How To Avoid Overtaining

Training Hard Is The Way?

Being a boxing historian that watches and studies the great old champions of the past, I would always read stories about fighters like Joe Gans, Sam Langford, Jack Johnson and other boxers who would fight in matches of 20+ rounds and so forth. In fact, in there time they would fight up to 44 rounds in their time, and there were periods in history such as in the 50’s when champions would fight 15 rounds more than once a month. It always made me think: why do fighters today struggle to fight 12 rounds, if there was a time where fighters would fight 25 rounds?

Admittedly, when it comes to training and working out, I’m a full addict because of the fact that I’m aware that these great champions of the past had such high endurenace leveles. When I started spending full days in the gym, in my attempt be the hardest working athlete, I started attending the gym when it opened at 7am, and would leave at closing time 8pm.

I noticed that my fitness (predictably) rose quite quickly and my strength and endurance followed suit. However, after a few weeks, I noticed that despite my high levels of fitness, I severely lacked sharpness and the ability to react quickly in sparring.

Despite feeling in my workouts that I was doing pretty good, the dreaded ‘overtraining’ symptoms had crept up on me. After ‘overtraining’ a number of times, I’ve developed an awareness of what causes the body to suffer the dreaded effects of overtraining and how you can avoid overtraining:

Gradual Progress

One of the most easy ways to over-train is to jump the gun and advance the reps of your exercises too quickly. The point to which you exercise, or work out, should of course be outside of your physical limit. But it shouldn’t be too much past what you are used to. The rest after a session is the period in which your muscles recover and ‘catch up’ with the progress you’ve made.

The problem for most people (including myself once upon a time), is that they lack this awareness and they fail to allow their body to recuperate and get to the point that they just worked, or exercised to. From this perspective, it’s the quality of the training you do that is important, rather than just the number of reps.

Let’s say you haven’t sparred in months, but then you decide to get back into it and suddenly do 10 rounds of sparring because this is the last point you was at before you stopped. Doing this consistently would be treading into the realm of overtraining, because your body will need extra time to recover.

This is because the effect of  doing the 10 rounds of sparring when you’re new, is different compared to when you’ve gradually built up to 10 rounds over time. Even if you do happen to consistently do the 10 rounds of sparring, because of the increased effort it took from your body to complete it, you will be more likely to be fatigued from the effort, compared to if you slowly built up.

If you were to be strict with yourself and started off doing 4 rounds, then moved on to 6, and so on until you get to 10, the physical effort it took from your body to get to that point will be less harh. And with this method, you will get up to the 10 round mark, still feeling very fresh. Better to be patient and sharp, rather than go too fast and be drained.

Alternate Hard and Light Days

One thing you can do to give your body the opportunity to recover after workouts without stopping altogether, is to have specific days where you work out hard, and have lighter exertions on other days. In the light days, you are still progressing physically, but you also are giving your body time to catch up.

For example, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you can do exercises and workouts that are generally considered intense (such as sprints, sparring etc.). On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, you can do the parts of your training that are generally considered more lighter on the body (such as technique drills, slower paced runs  or swimming etc). You may want to have a rest day on Sunday, or you could take it easy and just go do cardio whilst your body catches all the way up.

Alternate Areas of the Body

It’s impossible for me to say what you should specifically do, because everyone is different. Only you will know what your body is like. The general concept of the alternating days should definitely be applied to your training regime. But that’s not to say that the days have to consist strictly of either hard or easy workouts.

The concept of alternating can also apply to the different areas of the body that you work. For example, isometrics in the arms may could be done on specific days. But then on alternating days, you can work intensely on legs. You could work hard on your shoulders one day, and then the next day work really lightly on your shoulders while you work your chest intensely. And vice versa.

Listen to your body

It sounds very obvious, but this is the best compass you have that will prevent you from overtraining. You often hear experienced fighters say: they no longer train hard, but they train smarter.

This is because years of experience (and injuries) has shown them that excessive training hampers their performance, and that quality training is better than quantity training. Learn to be aware of the distinctions between different types of pain. For example, if you feel sharp or hard pains, this is particularly a sign that you should lighten your workout, especially if you feel pains in the bone. On the other hand, a sore feeling in the muscles is usually a ‘good’ pain. In the long term, be aware if certain muscles groups are not as sharp as they usually are for long periods of time. Failing to do so could force you into a situation where it may take you weeks to recover your sharpness.

Final Note – Are They Doing It?

Paying attentive to your body’s signals, and adding some direction and logic to your training regime will be very helpful in avoiding overtraining.

Rather than enduring injuries and having inefficient performances because of it, accept that training smarter is more important. Take the initiative and learn how to train smarter as soon as you can. Prevention is better than cure.

Getting the best out your workouts is more beneficial than working out inefficiently to get the same results. This way, you can still stay active and improve physical and mentally.

As proven by the experienced champions that start talking up their ability to work smarter as they are older, it can take years to develop this ability when done mindlessly. This means that you will be in a small minority if you learn to work smart, because so many others will fail to follow suit.

This is what it means to be a champion, to do what the others will not, to get the rewards that are out of their reach.