The Training Dilemma: Too much or not enough?

A modern day training/performance dilemma for many. I think in order to answer this question, you must first determine what your goal(s) are. If you look back at my Instagram post here, this blog can be seen as an extension to that.

In the Instagram post I specifically talk about returning to sport and how to structure your workload so you’re incrementally increasing your performance, and not burning out due to fatigue. The model I refer to is the ‘General Adaptation Syndrome’ or the GAS training theory.

Those in the sport performance world usually have the luxury of coaches and sport scientists to periodise and plan their training, so that the athlete is peaking closer to competition or are fresh enough to compete. For those of us who are non-professional athletes, we have to be able to autoregulate and plan better to ensure we are not only overtraining, but also pushing ourselves to get better at whichever activity we’re taking part in.

In the last couple of years, there’s been a huge increase in the use of wearable technology that track everything from sleep to heart rate, for example; smart watches, heart rate monitors, heart rate variability tools (oura ring) and the rest that many have adopted, but the jury is still out on if these wearables actually improve performance. On one hand I can see why many are drawn to these tools, as it’s a novelty and being able to track performance metrics is probably the closest many will get to feeling like a professional. On the other hand, I really question whether some of these metrics are actually something you need to know, and can it even possibly push you towards overtraining and injury.

I think with everything there needs to be balance. Don’t rely too much on your smart watch or heart rate variability tool and also only use metrics that are valuable. You will know if you are too tired, or you need to sleep more, you do not need an app or tool to tell you that. If you are an amateur/semi-professional athlete you should really focus on understanding what your weekly training load is. I’ve also written about reverse engineering your sport or activity, to give you a better idea of how much training needs to be done and what type of training needs to be done.

If you’re a frequent gym goer who’s maybe reaching a plateau in performance, e.g. a max squat, the thing to do isn’t to grind through sessions for the sake of increasing your 1 rep max, the best thing to do could actually be removing weights and focussing on the technique, or even removing a few gym sessions all together to allow the body to reset and boost freshness.

I’ve always maintained that training should be a life thing, and in order for this to happen there needs to be just enough stimulus to elicit a response and adaptation to continue to get better. I also believe that every so often you should do hard things to challenge the mind and body and make sure our baseline levels improve. But the main thing is to make sure you are not working out or training under constant fatigue. Tiredness should never be the goal, it should be used as an indicator to determine how you should proceed with training.