Do different sports need distinct tapering strategies?

We don’t know yet. A lot of science work has still to be done to give the various taper strategies a scientific background.
Scientific studies need to outline a proper hypothesis, and consider the complexity of the physiology behind. Until today we don’t even know whether the taper has to change depending on the sports. Maybe we have to discriminate between strength and power sports, endurance and ultra-endurance sports, maybe we have to look at the individual.
That our knowledge about tapering is still very limited, has in my opinion got mainly two reasons. One is, science studying this field is still very young. The first scientific study was reported as recently as 1992 (Shepley at al.). Secondly, the studies that have been performed are only vaguely aware of the complexity of the physiology behind the body’s regulatory and adaptation processes in the tapering and the preceding training. Therefore future investigations of a more dynamic nature are needed, investigations, that take the course of time of physiological changes into considerations.
Interesting to know is that round about 50 years ago we have not even been aware of the fact, that a special recovery regimen before a competition can improve performance. Training was continued right through to the competition. So it happened that guys were running a marathon before racing the marathon. One of the first authors to discuss the importance of resting before competition was Stampfl in 1955. He insisted that his distance athletes rested for full four days before competition. The term tapering was first coined by Carilie and Frank Cotton in 1947.

There are various tapering strategies around that differ in duration and intensity. Banister et al. published a paper in 1999 looking at three different tapering strategies. I think this paper is still the foundation of what is roughly done until today with lots of minimal variations and individualizations by coaches and athletes. The study by Banister found that the more rapidly you reduce training in the taper, the better is your racing performance. Thus the most effective taper was one in which training was reduced by 50% on the third day of the taper and 75% on the sixth day with a continuing reduction for the next eight days.

Is tapering a period of time for the body and the brain to adapt and recuperate?

The answer is maybe. How to measure, how to assess your very own and optimal way of tapering to achieve what seems to be clear cut: Tapering produces a dramatic improvement of performance, if you do it accordingly.
You may not be able to go for all the different and then anyway inconclusive parameters such as metabolic changes, muscle glycogen concentration, VO2max and lactate (levels that seem not be influenced by the tapering anyway). But you have access to your own mood state, sleep pattern and perception of exertion. All three are complex physiological and psychological phemomena that indicate your condition and well-being as a whole. It is the body and the brain, both together fresh and ready to rock that make up for a peak performance. All three are emergent states that indicate the condition of your immune system, your ability to cope with stress factors and adapt to changes etc. If during the taper your mood (e. g. perceived fatigue, depression, anger, confusion) is not getting better, your sleep not more restorative and your level of vigour not higher, then there was probably something wrong with the preceding training. At least these are the conclusions I draw from the incoherent literature I read.

Is tapering a phase for focusing on neuromuscular recruitment?

Let’s dare to say yes to this point, one of the few with almost unanimous consensus among the scientific community. Taper results in an increased strength and power output in athletes obviously regardless to the sports they do. As I would put it, during the taper  you have to rest, but the current of signals from the brain to the periphery and back should not stop. This is at least what field experience of athletes proves. Signals have to be sent with sufficient intensity and frequency to keep open all the paths from the brain to the periphery of the muscles and other organs and back, to have all the necessary neurones on stand-by mode and ready to fire when receiving the command of the race’s starting signal.

Summary

Scientific evidence confirms that tapering produces a dramatic improvement of performance. The effect is greatest if there is a rapid reduction in training volume already in the first few days of the taper and if training during the taper is at high intensity, approximating 5-km race pace for runners.
To sharpen the training to optimize the training effects on the brain, and its ability to recruit a larger muscle mass for longer during subsequent exercise, and at the same time to leave enough time for adaptation and recuperation that’s what I think counts during tapering.
The key could be to do very little training during taper, but to train only at race pace. Tim Noakes’ expresses it like this: »Once you decide to taper, do as little training as your mind will allow, but do this little training at fast pace.«

Hard training and racing too much may stress the body in a way that disease symptoms suddenly reappear, part 1/2

Performing great and peaking at the right time  – that does not only apply to sports – has a lot to do with finding and keeping your body in balance.
As an athlete you are constantly challenging your very own balance. At this point, I would like to mention that one’s balance is something individual, that parameters that define your balance cannot be simply passed on to someone else. The other may have a distinct pattern of parameters from you signifying wellbeing and balance. Balance is an active process, a condition that needs to be reestablished everyday, if you train and push your limits. This can eventually be a tricky thing to do.
If you do not want to topple off the narrow ridge of balance into the valley, from where the path is often very tedious, then you should take the signals of your body that are indicating a threatening decline in efficiency seriously.
I am defining the dynamic balance here as a condition of one’s well-being that is produced by the optimal co-operation of the immune system, nervous system and hormones.

