What Is Overtraining?
Takeaway Points:
The fear of overtraining comes from outdated/under-researched ideas of the limit of how much volume humans can lift.
Average (or above average) exercisers generally do not have to worry about overtraining. Pushing too hard, too fast can lead to injury, but intentional, slow development from a well designed workout plan allows someone to safely train hard.
Real overtraining occurs in high performance athletes who have been chronically overworking for a long period of time. It often results in drastic drops in performance and requires long breaks to recover from. Think “burnout” for athletes.
For a long time in the 00’s and 10’s, ‘overtraining’ was one of the big boogeymen of the lifting community.
The concept was simple - if you lifted too much, then this put you in a state called overtraining, in which you didn’t see further results, and were more likely to be injured.
But while the concept is simple, the unfortunate reality is a lot more complex.
Naturally, a lot of people got scared of the idea, and immediately became overly cautious about training hard. If all you got for hard work was overtraining, then why push it too hard? How can you know the limits when you start to become overtrained so that you can avoid this?
The concept of overtraining also resulted in a lot of complex interplay with other aspects of the fitness industry.
A similar concept called ‘CNS fatigue’ (central nervous system fatigue) posited that your central nervous system could become burnt out from heavy lifting. This provided a rational justification for how overtraining could occur - if your CNS becomes burnt out (and this can’t as easily be measured/analyzed the way normal physical fatigue can), then it provides a near-magical justification for how you can feel fine, but be overtraining and thus reducing your results.
Then there’s the fact that this concept clashes with the ‘high intensity’ elements of bodybuilding. High intensity training or HIT (not to be confused with high intensity interval training, or HIIT) is a bodybuilding philosophy popularized by Mike Mentzer and other advocates. This form of training theorizes that intensity alone is the most important driver of strength and muscle gains.
Accordingly, HIT advocates suggest extremely short, extremely high intensity workouts, performed infrequently. A HIT workout might include just 1 lift per muscle group, performed for 1 set to absolute failure, performed twice per week. This routine could be exceptionally quick, only taking something like two, half hour workouts per week, and has been recently re-popularized in the 4 Hour Body by silicon valley influencer Tim Ferriss.
Naturally, the concept of overtraining clashes with the idea of training as hard as physically possible in short bursts, leading to a lot of argument.
There was also a span of time in which CT Fletcher, a popular fitness Youtuber/influencer, aimed to ‘reclaim’ the concept of overtraining, basically just rebranding it as hard work and claiming that he was proud to be overtrained.
I can’t tell you how many questions that I’ve received over the years about overtraining. Questions along the lines of “if I do X amount of work, is that overtraining? What about Y amount of training, could that be overtraining? If I perform more than X exercises per workout, is that overtraining? If I do X, could I accidentally put myself in overtraining?” and so on.
It’s a subject that has a massive outsized influence, relative to how much the average lifter or exerciser actually needs to think about it. So, let’s dig into the reality.
What actually is overtraining?
The reality is that overtraining does refer to a real thing, but it’s significantly different than most people envision.
Scientifically, overtraining is a status observed in some high level athletes, which equates to something like professional burnout. Overtraining in elite athletes is defined by sudden and unexpected drops in performance with no discernible physical cause, generally paired with psychological disturbances - depression, anxiety, sleeping troubles, and so on. They may lose motivation to train or struggle to continue their existing workload as a result.
When faced with overtraining, in order to resolve the issue, they need to typically step back and take a lot of time off. When faced with true overtraining, an athlete may need to take months or even years to recover before they find themselves able to resume their prior levels of training and performance.
Note that this is basically the description of overtraining in the scientific literature, and it has little to no relevance to the average lifter. Where in this do you magically see that you cross a certain threshold of work, and instantly stop making gains?
True overtraining is about chronic overwork for long periods of time, leading to burnout and a crash. You can understand now, how silly it is that the average lifter might fear that they’re suddenly in overtraining without realizing it - if you’re in a state of overtraining, you know that you’re overtrained, because the effects are real and measurable, and occur as a result of chronic overwork over long periods - it’s not like you suddenly become overtrained, without making a lot of intentional choices that lead up to that point.
Is more work better?
A lot of the fear around overtraining is also centered around the fear that in a general sense, too much work can result in worse gains. For a long time, there was not really strict research about training volumes in lifting, and so it was widely believed that there was a theoretical limit of training in which you would stop seeing further results - given that there would be no benefit to training past this point, this would mean that you would only risk injury after that point, and waste time.
While this is generally scientifically sound, and holds true to this day, the research has since shown that this limit, if there is one, is a lot higher than we thought. Studies on high training volumes have consistently shown that more work always provides more benefits, with the caveat that training efficiency goes down.
We typically measure volume of training in terms of challenging sets per body part. What this means, is that, for example, your first set of challenging bench presses per week, gives you a surprisingly high percentage of your gains, then each additional set after that has diminishing returns. The end result is that doing say, 40 sets per week means more gains than 30 sets per week, but the marginal benefit is very small.
We’ve seen research confirming that volumes as high as 40 sets per week or so still provide better gains than smaller volumes of training, which is a volume of training high enough that most people would probably consider it to be overtraining. In general, most lifters perform something in the range of 10-20 sets per muscle group per week, which makes it especially funny when folks email me asking if 15 sets per week is overtraining and likely to get them hurt.
Given the above, we don’t really know currently, if there’s any real upper limit to how much training you can benefit from, just that of course the benefit is smaller and smaller with more and more sets.
Understanding context
Another big problem that the overtraining debate has, is that it lacks the context of the individual lifter’s level of adaptation. Simply put, human beings adapt to the exercise stressors placed on them, and become more resilient over time. An elite level lifter, can certainly handle much higher training volumes than a complete beginner.
A big part of why the Bulgarian lifters were so shocking, was that they violated all the rules - they lifted all day, every day, and still got incredible results. These lifters are a testament to the fact that even the most absurd, superhuman training volumes can be adapted to if you have the willpower, the means, and probably a bit of chemical assistance. Likewise, there was as a response, a surge in popularity for “Squat Every Day” Bulgarian-style lifting in the 10’s, and Matt Perryman wrote his excellent book Squat Every Day to capitalize on this trend, and break down the absurdities of current discourse on overtraining.
Often, what’s missing is context. If you give a beginner lifter too big of a workload, they’ll struggle and potentially injure themselves. If you take that same lifter and slowly build up their volume of training over time as they get stronger, they will be able to tolerate and grow from volumes that would previously only have caused them to struggle and get injured. Without knowing the history of a given lifter, it’s hard to know if a certain volume of training will be overwhelming for them, because you need to know what their current level of tolerance is first. This makes questions like “Is X volume of training overtraining?” especially funny without context, because of course I couldn’t possibly answer that unless I know your training history in some detail.
Are you overtrained?
To put it quite bluntly, if you’re asking that question, the answer is probably no. If you’re overtrained, you would know it. I myself have reached the point of overtraining only a couple of times in my career, and usually only from extreme training volumes (20+hrs of training per week), and only after maintaining this volume of training for a while before burning out. Most people who are asking this question, have likely never gone near this level of training.
The reality is that many people are worried or scared about mostly-made-up boogeymen, and need to train (reasonably) hard - and consistently - over long periods of time to see results. Pushing it too hard is going to cause issues, and not pushing it hard enough will mean smaller muscle and strength gains. But most people have not ever really pushed themselves hard to the point that it’s really causing serious issues, and shouldn’t be worried about accidentally doing so.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached thousands of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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