More exercise is not better and usually leads to overtraining. Symptoms include fatigue, increased susceptibility to illness and injuries, insomnia, general aches and pains, depression, irritability, and headaches. Attitude, performance, hypertrophy, and strength gains also slide. Overtraining raises cortisol levels, further catabolizing muscle tissue and raising body fat levels. The body may become calorie deficient, adding to muscle tissue breakdown. Over time, decreases in fitness levels occur. Overtraining is common in fitness enthusiasts and athletes, often leading to compulsive exercising.
To help avoid overtraining, progress training levels gradually. If you’re stiff and sore the next day, you went too hard too soon. It is amazing in this day and age how the prevailing, perhaps unspoken “wisdom” is still “No pain, no gain.” Pain equals drain, not gain! We’re meant to move at moderate levels with short bursts of speed and/or power as needed. We’re still the same beings physically as we were 100,000 years ago. Our ancestors most certainly did not jog around gathering food. We sprinted during the hunt and had to do some heavy lifting post hunt to bring the bacon home. Training too long and hard stimulates the sympathetic nervous (fight or flight) system and is catabolic. This will compromise the body’s ability to recover between sessions and fight off infections.
Eat enough nutritionally dense calories! This is one of the hardest concepts for women, in particular, to get their minds around. Our bodies require a minimum of around 1500 calories just to function if we lay stock still in bed. We need plenty of high quality protein, fat and carb (not grains) sources so the millions of our body’s cells that die every second are rebuilt from good “material.” When we train too hard and don’t eat enough nutritionally dense food, cortisol is released, washing every single cell in it. That’s OK in small doses, but prolonged exercise sessions on top of calorie restrictive diets made up of fake food tells your body that you’re being chased by tigers all day long as you jog around looking for food and water that is never in your cave. It has no idea you’re trying to be healthy or get “fit” in a six-week boot camp. The harder you train and more calories you cut, the more stressed the body is, the more it eats itself, the more your hormones are out of whack, and the more fat storing hormones are released to keep fat on for the body as fuel.
Hydrate with enough pure water. Gatorade does not replace electrolytes; it hops the body up on sugar and high fructose corn syrup as well as refined versions of sodium chloride. A pinch of unprocessed Celtic sea salt in that water will supply the body with the trace minerals it needs and allows the water to better permeate the cell walls.
Get adequate rest between training sessions and unless all the other factors in your environment such as nutrition, work/relationship stressors and rest cycles are optimal 80% of the time, moderate exercise is best for those of us who are not professional or elite level competitors (even so, many of them are over training!). Fatigue and pain (the body’s idiot light) are signals that we need to back off, not tough it out to get stronger. This really archaic thinking simply won’t get anyone to the levels they want to get to. Low levels of exercise during rest time (known as active recovery) often helps recovery between sessions.. That means moving at levels which don’t require open mouth breathing; this will stimulate the parasympathetic system, which is anabolic (builds up) in nature. Fitness and wellness should be sensible, fun and invigorating, not a test of how far we can go for how long on the least amount of good food.
References and additional reading:
Chek, Paul; You Are What You Eat CD Series, Chek Institute, San Diego, CA 2002
Chek, Paul; How to Eat, Move and be Healthy, Chek Institute, San Diego, CA 2002
