Overtraining is usually something we perceive as being bad.  Overtraining is associated with lack of recovery, injuries, suppressed immune system, plateaued results in the gym and on the field, low energy, low motivation, etc.  I’m not gonna dismiss any of these side effects from a training volume too high, as these are very real effects from overtraining.  Actually, I’m usually the first one to sensitize people to the effects of overtraining, and I encourage coaches and trainers to monitor training volumes and progress closely.

Then, why am I writing a post questioning the importance of overtraining?

I’m not really questioning the importance of overtraining.  What I want to say is that if it is planned, monitored, and the appropriate amount of rest is planned consequently to allow overreaching, then overtraining might be an interesting tool to use.  I’m not talking about the kind of overtraining that lasts for weeks, or months where you just bury your athletes in the gym without any consideration for obvious symptoms of overtraining that are just getting worse and worse.

If you know that your athletes are going on vacation for a week or two, or they won’t be able to train for that same amount of time, planning to have them reach an overtraining state before they leave might actually be beneficial.  Because you know that during their time away they will have plenty of time to recover, which will allow them to  supercompensate, which will be beneficial for their development.  Upon their return they’ll have recovered and they might have reached new levels of strength, power, endurance, or conditioning.

This might also be a strategy that can be used even with athletes who are not going on vacation.  You can plan overtraining in your program.  As long as it’s followed by an appropriate deload period, you can definitely get some benefits from it.

After all, overtraining is essential to make progress.  The system needs to be overloaded to create adaptation that will translate into gains in strength, power, endurance, aerobic power, or whatever you are trying to improve.  If the overload is not sufficient, the body won’t create adaptation that will trigger improvement.

In the image above, you can see the importance of creating the right amount of training stress, and give the appropriate amount of rest before imposing a new stress.  The red curve is the ideal one where the body is stressed enough to create supercompensation big enough that will lead to improvement.  In that case it’s also important that the training stress is re-applied at the right time (as identified by the letter B in the chart).  So the bigger the training stress (creating overtraining), the more time you will need to allow for recovery so the compensation reaches its peak.

If you ever talk to Cal Dietz, strength coach at the University of Minnesota, you’ll hear him say over and over again that he overtrains his athletes.  For someone who doesn’t understand the supercompensation concept it may sound kinda silly, but the reality is that Cal plans his training volume and rest periods with his athletes as much as anyone I know.  He takes into account the fact that his athletes are also students, that have Christmas break, Spring break, finals, vacations, and all that stuff that’s part of a student’s life.  Therefore he knows that his athletes won’t train with him 52 weeks a year, which is why overtraining (or overreaching) at different time of year is a good option in his situation.

Like I said before, everything is relative.  Nothing is all black, or all white, a lot of things fall into this good old gray area.  It’s all a matter of understanding the context.

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Recently I’ve been introduced to the concept of heart rate variability (HRV).  For those who don’t know anything about HRV, it’s basically a measure of the variation in beat-to-beat interval of your heart rate.  Methods to measure HRV include ECG, blood pressure and specific devices (which I’ll talk about a little later).  HRV has been shown to be a pretty accurate predictor of heart diseases.  But more specifically to training and performance, HRV can give you information about the CNS, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems activity, and overall fatigue and recovery.

What that means is that HRV measurement could be an invaluable tool to monitor fatigue and recovery in athletes.  Think about the implications of this.  We all periodize our athletes’ training programs and adjust the training loads in order to give them the biggest benefits from training and we try to follow some sort of supercompensation model, in the hopes of getting the desired results.

But how do you know if you’re training loads and recovery times are perfectly adjusted so your athletes reach optimal supercompensation?  There is no way to know without measuring it!  It doesn’t matter how much experience you have in training high level athletes and writing training programs; the fact is that you can’t know EXACTLY how much training load and recovery is optimal for every individual athlete.  Because let’s face it, every athlete is different; they all handle stress (physical and psychological) differently, they eat and sleep differently and their bodies have different recovery abilities.

This is where HRV measures come very handy.  By getting those measures you can write programs and adjust training loads accordingly.  HRV measures give you all you need to plan your training, recovery and supercompensation optimally.  HRV is probably the future for most high level athletes and their training regimen.  But with the finding of HRV comes a bad news, and a good news…

Bad news first: there aren’t that many good devices out there that are user friendly to use HRV with yourself and your clients.  And most of them are worth thousands of dollars; OmegaWave, which is probably the most popular one is worth well over 10,000$!  And in terms of practicality it’s not better as you can run only one person at a time (takes around 5-7 minutes to run someone through); that’s pretty inconvenient from a team’s or small group perspective.

But here’s the good news: Joel Jamieson is about to launch is own HRV product called BioForce HRV  and it’s going to be available for less than 200$!  From what I heard, Joel has been working to develop this product for the past 10 years, and it’s been tested on hundreds of athletes.  It should be similar to the OmegaWave, but much more available to anyone who wants to use HRV.

If you have any interest in that type of product, I recommend you check out Joel Jamieson’s website as we’re getting really close to the launch date of his product, from what I heard.  Check it out HERE.

I’ve only been introduced to the HRV concept a couple weeks ago, and all I’ve been thinking about ever since is: with all the implications of this tool, it could very well change the future of periodization training for sports -and the one of every high level athlete, for that matter.  If you realize how much managing training loads and volumes matter with high level athletes (especially in-season to manage fatigue), you’ll probably think like me that this tool could revolutionize our industry forever.

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