Coach Allanah’s tips on how to know when overtraining may begin to hinder your goals.

Hi Beasts,
We are all for chasing those goals and hustling hard here at BB, but how do you know when kicking that bag is getting a bit too much?

I wanted to jump in and give you a run down on how to pinpoint when you could be overtraining.

Over training is exactly what it sounds like to train to excess. This is bad for us for many reasons! Overtraining puts some serious stress on our bodies. Stress = giving your body a reason to produce the nasty hormone we don’t want to hang around called ‘cortisol’.

As soon as your cortisol levels increase, this directly effects our metabolism and immune responses negatively. This can lead to weight gain, reduced maintenance calories, injuries and sickness.

So, how do we know if we are overtraining?

Let’s go through a general checklist!

• You are doing double sessions more than once per week or training more than 6 days per week regularly
• You have persistent injuries and muscle pain
• Felling fatigued and having difficulty sleeping
• A decline in performance
• Fitness Plateau – Putting in constant work and not reaping the reward for effort.
• Weight gain

Ok so we have pin pointed what it is and how we know if it is affecting us!

How do we fix it?

Over training can take a bit more to fix than just easing back on the training.

Some top ideas:

Take those doubles off your calendar girl. At BB we have created the perfect programming! It is designed so that you only have to get to 5-6 sessions per week for optimum results! If you do want to double up, try to limit it to once per week or every so often if you miss one of your normal days.

Take a deload week! Yes, you may have heard this term in the weight lifting world, but the same principle applies! Basically it just means to ease back on the training for 1 week and give your body a good couple of days in a row to rest and recover. During this time, make sure to smash back plenty of nutritious food high in protein to help with muscle repair and growth!

Eat Make sure you are eating enough food for what your body demands!

Rest Introduce the idea of 1-2 full rest days regularly, where the most exercise you do is go on a nice walk or hang out at the beach.

Enjoy! Remember you want to enjoy your training! smashing it out too often might make it start to feel like a chore and you’ll have less chance of sticking to it!

Look after yourself ladies! I know how much we love our BB training, so we need to make sure we are all putting our health as number 1!! If you think you might need some help coming up with a better balanced weekly schedule please email us and book in for a goal setting session.