A body increasingly loosing its balance
The story of pro triathlete O. S., a case report

First, I’ll tell you an athlete’s history that impressively shows how a body becomes unbalanced and how its buffer capacities are slowly depleted. The athlete suffered from severe exercise-induced  asthma ever since. Sometimes he could control it well, sometimes the symptoms just deteriorated. An allergy component has never been clarified.
During the 2005 racing season, he again suffered badly from asthma, the symptoms could be hardly controlled. One reason for this was definitely the preceding extremely strenuous season of 2004 with 4 IRONMAN distances and quite a number of short distance races.
In July 2005, during the highly intensive training phase just before the IRONMAN Switzerland in Zurich, where he wanted to start, O. S. hurt himself with a cut in the front of the sole of his foot. Of course, training especially running seemed no longer an option. Due to the injury, he was given the routine tetanus injection. Right after that, he felt really bad: headache, joint aches and pains, extreme fatigue, like when having a bad bout of flu. Statistics say that 3 to 5% of those vaccinated suffer from such side reactions to vaccinations, especially when the immune system is already weakened. In this case, it was very obvious what happened. The immune system had to be active in too many places.

• The highly intensive training meant stress for the immune system (muscle adaptation and healing processes of the micro-lesions).

• The asthma symptoms needed regulation and control by the immune system.

• The foot injury triggered off a process of inflammation that demanded healing as well.

• And the vaccination was another provocation of the athlete’s immunity.

O. had to cancel the Zurich race, trimmed his training until the reactions to the vaccination eased and the foot wound had healed. But then, round about one year later another serious health incident occurred. A tumor of one of his testicles was diagnosed and he had to undergo an operation and radiotherapy. His age back then was 35. Obviously, O. S. immunity was stressed so much during all these years of intense training and racing that these became chronic stress factors that lead  – beside the genetical part that is always involved in tumor growth – to the development of the tumor.
The conclusion is that severe stress weakens immunity. Training and racing can be strong stress factors depending on the robustness of your body. There is always a genetic component to what extent you are able tolerate your sport. In the case of O. S. the system had reached its limits, and O. had to slow down and change his approach to his sport.

Many athletes suffer from symptoms that point towards a stressed immune system

My work with Biestmilch made me talk with many athletes about their health issues. It was amazing for me to find out how many athletes suffer from various illnesses that point towards incompetence and strain on the immune system. Many of the symptoms they have get worse during the stress of intense training and racing. Even young athletes between the ages of 15 and 20 complain about unclear symptoms of chronic pain that seems to be orthopedic because its location around knees, groins or lower back, but they are not. All diagnostics are negative. Immune imbalances can provoke these symptoms of chronic pain. Other athletes come down with some infection or another after having hardly moved out there comfort zone in a race or during training.

Physicians are consulted, the diagnostic outcome remains poor

In many cases, an odyssey from doctor to the other does not lead anywhere. Here is a short list of the problems that indicate that you may just about to fall off the narrow ridge of immune balance. If these alarm signals are cropping up, you should be careful and slow down, focus on recovery: severe respiratory infections and infections of the sinuses, herpes infections, gastrointestinal disorders or irritable bowel disorders, sudden injuries, pains typically in the groin, knee, back or Achilles tendon that bear no relation to what the x-ray shows, stress-induced asthma, spreading of an existing allergy to other organs ( hay fever suddenly accompanies asthma), worsening atopic eczema….. the list could go on and on.

Illnesses or other the performance impairing issues in athletes are either due to acute stress situations or long lasting chronic stress. The sequelae of are acute stress are reversible and disappear fast, if you take your time for recovery.
It is different in the case of complications that result from chronic stress. Here are some of the most frequent sicknesses that are most likely due to chronic stress and a genetic aspect: increased sucsceptibility to injury, whereby the healing process is slowed down, over-training, chronic viral infections such EBV, burn-out syndrome, chronic fatigue or increased worsening or reactivation of existing illnesses.
Many an athlete has told me that in times of not training, which were necessary for professional or family reasons, all of a sudden there were no symptoms of allergies, asthma or atopic eczma. On starting up training again, the problems returned; sometimes they were even worse than at the beginning of their athletic career.

