Causes, Symptoms, and Prevention for Triathletes – Triathlete

You’re a long-course triathlete in the middle or maybe toward the end of your training season, and you’re tired. Your training feels flat, your workout performance is off, and you’re just feeling cranky about everything. You’re almost scared to ask the question, knowing an answer of “yes” might mean the end of your season: Could you be overtrained?

Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news first: it’s unlikely that you’re overtrained. The bad news, though, is that it’s entirely possible that you are overreaching. How do I know this, knowing virtually nothing about you? Because while true overtraining is rare in age-group athletes, overreaching is more common than you might realize.

But since you probably want more than that very generalized answer, let’s get specific. We’ll start by getting specific about the word “overtrained” – what it means, and when we should be using different words instead. Then we’ll look at what leads to overtraining (and the other things), and how those scenarios often look different for professional athletes versus age-group athletes. Finally, we’ll look at what you can do to avoid all of this, so you can keep your training season on track and your racing goals in reach.

Overtraining syndrome vs. non-functional overreaching vs. functional overreaching

We often use the term “overtrained” to describe any situation where an athlete experiences fatigue combined with a decline in training performance. In fact, there are three distinct(ish) terms to describe the combination of fatigue and decreased performance: Overtraining Syndrome (OTS), Non-Functional Overreaching (NFOR), and Functional Overreaching (FOR). These three states exist along a spectrum that differentiates across both the degree of physiological impact from fatigue as well as the amount of recovery required to return to your baseline state.

Let’s start with Functional Overreaching (FOR). FOR sits on the far left of the spectrum, with the least physiological impact from fatigue and the least required recovery. In fact, FOR is an intentional part of the fitness development process. That’s because FOR results from progressive overload: the standard practice of gradually increasing training volume and/or intensity to stimulate fitness adaptations.

At the tail end of multiple consecutive weeks of progressive overload (or a short but intense period of training, like a camp), you’re often in a state of Functional Overreaching – a bit of cumulative fatigue that negatively impacts training for a few days up to about a week.

We don’t worry about FOR, because we align it with a recovery period of reduced volume and/or intensity, allowing your body to fully recover from the fatigue after a few days (or up to two weeks in extreme cases). FOR is there by design, and we leverage it intentionally to create fitness development.

Non-Functional Overreaching (NFOR) and Overtraining Syndrome (OTS) sit in the middle and on the far right of the spectrum, and are neither productive in fitness development nor intentional. Both exist when stress on the body exceeds your ability to recover from it, and both present as persistent fatigue, a prolonged decrease in training performance, and potentially a host of additional symptoms. Those additional symptoms can include an elevated resting heart rate, altered heart rate response to exercise (too high or too low relative to pace or power), mood and sleep disturbances, and neuroendocrine dysregulation leading to a blunted hormonal response to stress.

Non-Functional Overreaching can be considered a substate of Overtraining Syndrome, and is characterized by 2-3 weeks of decreased performance. Relative to OTS, NFOR typically presents with less severe symptoms that require a shorter period of recovery – 3-8 weeks – to return to baseline.

You tip over from NFOR into OTS when decreased performance persists for over two months and requires months of recovery – even up to a year – to return to baseline. OTS also frequently presents with more severe overall symptoms, including a greater likelihood of associated clinical depression and more pronounced impacts on hormonal response to stress.

The context behind overtraining syndrome and non-functional overreaching

Overtraining Syndrome and Non-Functional Overreaching occur when stress on the body exceeds your ability to recover from it. So let’s unpack both sides of that equation, looking deeper into both the stress component and the recovery component.

We often think about stress on the body in terms of training stress – the volume of training you do in a week and how much training intensity you pack into those hours. But we also have to consider stress outside of training, because the body’s hormonal response to stress doesn’t differentiate between training stress and work deadline stress and emotional stress. All of that combines to form the stress context for the OTS and NFOR equation.

On the recovery side, we want to consider both recovery addressed outside of training and active recovery within training. The primary drivers of recovery outside of training are sleep and nutrition. Period, full stop.

Cold plunges, recovery boots, your foam roller, and supplements may all claim to aid in recovery, but the research still points to sleep and nutrition as the best recovery tools. In terms of active recovery within training, we want to look at what’s happening both within a week and across a training cycle.

Within a training week, it’s critical that high-intensity training days are balanced by sufficient time training at lower intensities – Zones 1 and 2 – where fitness can be developed without increasing the fatigue burden (and can even help to lift it). We also want to ensure that periods of Functional Overreaching are followed by proper recovery weeks, incorporating a reduction in training stress of at least 20%, if not more. All of this layers to provide the recovery context for OTS and NFOR.

When we apply this stress-and-recovery equation to professional athletes versus age-group athletes, the contexts for NFOR and OTS can look quite different. Professional athletes maintain incredibly high levels of training stress for long durations across a year of racing, often pushing themselves right up to their body’s physical limits for significant portions of their season. They also maintain well-structured training schedules that incorporate active recovery, focus heavily on recovery outside of training, and are less likely to have significant stress outside of training. For this reason, NFOR and OTS in professional athletes tend to be driven primarily by training stress.

Age-group athletes often present a very different picture. The structure of their lives typically limits the hours available for training, and therefore overall training stress. Life stress, however, can be unavoidable and often contributes to the overall stress placed on the body and its systems.

Additionally, age-group athletes often skimp on sleep and lack the time to ensure high-quality and/or adequate daily nutritional intake. On top of that, they often fall into the trap of insufficient active recovery within their training, either due to the “faster is always better” mindset or simply lack of structure.

For all of these reasons, prolonged fatigue and decreased performance in age-group athletes tend to be driven by a combination of factors, with training stress contributing less than it does for professional athletes and under-recovery being a more dominant factor. This combination of training stress plus life stress plus lack of recovery rarely leads to a context where the athlete needs months or even a year to return to baseline, the true OTS scenario. More commonly, what we call “overtraining” is actually Non-Functional Overreaching, resolving with a month or two of recovery.

How to avoid states of overreaching and overtraining

Understanding Non-Functional Overreaching and Overtraining Syndrome, and the range of contributing factors for age-group athletes, gives us the tools to avoid wandering into those problematic states.

1. Prioritize recovery – particularly sleep and high-quality, adequate nutrition, especially during your peak training cycles.
2. Ensure appropriate active recovery in training – don’t just schedule Zone 2 days; actually execute them in Zone 2. And always follow Functional Overreaching with a recovery week.
3. Limit life stress where possible – and balance it out where you can’t. If life stress goes up, training stress must come down.

Finally, if you do find yourself experiencing a string of days of decreased performance beyond what’s appropriate for Functional Overreaching, pivot quickly to intentional recovery. Whether you’re mid-season or peaking for your “A” race, you’d much rather sacrifice a bit of fitness than find yourself in a state of Non-Functional Overreaching or (yikes) Overtraining Syndrome.