We've all been there.
You've been working out hard for the past few months, hitting the gym frequently and raising how much you lift with pleasing regularity.
You're eating well, sleeping well, doing everything you can to stay on track, and then one day you simply stall out.
Your progress plateau's, and before you know it you're exhausted all the time, irritable, having trouble sleeping and doing poorly in the gym.
What happened? Where did all that progress go? Should you push yourself harder, or have you reached your max already? The answer is frequently that you've simply over trained.
The good news is that it's easy to get around this problem, so read on and find out how.
First, let's clarify a couple of concepts.
Most people think 'overtraining' is when they use too much weight for a simple exercise.
They equate it with 'going too hard', when in reality that's not overtraining, that's overreaching.
If you're trying to squat too much weight, and unable to do so, that's because your system is simply not ready for that kind of load.
Scale it back, young 'un, and be reasonable.
No, overtraining can best be understood as under-recovering.
You can't overtrain in a single workout, or even a week or two.
No matter how hard you're pushing yourself, you can't overtrain in a brief period of time.
Overtraining occurs when your central nervous system doesn't have time to recover, and even if you push yourself as hard as you can for seven straight days, your CNS will recover sufficiently to prevent you from overtraining (though not from feeling awful for other reasons).
What makes you overtrained is accumulating more fatigue than your CNS has the ability to recover from.
Imagine that your system is a bucket, and fatigue is water that gets poured into it every time you workout.
The harder you workout and the heavier the weights the more water is poured in, but each night through sleep and each day through a good diet you're able to empty some of that water out.
However, if you train hard enough, the amount of water going in will be more than the amount you will be able to empty out.
One step forward, two steps backward kind of deal.
While the total level of water will rise, it will rise slowly, until one day, maybe three weeks or a month later, it will simply overflow and you'll be done, overtrained.
How do you know you're overtrained? You'll have plateaued in the gym, and will experience common physical symptoms like an increased heart rate when you awaken, insomnia, decreased appetite, rapid weight loss, irritability, loss of sex drive and more.
The key to recovering is simple.
Recognize that you've been pushing yourself too hard for too long, and take a break.
This doesn't mean stay in bed all day, but rather, workout with less weight or fewer reps or both.
The idea is to give your CNS time to empty out some of that water from your bucket, so that when you go back to the gym you're in fighting form once more, and ready to keep growing like crazy.