Every muscle requires an impulse from the central nervous system for contraction. These stimuli determine how many muscle fibers are activated. You will be surprised to hear that only about 20% of the muscle is activated in the stage of high strain. The muscles need stimuli from the central nervous system to move. With the feeling of fatigue and exhaustion emerging a decline of the frequency of impulses to the muscles goes along. Exhaustion and fatigue are thus triggered by the central nervous system.Tiredness of the mind brings about a performance decline

It is proven that the central nervous drive decreases when the muscle grows tired and this condition seems not related to an acidic situation or empty carb stores. If the mind/brain is tired, the muscle will be tired too. Another strong indication for the central nervous system being involved in the development of exhaustion and fatigue is the fact that less muscle fibers are recruited by the central nervous system at high altitude compared to sea level. This so-called central fatigue kicks in before a lethal situation may occur in the organs. In all the other models it is a peripheral fatigue that determines the performance limit. But data tells us that in the situation of breaking off performance no peripheral organ, neither heart nor muscle nor liver etc. have reached their ultimate limits. Obviously, we have safety margins to protect the heart, to ensure the ATP supply and generally hold the body in balance. Staying focused during a whole training session brings about more resistance towards exhaustion as neural muscular pathways are better trained.

Measures taken from athletes after strenuous exercise may resemble those of a disease condition

A nice, and in my opinion very logical comparison that supports this approach is that of an athletic peak performance and that of an extremely dangerous disease that often leads to death. At the same time this shows us that the observation of measuring parameters alone can be rather misleading. The disease is called SIRS (systemic inflammatory response syndrome) and can have many causes. Two or more of the following criteria must be fulfilled to diagnose a SIRS: body temperature over 38°C, heart rate over 90/min, breathing rat over 20/min, leukocytes over 1200/nl or under 4000, immature leukocytes over 10%. You will find the same measures in a marathon runner without this condition being the least bit threatening. So we perceive how important the context of the measurement is and that values can be a surrogate of many components. Intact regulatory processes underneath the surface of the measurements are obviously really crucial for peak performances and not the measurement itself.

Are there central switches turning on fatigue?

There is surely a whole complex network of central and peripheral circuits that ensures that no organ or organ system is driven to a lethal boundary. Therefore the performance limit is a computational result out of many many parameters, of many of which we may not even be aware of yet. It is not merely a final result but a constantly performed computational process. Training modulates these processes and increases the adaptability of the involved circuits towards safe boundaries.
Having read these chapters you will have noticed that it is very difficult to decide on one single training concept. All the facts lead us back to the beginning and the realization that there is a bit of truth in all of it. To improve endurance performance and peak at a special moment in time is a tricky business and the mission of training. More and more coaches, recommend listening to your inner voice and find out what it is like to feel good and then to train according to that feeling.

Chris McCormack also points that out. He says: “The body is a smart thing. And it is one body, everything is related to everything, people tend to forget this.”
That is why there is not only one correct way of reaching a goal. To feel good is difficult. The feeling cannot be described with a heart rate monitor or stuffed in with carbohydrates. It is the art of finding out in training which mixture your body needs to find that wellbeing which leads to an ideal performance.

Here are the main models which are building the base for the logic of training plans, mostly these model are infiltrating the plans of coach on an unconscious level, which I think should not be the case. If you want to tune different parameters of your performance, you need to know which model is guiding you by interpreting the data, otherwise you may draw the wrong conclusions and initiate changes that may not be adequate.

Biomechanical model
Cardiovascular-anaerobic model
Energy supply/energy deficiency model
muscle recruiting/muscle strength model
Psychological, motivation model

Biomechanical model – A muscle that is not trained remains untrained

Just very recently I wrote blog post about the biomechanical side of training. Nevertheless I shall mention it here again as one of the important training models.
Every muscle must needs a regular work-out or it will loose its strength and speed. In spite of various athletic activities, many of our 656 muscles remain unaccounted for. That is why a great runner can get sore muscles, if the track profile changes. You should also train muscles which you seemingly do not need. The pelvic floor muscles and back muscles for example. Not only do many orthopedic conditions result from muscle weaknesses, they also reduce economic movement patterns. If you emphasize speed and strength you must train both, single and in combination. Endurance is always a mixture of both. Muscles make your body tension like a spring. Springs store energy, which is common knowledge from physics. This energy is important for endurance.

