remain disturbed over a very long period.
I like to reiterate to all exercise and wellness practitioners their role as stress engineers. It is not merely their technical duty to load and shape the body but also to do it in a way that only positive stress is put on the human system.
Corrective exercise versus working out
It is human nature to prioritise immediate needs over long-term goals, and corrective exercises are often not top priority when compared to sculpting the body or losing weight. People often believe they need fitness-based exercises (performance-improving exercises that elevate heart rate, adrenalin and create a “high”) far more than corrective exercises. This mentality explains the recent popularity of crossfit gyms, marathon running events and other extreme exercise protocols that feed into the exercise “junkie” mindset and give people their “fix”. But it is also true that despite there being a surfeit of gyms, fitness centres, yoga, pilates and other institutional health practices, at no other time in history has man been so unhealthy.
Watch out for the signs
Overtraining is more often a problem of too little rest rather than too much exercise. If you are on the run from the time you wake up — rushing to catch an early morning flight, getting a mandatory training session done, sprinting to a sponsor’s dinner, meeting clients, attending official functions and meeting professional commitments — and finally collapsing on bed late at night, only to wake up without enough sleep the next day to start the cycle all over again, you are a prime candidate for the dangers of overtraining. You are in no physical or mental shape to handle your day with energy and gusto. Surprisingly, the easiest overtraining symptoms to recognise and assess are psychological. Constantly thinking of exercising or getting very irritable or depressed about missing even a single session of practice or training is one of the first signs of overtraining.
There are over 130 signs of overtraining, and many of them — like changes in blood lactate levels or hormonal imbalances — need lab testing. It is much easier to keep a tab on your mood. A little bit of irritability after a hard exercise session is normal, but if you are feeling very crotchety, or the irritability does not go away for hours, or even days, you are overtraining. Other psychological signs include feeling demotivated about working out, depression and disturbed sleep.
When you finish a workout session, you should be able to feel a “runner’s high”, or elevated mood that comes from endorphins, feel-good hormones that your body releases when you exercise.
The physiological signs of overtraining include chronic fatigue, chronic muscle soreness, increase in body temperature, elevated blood pressure, increased frequency of headaches, upper respiratory infections and a suppressed immune system.
The recovery
Every person has different needs and different levels of fitness. Listen to your body and look for signs of overtraining. Bring down the volume of exercise, and go back to the basics — evaluate the form of your basic movement patterns: Are you running correctly? Squatting correctly? Doing push-ups and pull-ups correctly? If you are severely fatigued by exercise, then stop doing it for a few days or even a couple of weeks. Do a refreshing and rejuvenating session of stretching every day instead. Get your eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, and eat well.
Training sessions should never last more than an hour, including warm-ups and cool-downs. Always have one day of the week marked as rest day. For the other six, make sure you do a mix of light, medium and intense sessions. Try and do different things on different days to avoid repetitive stress on particular body parts. I tell my athletes that it is better to undertrain than to overtrain because the undertrained athlete will always have some reserve power left but the overtrained athlete will lack staying capacity.
Hans Selye first recognised the symptoms of physiological stress from exercising too much (exhaustion, illness and injury) and called it Negative Adaptation Stage. This stage occurs from the body’s inability to adapt positively to physical stress due to overtraining. I like to describe fitness trainers as stress engineers who seek to promote positive stress adaptation from exercise.
At times, less is more
“To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy,” said Hippocrates. We live in stressful times as many of us deal with information overload, long communes, deadlines and bills. When fitness trainers load these kind of people with a workout routine that stresses their vulnerable nervous system even further, it leads to the total opposite of what most people desire out of an exercise routine. We have to be sensitive to the needs of these people.
Paul Chek, the leading authority on corrective and therapeutic exercises, has devised a set of exercises that form “working-in” rather than “working-out”. At our clinic, we have enjoyed great success using this methodology with overworked, overtrained and overstressed subjects, most of whom we have restored back to normal health, training and performance again. A young fast bowler suffering from burnout syndrome was able to stay injury-free for two successive seasons and win his way back to the state team using these exercises. A well-known Calcutta-based rock singer almost gave up performing before following this protocol and slowly clawed his way back to concert performance once again.
Exercises that rejuvenate are energy push, wood-chop, cross-crawl and thoracic mobilisations.
Ranadeep Moitra is a strength and conditioning specialist and corrective exercise coach