In endurance sports, adding hours of training is essential to be able to progress. The training load of each athlete is very personal and it is important to properly plan training and rest.
Training well and doing good training sessions is transcendental, but just as important is how we recover from that effort and what adaptations we generate in our body. Therefore, knowing how to differentiate between fatigue and overtraining will be key to being able to continue progressing and not enter a negative loop.
Fatigue is a physical and mental sensation of lack of energy caused by a certain effort. All training and our day to day generate fatigue to our body. This feeling is usually something punctual and we can easily overcome it, adding more rest. Training at high intensity for several days, carrying a high workload, not stopping all day and getting little sleep can be factors that generate this state of fatigue.
Overtraining, on the other hand, is not a physical sensation as such. Fatigue has a more extreme feeling of tiredness, but it is much easier to remedy. Overtraining is a physical and mental state produced by excessive physical activity, which generates an inability to assimilate balanced training loads.
This will cause us not to improve and our performance to worsen.
The key to not falling into a state of overtraining is to rest well and eat a correct diet, that is, the typical thing that is always said for everything. Do you want to go faster? Eat and rest well. Do you want to have a good competition? Eat and rest well.
This is real and obvious, but many times one does not know how to apply it.
The body is very complex and, fortunately or unfortunately, there is no specific training or rest schedule to go like a motorcycle avoiding falling into these negative states. For this reason, paying attention to the signals that our body gives us will be essential to be able to be as precise as possible when it comes to scheduling more hours of filming, or, alternatively, giving ourselves a short and well-deserved rest. As some of my teammates say: “rest, train”.