Economic patterns of movement lead to an improved performance

One concept of training physiology is based on this form of energy. It is called the biomechanical model. It indicates that muscles are systems, which give back elastic energy. The skeleton muscles function as springs and produce a torque. They retain mechanical energy.
Economic running belongs to this chapter for example. If the peak performance of an athlete were connected to the raised oxygen supply to the muscle, then the higher level of produced energy would also be linked to a higher thermal output. But increased heating also leads to a premature feeling of exhaustion. Heat accumulation leads to a performance drop or abortion. So it is logical to reduce the oxygen consumption and reduce the thermal output by a better motion efficiency.

So: Running technique, core stability, semi-specific training etc. give the muscles elasticity and tension. The well trained muscles turn into a system, that efficiently releases energy without producing to much heat. To improve running in an athlete who is already very fit can be achieved by an improvement of his running technique. More muscle strength and more muscles fibers and therefore a higher oxygen consumption will probably not help him any further, but reducing weight and running more efficiently. There is another advantage of a well-trained muscle (with an efficient stretching and tensing cycle). It is more resistant towards the kind of damage, which occurs due to eccentric strain on the muscle by running. Muscles of this kind allow you to train longer and harder.

Summary: Less damage due to less heat in the muscle (heat also damages the tissue) and less muscle damage by eccentric mechanical strain mean a faster recovery and the possibility to train more often without your recovery suffering.

The next posts will cover the other models.

From coaches and trainers you will probably often hear the words that you are supposed to listen to your body, first consciously and – even better – unconsciously. Body and mind should form one entity. This means you have to proceed in a way that your body-mind balance is sustained. Easy said, difficult to achieve.
The phrase undoubtedly indicates a general trend towards a holistic view of the organism. It is influenced by a mixture of views borrowed from biology, psychology, naturopathy, sport science, sport medicine, nutrition science, personal experience…and more. But the appeal to you remains vague, you have to find out yourself, what it is like to be in a state of balance with your mind and body.

Using the computer as a body metaphor avoids this mess of viewpoints, and quickly shows what changes mean for the body computer. The greater the difference between a body state you are used to and the condition you are trying to obtain, the greater the processing demands for your body. Training is nothing less than practicing the processing operations. Exercises must be repeated until for example the paths of nerve connections are established which then enable a stable channeling of the impulses. Whenever well trained signal constellations (sensory stimuli, impulses from your senses to the spinal cord and brain) are existent, they are automatically processed into the desired movement pattern without even touching your consciousness, and that occurs even under extreme stress. It might sound rather trivial to those, who have had to relearn speaking after a stroke, just as to a child that must learn to eat with a spoon, or an athlete who wants to improve his/her running or cycling technique. It is all about reiterating and spacing a stimuli pattern.

Searching for a constellation of stimuli that can be best processed by the body computer

This assignment is not trivial. You probably know how difficult it can be to correct a trained, but wrong movement pattern, such as a wrong swimming or running technique. It is made even more difficult by the fact that you can’t tell if you have been ‘practicing’ the proper technique, nutrition or training scheme, until you have practiced for a while.
There is no way of gaining knowledge about whether your training is adequate without giving the body some time. Unfortunately, impatience is a constant companion of many athletes. Changing training methods or devices too early may spoil your build-up, but who can tell you, when it’s time to change. It’s only you who can assess this.

Body perception or feeling good is the most complete body parameter

Chris McCormack – Triathlon World Champion Long Distance 2010 – says that the whole trick is, to know what it means to feel really good. Only under such circumstances it is possible to peak on time and remain uninjured. Training and becoming tired, reaching limits without wrecking yourself, is an art that only few can master. An art, because no more direct and complete but at the same time immeasurable parameter than body perception exists to reach this goal. This is still the case, even though we got so many devices to measure. There are tools that can guide our way to wellbeing such as heart rate, lactate, urea, creatine kinesis, oxygen consumption, electrolytes, micronutrients, inflammatory parameters etc., and there are the indirect methods such as being healthy, not suffering from injuries, pain or infections. But in the very end, we have to decide by experience when we are really feeling good.

