CHAPTER 8
THE OVERTRAINING SYNDROME
Overtraining is the most common problem that prevents endurance athletes from reaching their potential. It’s also the most common cause of injury and ill-health for millions of athletes. And overtraining is a problem that many athletes, coaches, and health-care professionals don’t recognize until it becomes a more serious condition.
As a result, overtraining is not recognized soon enough to prevent loss of training time, injury, ill-health, or poor performance. In other words, overtraining is too often remedied in a reactive way, after it’s happened, rather than preventatively. Overtraining is the accumulation of various physical, chemical, and mental stresses.
Overtraining has been traditionally described as diminished performance that results from an increase in either training volume or intensity. Let me emphasize this point again: Overtraining is an imbalance in our simple endurance equation:
