Are you Overtraining or Under-Fuelling?

Your legs are heavy, your easy sessions feel hard, and you are not improving despite training consistently. If you immediately thought overtraining, you are right. That is also the exact symptom list for under-fuelling.

Researchers went looking for every training overload study that also measured what athletes were eating. 21 studies made the cut, and in 18 of them, 86%, the athletes were under-fuelled. So the majority of athletes diagnosed as overtrained in the research were in fact not eating enough. Which raises a fairly uncomfortable question about that extra session you are thinking of adding to your training schedule right now.

In this episode, I show you how to tell whether you are overtrained or under-fuelled, why adding volume to an under-fuelled athlete makes everything worse, and the 3 signals plus 3 fixes to run through before you touch your training program.

WHAT YOU WILL TAKE AWAY

Why overtraining and under-fuelling start in exactly the same place in your brain, and why that changes the fix What energy availability actually is, and why it is not the same thing as calories in versus calories out The maths run on a 75 kg age-grouper training 12 hours a week, and what his number actually comes out at Why overtraining is a diagnosis of exclusion, and what the professionals rule out first The 3 signals that tell you under-fuelling is on the table at all The 3 things to fix today, before you add another hour of training TIMESTAMPS

00:00 The symptom list you are about to recognise

00:54 The number that should stop you adding a session

01:57 Same origin, same dials, different fix

02:20 You do not get fitter during your sessions

03:37 Inside the research: 18 out of 21 studies

04:17 Why overtraining is a diagnosis of exclusion

05:26 Energy availability, in plain English