The goals and the technique may vary, but the process is always the same

Body perception is a feeling that is acquired, when the gap between target – and actual condition closes. It requires motivation and practice, training. As a child you learn to ride a bike, because you would like to move faster and more independently, or because others do so. As a triathlete, the relation to your bike changes. You will try to ride quickly with the least possible strain. The bike and all its technical details are analyzed and questioned and so is the process of riding itself. Wheels, pedal position, frame size and handle position are all given their own importance. The motion cycle is analyzed and the perception from child age is taken apart and put back together and improved until a new perception has emerged – a new oneness between you and your bike.
This procedure does not always work. It requires a lot of practice and training. In the best case you melt into one with your bike. You move as safely as on two legs. You do not even notice it anymore: it becomes a part of you. But if the structure of your bike changes this process begins anew. The changed incoming stimuli patterns change your perception of the bike and interrupt your movement pattern, until a new balance is calculated through practice.
Countless examples could be named here. The same applies to such simple objects as a shoe. Whereas, shoes are especially stubborn companions. A shoe that does not distort your body perception is worth a lot. The smallest change to the sole, a body part very sensitive to wellbeing and body perception, can give you the feeling of being impaired. Therefore: Never change a winning team. This applies to things as well as humans, one can hardly believe it.

Können Gefühle lügen
von Sebastian Kienle, Deutsch

And here the link to the “Masters” blog
My thoughts on training
by Chris McCormack

Sports are full of devices more or less sophisticated. The shoe is most probably the oldest one, which many of you may not even consider as a device. But imagine what can happen, if shoes are not fitting well. It can spoil the hard training work of years. That power meters and navigation systems are devices is obvious, nobody will doubt that, and therefore we are more consciously dealing with them. But a shirt? A device? How ridiculous! But then, we think about all the industries behind the shirt that allow us to produce functional wear, the production line starts with oil and ends with a jerzey. Yeah, we live in a complex world of interdependencies with all our devices.

The following article in specific wants to demonstrate how closely we interact with devices such as a shoe or a bike, that closeness makes us feel that borders between us and the device are dissolving, or just the other way around that these things develop into handicaps, fractious and painful.

Body perception can be seen as a computational result

If you are ready to follow me insofar that the body (organism) can be considered as a stimulus/signal/impulse processing and self-regulating machine, then you may also accept for this moment of time that body perception can be described as the result of all the stimuli/signals/impulses involved in the computation. The body nothing more than a huge computer, scary? No, only a thought experiment! By applying such a straightforward metaphor it is possible to deal with body perception without going into details of brain and consciousness.
Does this approach sound too factual to you? Venture out with us for this experiment that is looking at the body as very complex computational machine.

Body perception is changing depending on the devices we use

Let’s summarize: the body consists of vivid currents of signals that make up patterns of which the cells are senders and receivers and interpretors. If the signal patterns change, the body’s condition and perception changes as well, and vice versa. If processes of emerging patterns are misinterpreted, or not reaching the receiver, if the signals are not strong enough, or not as many as needed for understanding the message, then the circuits, feedback loops and control cycles regulating the body loose connection, may be disturbed and even disrupted, thus, body perception, body feel changes.
An example: If you have been wearing a shoe for years, a shoe you did not feel anymore, not a shoe anymore, but a body part. But then one day you take the chance/risk to change your shoe brand. Suddenly everything is different, the shoe is sending signals, and either you get used to it and the shoe develops into a body part again or it remains a foreign body with sore consequences for your body as a whole. The signals initiated by the shoe may destroy the delicate balance between you and the shoe. The health issues can then range from an uneasy feeling to suddenly struggling with your running technique or feeling ill and prone to injury. The influences of electronic devices on your body’s balance are much more difficult to analyze, but worthwhile to consider.

Training improves the body’s computational capacities

The aim of training is to constantly improve performance by optimizing the computational capacities of the various organ systems, be it the metabolism, the immune system, the cardiovascular system or the nervous system. If the body computer succeeds in integrating the various signal currents from all the sources, if there emerges a balance of the ever changing and repeating signal patterns, then you have the perfect body feel, body perception is that of wellbeing and health.

In cases of massive changing signal currents, and limited or overburdened processing capacities – both can occur at the same time -  the condition of wellbeing can change immediately. Just remember a race you had to quit or to walk to the finish line, when suddenly you started struggling, and nothing seemed to work smoothly anymore, and all compensatory actions failed, then you may feel what I mean

Part 2 follows tomorrow …

More to read:

Training Gadgets GPS,SRM und co -Train by feel
by Nicole Leder, Text in German
Lauftraining mit GPS
by Daniel Schmoll, Text in German
Get the feeling: SRM und andere Gadgets
by Ronnie Schildknecht, Text in Swiss German

The Science of Triathlon – Gizmos and Gadgets
by Terenzo Bozzone
Swim equipment on Edith’s Blog
by Edith Niederfriniger

Modern exercise physiology and biology put a lot of work into studying the healthy body. That has not been the case for many decades where scientists only looked at sick bodies. Exercise physiology gives an amazing insight into the body’s “normal” way of functioning.

