How To Spot The Symptoms Of Overtraining | Maximise Gains In Your Ultra Endurance Training Plan

Hello and welcome back to the channel! Thanks as always for the visit, hope you’re all good yeah? In this video I am taking a well needed break. I have had a ‘bump in the road’ and can’t burn the candle at both ends right now. Hopefully this will help people realise when they need to take a breather themselves.

This ride – https://www.strava.com/activities/10834367628

We’ll call this an episode of learn from Andy’s mistakes what I’m about to go through for sure could be crippling your gains on the bike and it has been mine [Applause] Recently good morning welcome to another Ultra cycling related video here in sunny England if you watched any previous videos thanks a lot for coming back if this is your first one my name is Andy I’m ultra cyclist on the south coast of the UK videos I make are about Ultra

Cycling training and and Adventures currently documenting my training for the Transcontinental Race So if you have endurance goals of your own subscribe follow along I’m sure there be something in there for you or maybe you’ll teach me something on the C for today got a bit of a short

Ride to be honest good reason I’ll go into detail on why that is shortly to be honest weather’s pretty poor so it couldn’t have come at a better time hopefully this footage isn’t completely useless and you can hear a bit of what I’m saying just got a few

Hours planned today staying fairly close to home taking it pretty easy essentially a recovery ride I can’t ride en Jance at the moment and I’ll explain why makes quite a nice change to be honest hopefully you’re all well looking after yourselves and getting the odd

Ride in let me know what you’ve been up To Be Oh This wind is brutal living by the coast it’s almost never a Bad Thing days like today just get absolutely battered who needs mountains when you can push against this that’s better much more sheltered down this road and it’s a couple miles long so lovely so we’ll call this an episode of

Learn from Andy’s mistakes don’t do what he does but hopefully consider this a PSA and what I’m about to go through for sure could be crippling your gains on the bike and it has been mine recently so as you’ll see from the thumbnail the theme of this is self-sabotage but stealth self-sabotage

And as I alluded to earlier it’s a reason I’m not really riding endurance today and probably can’t for a couple of weekends this is overtraining and you might think maybe yeah maybe you overdid it a bit tired bit fatigued overtraining goes much deeper than that has the potential to screw up

Your training plan quite long term and it’s also really sneaky if you do slip into full-blown overtraining potential is you’re not getting the most at your workouts at the same time losing Fitness there are actually a good few symptoms to watch out for and I’ll put them on the screen

Because I can’t remember all of them just the ones that I had but it really does sneak up on you for me I’ll explain what happened in my training and how it’s messed mine up thankfully it’s not the end of the world over the last few weeks I just

Found it harder and harder to get through my workouts struggling towards the end of the sessions following the exactly the same structure so it should be working as the weeks went on towards the end of the sessions I could make it through less and less to really hit on Thursday just

Gone the first thing I thought was maybe I need to calibrate my trainer it felt far far too difficult so I stopped the workout calibrated my trainer and also I have a power meter on this bike so I connected my phone to the power meter compared the

Two power meter showed I was actually pushing much higher than what the trainer said my first thought was trainer knackered so started going down that rabbit hole thinking it’s not me surely it’s got to be got to be the equipment blame the tools and the realization came the

Following day my legs just screaming with pain far too much really tired to started to consider other options a couple of the symptoms are increased RP or relative perceived effort so your workouts feel much harder than they actually are increased muscle soreness and muscle tightness and started to think actually

That’s one of the main things I was struggling with I spent some time a couple days before foam rolling my legs had a little cross ball trying to work out nuts thinking my legs are just just need a workover really thought if I spend some time on Mobility stuff I feel better the

Following day and lo and behold performed even worse it’s easy to say managing fatigue is simple you get tired you rest it’s not always as simple as that the nature of what we do as endurance Riders and athletes we’re always managing fatigue to some extent and always tired when you’re in a

Routine of training taking the workouts having your own busy life outside of that too it’s really easy to miss just how tired you you’re actually getting before you know it you have those symptoms you don’t realize if you let it go too far all kinds of things can happen to

Your body your body can start to catabolize muscle mass lose the muscle mass that you built in your legs to get fitter that’s probably a worst case also extreme fatigue I’ve had that in the past a level of fatigue that doesn’t go away for weeks and weeks it’s really not nice I thought

Actually having a whoop would help me with that and it does really really good overtraining can be extremely Sneaky Oh I’m sure some people watching this will just chalk it up to me being an idiot not resting enough and that’s okay but I hope in sharing this some people watching it at some point in my trigger a memory you realize a nip it in the bud quicker than I

Did that said I think I got it pretty early to be honest so I still do some shorter rides for a couple of weeks no threshold just try and rest the initial feeling when I realized it’s not my equipment of fault it’s me was a bit annoyed to myself to be

Honest made a lot of really good progress in the winter I can feel it slipping through my fingers and I sat and watched that happen for several weeks weeks until I put two and two together and realized you got to not be too hard on yourself situation like that try to turn

It to a positive my case it kind of felt like once I accepted it’s overtraining and I got to have a couple weeks of less mileage it’s actually quite nice take my foot off the gas a little bit my body kind of felt like when you finally get

Your twoe holiday day you don’t realize how busy your life is suddenly you come over really tired like your body just accepts it’s time for a rest had the exact feeling the next day might just be where I’m really really tired but I think definitely overdue a rest so PL in my

Comeback going to take about 8 nine more days easy my Club Portsmouth North End Cycling Club organize a session on an outdoor Vel Drome every Monday so not this Monday coming but the following Monday going to take this bike with a power meter on it do an outdoor 20

Minute FTP test whatever number that comes back with I just accept it might be lower but it’ll be the right number to train from then I’ll start doing my threshold sessions Outdoors rather than on the drainer it’s getting close to Spring now so the weather’s going to get a lot

Warmer much harder to produce the right numbers indoors once it gets to warmer weather hopefully after that and get a bit more quality training in before my first race in May so here ends that particular story if you weren’t already aware of how bad overtraining can be in

The extent of the the impact you can have on your training plan and hopefully stored mentally and then if you get similar symptoms you get over the bump in the road a bit more quickly than I have this time as I’m sure you can see not only is it incredibly

Windy it’s now raining too so some pretty standard British weather thankfully right now I’m about 15 minutes from my house so not much more of this for me well when it comes to riding through the city of Portsmouth this is about as nice as it gets so I’ll say bye now and if

You’re watch until now then thank you appreciate it as always have a really good week look after yourselves I’ll see you on the next One [Applause] a