Is Over-Training Over-Rated?

Unless you're an elite athlete, it usually is

When I was rowing in college, I had a teammate, Jon Albin, who heard the story about an Olympic gold-medal winner who spent the off-season sitting on a rowing machine for 90 minutes in the morning and 60 minutes at night, six days a week. So the summer between his sophomore and junior year, that’s what Albin did. That fall, he arrived at the boathouse in phenomenal shape and earned such a massive amount of respect from the team for his work ethic that they (I had graduated by then) made him team captain. He wrapped up that season helping the varsity boat finish third in the nation.

My experience with rowing volume went the other way. I didn’t sit on a rowing machine all summer, but no matter, I was still toast by the start of the racing season in April thanks to going all out, every day during two-a-day practices that started the August before. Every spring I picked up a nasty respiratory virus that set me back weeks. In short: I over-trained my way out of a seat in the faster boat.

In the 12 years since, I’ve been a bit of a wuss when it comes to piling on miles on the bike or in my running shoes. I never want to experience over-training again. So I always do the bare minimum I need to do to accomplish a goal (century ride, marathon, epic thru-hike). And I do pull off these things, but always with a curiosity as to how well I could do them if I really trained. Note: This feeling usually occurs after I get smoked by someone who looks less fit than I—who knew I had an ego.

Now I come across a New York Times story about over-training which quotes a Dr. Steven Keteyian, the director of preventive cardiology at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who says most athletes are too quick to self-diagnose themselves as over-trained. Specifically, he points to runners jumping from 50 miles a week to 80-100 mile weeks of running as being a good predictor of over-training. By my rough calculations, Keteyian means anyone making the jump from 8-10 hours to 15-plus hours a week of endurance training can worry about over-training. The rest of us it seems, just need to get over it.

And so I will. Who knows, maybe now that I’ve overcome my fear of bumping up my training volume from 6 to 8-10 hours a week, I might finally run as fast and far as my body always knew it could.

In short: If you work out 10 hours a week or less and you’re taking days off after the one or two high-intensity workouts you’ve got scheduled, don’t fret about over-training. Whatever you do, don’t skip that time off; seven straight days of a 60-minute Spinning class will waste you even though it only adds up to 7 hours a week. Got time to train more than 10 hours a week? Then you might as well try to go pro.