Inflammation is a phenomenon of the healthy body

You are probably used to the view/fact that inflammation is only present in cases of disease such as infections or chronic non communicable diseases (atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes-type-2, multiple sclerosis, bowel diseases etc.). Since very recent, scientific data talk a different language. Inflammation is a condition of the healthy body, it is a contained process essential for being healthy, a process that keeps our body with all its diverse functions going. Along all the mucosal linings (bronchi, guts, urinary bladder etc.) that connect us with the outside world, minor inflammatory or immune responses respectively take place… always and throughout our whole life. These borders colonized with its very own microflora are areas where controlled inflammatory processes secure the borders and guarantee our survival, where the communication with the environment takes place, often termed as friends (nutrients, bacteria, virus, macromolecules) and foes (e.g nutrients, viruses, bacteria, macromolecules).
As you can see from the listing in brackets, whether an agent or a molecule respectively is friend or foe is determined by the environment and the time of encounter at the very place of the encounter. There is no bad or good per se! Inflammation is a physiological/healthy activity/process of the human body! The meaning, whether a molecule is treated as friend or foe, is determined by the condition of the milieu at a given time (e.g. such different conditions may be diseases, the different development stages, we go through; or different situations of stress etc.)
The multiple systemic inflammatory processes ongoing in our body are termed low-grade systemic inflammation and are characterized by a state of perfect well-being. Diseases or discomfort start, if this process deteriorates and gets out of control which is generally spoken the case in all illnesses.

Well, this inflammatory situation is initiated and controlled by the same system, the stress system. I mentioned it already in my former post that it consists of the super system of regulation: nervous system, immune system and hormones (endocrine system). The basic mode of regulation is a loop, many loops connected by positive and negative feedback by structured by circuits on various levels. The context determines whether the system activates or suppresses a process. Under the condition of well-being exists a perfect equilibrium between pro- and anti-inflammatory currents. I name them currents, because you have myriads of molecules with either properties depending on time and place of the encounter.

What has this got to do with physical activity, with you as a high-end athlete racing Hawaii?

Moderate physical activity stimulates the stress system in a very positive way. It helps to avoid the deterioration of systemic low-grade inflammation into chronic systemic low-grade inflammation. Chronic systemic low-grade inflammation seems to be one cause for atherosclerosis, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes-2 and some forms of cancer such as breast or colon cancer. Physical inactivity has been identified as a stronger predictor of chronic illnesses than risk factors such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes, and obesity for all-cause mortality. Physical activity protects against these diseases and premature death because of its ability to down-regulate inflammatory states in our body.

As an athlete you find yourself on the path of health and youth ! If you don’t exaggerate!

You are well familiar with the fact that endurance training means stress for your body, positive in the case of overreaching, negative in the case of overtraining. The more you push your body to exertion, the more stressed it gets. The control mechanisms that contain your body’s low-grade inflammation have a hard time to remain under control. If you manage your training within these limits where training stress is not harming your immune system, autonomic nervous system and/or your hormone regulation, then you can be sure that sport is one (please, keep in mind that there are other factors as well such as genetic outfit and nurtition that play a significant role too) preventive measure for a long and healthy life.

If you do otherwise and drive your body permanently over the edge, then pro-inflammatory processes may take over and lead your body into a state of chronic systemic low-grade inflammation, one of the strongest disease predictors identified until now.

A remark at the end: In this post I am not taking about local acute inflammations due to injuries or other traumata. Acute inflammation is a short-term process, usually appearing within a few minutes or hours and ceasing upon the removal of the injurious stimulus. It is characterized by five cardinal signs: rubor (redness), calor (increased heat), tumor (swelling), dolor (pain), and functio laesa (loss of function).

Especially from studies that dealt with the effects of human growth hormone – a substance that is definitely on the WADA’s list and considered as doping – we know that performance enhancement is very closely related to recovery times.
Which means that doping agents, be it steroids or more powerful substances such as growth factors, speed up recovery time. It becomes that short that the training loads you can take on the day after a hard training session are just terrific. Those tested in the study where just startled of its effects, so very tempting to use them. Read more about hGH on the Science of Sport blog.

