5 Signs You're Overtraining and Don't Know It Yet

Podcast

February 5, 2025

Five early signs of overtraining in endurance athletes, from missed power numbers to poor sleep, and what Gerard and Jordan Donnelly do about them.

Get Fast Podcast, Ep 268, with Gerard and Jordan Donnelly

The five signs are: you can't hit your normal power numbers, your heart rate is unusually high or low, your mood and motivation drop, you keep getting sick, and your sleep gets worse. Improvement comes from training plus recovery, so more training doesn't automatically mean better performance. The main fix is more recovery.

Jordan cites estimates that 30 to 60% of endurance athletes suffer some form of overtraining at some point, and that true overtraining syndrome affects 10 to 20%. It can take months or longer to recover from.

What is the difference between overreaching and overtraining?

Training works by stressing the body so it has to adapt. Done in a healthy, sustainable way, that's overreaching, and it's how you improve. Too much volume or intensity turns it into overtraining, where you become too fatigued and burn out.

Age groupers are especially at risk. Triathlon means training for three sports, often while working full-time and raising a family. Pros train hard too, but Jordan points out they have about double the recovery, because training and recovering is their whole life.

Sign 1: Why can't you hit your numbers?

Jordan describes an athlete who couldn't get close to her numbers in a Friday session. She'd had a big week. After an easy Saturday and a couple of good nights' sleep, she repeated the session on Sunday and hit the numbers comfortably.

Before you blame fatigue, rule out the technology. Check the conditions were the same and your power meter was calibrated. Gerard has had this conversation more than 20 times with athletes who thought something was wrong with them, when their power meter was reading wrong.

Gerard also uses his warm-up as a guide. If he starts flat but feels better through the build and the short efforts, he carries on. If he feels worse, it's not the day for that session.

Sign 2: What is your heart rate telling you?

Overtraining can show up as a higher or a lower heart rate than normal.

High: a stress response, often with restlessness and trouble sleeping. Jordan's highest time trial heart rate in six years came a week after having COVID.
Low: the more common burnout response in endurance athletes. You feel sluggish and can't get your heart rate up, even on a hard effort.

Gerard has a love-hate relationship with heart rate, because a low heart rate can also mean good aerobic fitness, and a high one can mean you're fresh and tapered.

Resting heart rate is the measure he trusts most. His sat between 45 and 52 for two or three decades, then rose by about 10 beats, and that was the first sign something was wrong. To use it:

Take it when you wake up, under the same conditions each time.
Keep a history, weekly or daily.
If it jumps by around 10 beats, adjust your training or talk to your coach.

He finds heart rate variability less reliable. Before races, it has told him to rest when he was simply full of adrenaline, and then he raced well.

Sign 3: Has your mood changed?

Grumpiness, brain fog, dreading training and mental exhaustion are early warnings. Remember that it's your total stress load that counts. A training load you normally handle can become too much when work or life is giving you grief.

When an athlete says they just can't face training, Gerard and Jordan tell them to stop. That isn't weakness. Gerard says the aim is to spot the warning signs well before it gets that far.

One sign on its own doesn't mean you're overtrained. Feeling grumpy in the first few minutes of an early morning is normal. What matters is a feeling that keeps coming back.

Sign 4: Do you keep getting sick?

If you're always sick, or always on the edge of it, you may be pushing slightly too hard. It matters most when it's a change from normal. Athletes with kids pick up whatever comes home from childcare, especially when work, family and training have already worn their immune system down. Gerard says he rarely gets colds because he keeps asking himself whether he can cope with the hard session that day.

Sign 5: How are you sleeping?

Restlessness, insomnia and poor sleep scores are some of the clearest signs. Deep sleep is when your body repairs itself from training. Late-night sessions often disrupt sleep.

If you need more sleep, move your bedtime earlier gradually, about 15 minutes at a time over a month, and keep the same wake-up time. Jordan adds that if you go to bed two hours early and fall asleep straight away, you probably weren't getting enough.

Use sleep trackers and watch scores as guides, after you've checked how you actually feel. Jordan has a friend who skips the gym whenever his tracker gives him a poor score, and he lets it set his mood for the day.

How do you recover from overtraining?

Recovery is the best tool:

Back off the training load, starting with intensity.
Prioritise sleep. Gerard sometimes sees athletes on the trainer at 11:30pm when they start work at 6:30am.
Eat well, because poor sleep and poor organisation often come with poor fuelling.
Trust how you feel over the data. If a session feels out of reach, it probably is.

Planned lighter periods help too. The usual guideline is every three or four weeks, but Gerard and Jordan often schedule them every two or three weeks for age groupers. If a lighter block doesn't freshen you up, that's a sign you're more fatigued than you thought.