Are you pushing it with exercise?
Over-training could be taking a toll on your health
While exercise is a key part of a healthy lifestyle, experts warn that ‘over-training’ or poor nutrition may cause injuries or actually harm one’s health.
Exercising too much — or ‘overtraining’ — comes when a body is exerting itself more than it can handle or recover from, which can lead to decreases or plateaus in performance and fitness, burnout, and injuries. In some cases, overtraining can be the result of an “addiction” to the physical and physiological effects of exercise, or because of efforts to get fit quickly without allowing one’s body time to adjust.
Andy Harper, the owner and cofounder of Dubai-based Iconic Fitness and the holder of degrees in exercise science and exercise physiology, noted that over-training is a “common issue” among his clients.
“It usually comes from a good place — a passion for fitness and a love for improving,” he told Khaleej Times. “We see it less often in relation to aesthetics, but that’s certainly still an issue.”
According to Harper, over-training often stems from a misunderstanding of how to achieve performance or aesthetic improvements.
“People often believe that more is better, when that is very seldom the case,” he noted. “A person can get life-changing results from one hour, four or five times a week.”
Additionally, Harper said that some people have an “unhealthy relationship with exercise and their bodies.”
“When you start to exercise, you feel that incredible endorphin rush and you see great results. But your body adapts. You don’t get quite as big of a rush and the results slow down. That’s normal and healthy,” he remarked. “But people can ‘chase the dragon’ and keep trying to get the same feelings and results they got when they first started. But it doesn’t work that way.”
In many cases, Harper added, over-training injuries come in conjunction with “movement deficiencies”, in which proper form is sacrificed for the sake of training intensity.
“A person wants to keep training more and more, but they are also unwilling to step back the intensity and focus on moving correctly,” he said. “Those two mindsets are incredibly common together and will always lead to an injury. It’s just a matter of time...hard to say if it will be three weeks or three years, but it will occur.”
According to Dr Shine Ashokan of Mediclinic City Hospital, injuries related to over-training are “very common” in the UAE.
“We’ve got a young population demographic here. Lots of people are into sports and activities, and lots of fitness centres and programmes are available,” he said. “What I find is lots of people are getting into these programmes, but not getting proper supervision, and end up having injuries.”
The most common injuries, Dr Ashokan said, are related to the knees and shoulders.
“Sometimes what happens is that people who do not have any formal training join a gym, and they commit to a very intensive program of six weeks of training, with lots of squats, lunges, treadmill work and bodyweight training. Lots of stress is placed on these joints.”
To avoid injuries, Dr Ashokan noted that proper form is vital, and recommended that — at least at the beginning of their training — people work out with supervision.
“That would include a personal trainer, taking the person through a warm-up, get the joints working, and a 10-minute warm down,” he said. “Another component would not to increase activity by more than 10 percent for those first six weeks. That will minimise overtraining injuries.” Mirna Sabbagh, a nutrionist and dietitian says “attempts to lose weight or be healthy are often quite extreme”, such as resorting to fad diets that are restricting in some food groups, or too calorically low, or geared towards specific ‘super’ or supposedly fat burning foods.
“The most dangerous of all are going on a calorically restricting diet or even low carbohydrate diets,” she added. “I find that people go to extremes without even trying the basics or learning them, leading to ‘yoyo’ dieting and lots of frustration as they try one diet after the other, all ending in failure.”
“People are often doing strenuous exercise while doing extreme low caloric diets. The two do not combine well because exercise needs energy to sustain,” she added. “(If) the person is doing weight training...the body will need carbohydrates before exercise, and protein after.”
Sabbagh added that most people who diet haphazardly are not getting enough protein, forcing the body to use its muscle stores, rather than building them. Other people end up avoiding healthy carbohydrates, which negatively impacts the nervous system and leads to declining performance.
According to Sabbagh, those who eat less than 700 or more calories than the body needs risk slowing down their metabolism. “It also leads to reduced quality of life, fatigue, nutrient deficiencies, and, of course, depression and a feeling of failure when the person gives up on these extreme restrictions, which are not sustainable,” she added.
‘I was doing way too much’
Among those to have suffered from the effects of over-training is Will, a 31-year old American who until recently was living in the UAE.
“I hadn’t done much for a few years, and I wanted to get back in shape. I just went for it,” he recalls. “I started exercising every day, sometimes for up to two or three hours. I’d lift, run, box, get on the bicycle, anything I could do. I wasn’t giving myself any time to rest at all, and I guess I wasn’t eating right. I was doing way too much.”
After about six months of constantly working through sore muscles, aches and pains, Will says his body started to fight back.
“I stopped making improvements, and I felt as if I was tired and sore all the time,” he said. “Eventually, I started to get injuries. I was having joint problems from running, some back issues, and I got tendinitis from pull-ups.”
Harper noted that such cases often occur because “people see professionals and experienced athletes training for two hours a day, six days a week, and believe they should do that right away to start making improvements.”
“Impatience is extremely dangerous in training,” he added.