What I want to say with that is that if you want to avoid overtraining, you need to listen to your body’s needs for recovery. That is easily said, but it is not easy at all to realize the transition from generalized fatigue that is an essential ingredient of proper training (after O’Toole, 1998 termed overreaching) to that bit of more fatigue that indicates the sliding into overtraining.

If you read the literature there is a wide consensus about the fact that we have distinguish between stages of fatigue. The first person who introduced these subtle grades of fatigue into exercise science and coaching was James Counsilman in 1968 (a former swim coach at Indiana University).
Counsilman’s fatigue zones may help you to evaluate your own condition. Zone A refers to an athlete who trains moderately hard and becomes mildy fatigued after 5 days of training. This athlete will barely reach a fatigue zone. During the recovery period on the weekend his fatigue level slightly drops below the previous one observed the week before. Training effects are minor. If you push yourself to the upper limit of the fatigue zone B, then recovery on the weekend lowers your fatigue level conspicuously compared to the observation point before This is what is called super-adaptation. Zone C of fatigue is a result of too hard training. It pushes you into a valley of fatigue. You may need the whole weekend to fully recover. If you start your training before that your level of fatigue will increase further during the following training week. Training is progressing from overreaching to overtraining. The alarm is on!

This inability to produce your best when you are apparently in good form is the first sign of incipient overtraining.

I know pro athletes who do not monitor their training. After many years of experience they know or may only think that they know where they are in training without making notes. Moreover, they may have coaches giving them a feedback on their current condition. But if you are an age grouper who cannot only focus on training, but has got a job and a family, and is left to his or her devices in many ways, then it could be of great importance to monitor your training performance. It makes you see your falls in performance immediately and you cannot cheat on yourself. Please, add to your notes all extra stress factors that happened during the training week. Stress from other than training accumulates and may force you to reduce the workload.
What is needed, I think, on top of a training schedule, is a level of fatigue and stress resistance protocol. For this reason time-trials make sense, even for age groupers. This is where the heart rate comes in, not so much the stopwatch, and the recovery time after the time-trial. As long as you are in zone B your heart rate is the same or lowers compared to before, your recovery time remains the same or goes down as well. All this changes directions, if you are on the threshold to overtraining.

So far so good, there will be more next time. No, one more thing at the end, doesn’t this text, for which I got lots of inspiration from Tim Noakes, the author of the lore of running, thank you!, show the great and overall importance of recovery!

Working with biestmilch and being a physician I am confronted with a lot of health issues of athletes and it is exactly now, that I receive these posts and comments talking about the discrepancy, the lacking proportionality between training efforts and performance. You may feel in top form, you worked hard for many weeks, and then when the day comes, you feel sluggish in the swim or toasted on the bike already. Maybe you overlooked the discrete signs that guide you along the path of productive and unproductive workouts. In this post I would like to start writing about the various symptoms that may give you a frame of reference and standpoint of where you are with your training, symptoms that may help you to assess your very personal body condition.

Sebastian Kienle told me before Challenge Roth: “Well, I don’t feel really perfectly prepared, but you know it, if you feel perfectly prepared, then it may as well be the case that you did too much.” You may know that Sebastian got 2nd in his 1st long-distance race and that he raced under 8 hours. To remember his sentence could help in situations of doubts.

To fall prey to overtraining can happen to everybody who loves his or her sport, because sport can actually become an addiction which has nothing to do with being overzealous or doped. The feeling of whole body fatigue as well as the feeling of being able to deliver peak performance are rewarding and seducing. Both extremes can lure us to do more to get more! One day “the more” turns into “too-much” and can bring about overtraining, a sneaky process that may overrun you! A complex phenomenon that needs elucidation still.

Overreaching we need, overtraining we have to avoid

How I see it is that training is the physiological healthy process of improving performance (that applies not only to sport, training is a process of learning to change behavior, be it mental or physical), whereas there are general and individual limits to achievements, of course. With exercise you stimulate and activate the respective parts of the body, including your brain/mind. Without stimuli we become lazy and fall apart, we are losing grounds, and finally develop into losers. We need training, we need exercise to live and survive, but have to learn to respect our very own limits that are rooted in our genetic outfit.
Out there in the real world we observe all transitions from healthy and fit to frail and finally sick. In the beginning the symptoms of decline are very sound, and easily overheard… and if we don’t listen, suddenly the steep fall is there and it may take us weeks, sometimes months, and sometimes for ever to recover.

