Too many workouts leave many drained, devastated

By Martin Miller
Los Angeles Times

Oksana Baiul, who won a gold medal in the 1994 Winter Olympics, dropped out of professional skating, in part because overtraining exhausted her. Advertiser library photo

That should have come as no surprise, given her weekly workout schedule. Six days a week, the student athlete would pound through 30 to 40 miles of interval and distance training.

Despite the hard work, her race times flattened and later slowed. Her determined efforts to push through the slump and an injury during her final season only accelerated the decline in performance.

"It was too much on my body. There was never any break," said Werner, 23, of her four years as a track athlete at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. "I felt constantly drained, and it devastated me."

Although undiagnosed at the time, Werner was suffering from a common ailment among serious athletes and fitness buffs: overtraining. The condition saps people of their normal vigor and can destroy athletic performance.

"It's not the "tired for a day" syndrome we're talking about here," said Gregory Dwyer, an assistant professor in the Department of Movement Studies and Exercise Science at East Stroudsburg. "In the most severe cases, this is someone who has the same profile as a clinically depressed person."

Victims of overtraining complain of intense fatigue, lack of motivation, body aches, sleep problems, frequent illness — and depression. Often the harder they train to overcome the condition, the worse their performance becomes.

Researchers describe a less severe form of the problem as "overreaching," in which people have some or all of the symptoms of overtraining. The difference: While it typically takes three to six months of rest to recover from overtraining, it may take one to three weeks to recover from overreaching, exercise physiologists say.

For decades, the traditional advice for athletes in training was: "The harder you work, the better you get."

Recent and ongoing research has tweaked this advice to something like: "The smarter you work, the better you get." Smarter workouts are those that expend only as much physical energy as necessary to achieve peak performance. Any activity beyond that point is seen as wasteful or even counterproductive, as with the overtraining problem.

A 1987 study on college swimmers helped to put exercise physiologists and coaches across the nation on notice about the dangers of overtraining.

During the study, swimmers cut back their usual workout routines — swimming three hours a day, five or six days a week — by half. After three weeks on the new schedule, almost every swimmer's time dramatically improved.

Since then, exercise physiologists have learned much about overtraining. Training recommendations for everyone from college athletes to recreational triathletes have been scaled back. And more attention is now given to the role of sleep and diet.

Many athletes simply don't consume enough calories, much less the right kind (carbohydrates and high-quality proteins), recent studies have found.

Female college athletes are especially vulnerable to overtraining, researchers say, because they often don't eat enough to sustain themselves. Today, exercise physiologists are focusing their attention on how to avoid overtraining athletes. Studies are pointing to an answer that involves a delicate balancing act between nutrition, training intensity and training duration.

"We're looking for the markers that signal overtraining, whether physical or psychological," said Richard Kreider, an exercise physiologist and author of "Overtraining in Sport."

The signs of overtraining can be as elusive for the athlete as for the physician. Physically, the symptoms can vary quite a bit from person to person, making it harder to diagnose. And since athletes tend to be in such good physical condition, doctors tend to dismiss tiredness as a condition that will resolve itself with time or extra rest.

For athletes, the same traits of self-discipline and mental toughness that makes them successful in sports can work against them in identifying the problem of overtraining.

When such athletes feel lethargic, they are likely to attribute the problem to just "feeling lazy" rather than the possibility that they are overdoing it.

"A lot of athletes who suffer burnout are usually just overtrained. Some end up quitting over it," said Kreider, head of Baylor University's Center for Exercise, Nutrition & Preventive Health Research in Waco, Texas. "It's a huge problem."

The condition's surest signs, however, are dogged weariness that lasts for weeks, diminished athletic performance and a loss of muscle mass.