You’re training hard, harder than anyone else in the gym, so hard that you’re always sore, you feel mentally tired throughout the day and lack concentration or even lack good humor?

Even with all of these factors, your results aren’t coming as fast as you would like them to? Or are you looking at people that with less effort are able to achieve what they are looking for? Are you in “overtraining”?

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There’s no need for that much hustle and bustle, “overtraining” is a very rare phenomenon and is not well understood. But, very possibly, you’re provoking and overcharge on yourselves. That’s why your recovery is affected and it ends up making your life difficult.

The accepted definition throughout the scientific community for overtraining is: a physiological state caused by physiological, psychological, environmental and chemical accumulation that leads to a decrease in psychological and physical performance, which involves an extended recovery period.

So, the chances of developing this condition are low. Recovering from doesn’t take days or weeks, it takes months. There are some registered cases of Olympic athletes who’ve reached this state, because they trained over 25 hours a week.

Even if it isn’t likely for you to develop this syndrome, it doesn’t mean you’re doing everything right. We’ll have you know:

• Training can cause elevated stress levels in your nervous system, which can lead to sort of a “hangover”. This can make you feel a lack of energy and focus, apathy, demotivated and have headaches. It’s no surprise that if you’re able to train in this state you’ll have a breakdown later on in the day,
• You can also be overloading your hormonal system, meaning that your cortisol production could be sky-high thanks to training. Cortisol isn’t the enemy, because it helps you to mobilize energy and increase metabolizing of glycogen and fat stores, guaranteeing more fuel for the muscles. The problem is that by producing more cortisol you’ll limit the production of testosterone or estrogen. This effect will make these hormones’ jobs harder, which can lead to muscle loss, fat gain and less libido. Another sign of elevated cortisol levels is liquid retention and a flat appearance in the muscles.

Signs of overload (nervous, hormonal or immune system):

• Lack of libido;
• Liquid retention increase;
• Notable strength loss;
• Loss of explosive power;
• Increase of resting blood pressure levels;
• Movement during training feels less precise;
• More tiredness;
• Being sore for extended periods of time.

If you regularly feel these symptoms, it’s time to make some changes to your training or even your diet.

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Solutions? Yes. Here you go:

• Fight your obsession over always training to failure, everything will come on its own time;
• Search for constant evolution in your training, like weight goals in certain exercises
• Try to do shorter, more efficient workouts.

Despite everything that was said above, your nutrition will also play a huge role. Nutrition can be a catalyzer to invert this situation. That’s why Team Transformerz defends flexible dieting, since it takes into account physical and physiological aspects of each individual, achieving excellent nutrition standards, both in regard to sports and physiologically. Have the best of both worlds, without useless restriction or sacrifices.