The very signs that mark the transition from overreaching to overtraining

Generalized fatigue, heavy legs, sore muscles, recurrent headaches, diarrhea, weight loss, sexual disinterest, loss of appetite, problems to sleep and getting up in the morning, inability to relax, listlessness, generalized swelling of lymph glands, worsening of allergies and asthma. Coming down with colds and flus, or respiratory infections that resist to therapy. And very important to pay attention to despite hard training racing performances continue to deteriorate.
This is only an incomplete list that wants to show that the changes you may experience can be emotional, behavioral or physical, and that they are all interconnected. They are all phenomena that depending on their severity are part and parcel of fatigue due to necessary overreaching or an indicator of overtraining.
The symptoms usually should disappear after taking a rest of 24 to 48 hours. If you cannot make it in this time, be cautious it’s overtraining knocking at your door.

Give me the one and only reason!

One more remark I want to make before I close this too long post, and continue to go into the biology of overdoing in greater detail in a later one. Athletes love to go for blood testing, x-rays, MRT etc. They search for the physician and they search for the parameter that is giving them the one and only explanation for their failing. I have to disappoint you. There is none. At the time you will receive concrete results of your bloodwork or other diagnostics you may already be gone over board, which means when your blood shows something you are really sick, and physical workouts are not any longer an option. It is the very characteristic of incipient overtraining that our diagnostic means fail. Overtraining is first of all a phenomenon of a stress system out of balance, a stress system that involves the immune system, the nervous system (central and autonomic nervous system) and hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. These systems control and regulate our whole body, more about that in another post.
In the end, say good bye to conventional diagnostics, and don’t get lulled by weird interpretations of sophisticated diagnostics. Overtraining is a syndrome that can mimic all kind of diseases, be they mental or physical, and this is due to the systems that are involved – and to cut a long story – it involves our whole body as does training before you crossed the line to overtaining.

In my opinion, here we stumble into the same troubles as everywhere, if we want to define one rule for everybody. I know athletes who train comparatively very little and achieve a lot. Whether this is a concept for everyone is not known, I myself. I doubt it. But there are studies on the way supporting high-intensity interval training. I have digged one that indicates that high-intensity interval training may compensate up to certain extent for long training session of low intensity around 65% V02 max.

It is an exciting perspective reading that 2.5 hours sprint units at ca 90% Vo2 max per week compared to 10.5 hours low-intensity running may be as efficient in outcome.

The group around Gibala and McGee from Ontario, Canada and Melbourne, Australia defines high-intensity interval training (HIT) as follows: 30 seconds of all-out maximal cycling against a high braking force on a specialized ergometer (Wingate test). Their standard protocol involved subjects repeating the Wingate test four to six times separated by 4 minutes of recovery for a total of only 2 to 3 minutes of very intense exercise per training session, with three training sessions performed each week for 2 to 6 weeks. The most unique aspect of their work has been the very low training volume, equivalent to approximately 300 kJ of very intense exercise per week.

One of the most remarkable findings from the recent studies was the dramatic improvement in exercise performance during tasks that rely mainly on aerobic energy metabolism, despite the very low training volume. Subjects doubled the length of time that exercise could be maintained at a fixed submaximal workload from approximately 26 to 51 min during cycling at 80% of pretraining VO2peak – after only 6 HIT sessions over 2 weeks. The validity of this finding was bolstered by the fact that a control group showed no change in performance when tested 2 weeks apart with no training intervention.

This is very promissing evidence for those of us whose main argument of not getting into shape is lack of time, and moreover, no excuses anymore

Of course, there remain reservations concerning the final interpretation of the results. HIT may differ from traditional endurance training with respect to changes induced in the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, metabolic control in other organs (e.g., liver, adipose tissue), and protection from disorders associated with chronic inactivity (e.g., insulin resistance, lipid dysregulation).
The answers to the fundamental questions regarding the minimum volume of exercise necessary to improve physiological well-being in various populations, the effectiveness of alternative (less extreme) interval-training strategies, and the precise nature and magnitude of adaptations that can be elicited and maintained over the long-term are still missing.

Nevertheless, for those among you who train anyway and struggle first of all with time, the HIT approach could at least be a partial solution of the dilemma.

Source: Gibala MJ, McGee SL: Metabolic Adaptations to Short-term High-Intensity Interval Training: A Little Pain for a Lot of Gain?: Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews, 58-63, 2008