You’re Not “Overtrained”—You’re Underprepared or Misaligned
Every endurance athlete has days (or weeks) when they feel utterly drained. It’s common to hear fatigued age-groupers sigh, “I think I’m overtrained.” But chances are, you’re not truly suffering from Overtraining Syndrome (OTS) – a serious, rare condition – so much as you are facing more ordinary issues: inadequate recovery, poor planning, or lifestyle misalignment. In fact, we must distinguish between true overtraining and just being tired, since feeling worn out is an inherent part of training (and sometimes just life). Misusing “overtraining” as a catch-all label can prevent us from addressing the real culprits behind fatigue and declining performance.
I want to use this article to define OTS and how it differs from short-term overreaching, explain why true OTS is far rarer than athletes think, and dive into the actual drivers of fatigue that masquerade as “overtraining.”
Low energy availability (under-fueling), poor sleep, high life stress, and poorly structured training plans are usually the real problems dragging you down – not a hard-to-reverse breakdown.
The goal is to replace overtraining myths with science-backed understanding and actionable fixes. No fluff – just a frank discussion of why you’re probably underprepared or misaligned, not truly overtrained.
Overtraining Syndrome vs. Overreaching: Clearing the Confusion
Before calling yourself “overtrained,” it’s critical to understand what Overtraining Syndrome actually is – and what it isn’t. Overtraining Syndrome (OTS) is the far end of a spectrum of training stress maladaptation. It is characterised by a significant, long-term drop in performance accompanied by persistent fatigue and mood disturbances.
Unlike ordinary tiredness or a bad week, OTS doesn’t resolve with a few easy days; it can take months or even years to fully recover, and in severe cases can even end athletic careers. It’s essentially a chronic breakdown of the body’s adaptive capacity due to an imbalance of stress and recovery.
On the same spectrum, but less severe, is overreaching. There are two types:
· Functional Overreaching (FO): This is the intentional, short-term overloading of training that temporarily impairs performance, usually followed by a taper and a “supercompensation” rebound to higher fitness. For example, after a hard training camp you might feel sluggish, but a week or two of regular training leads to improvements. Functional overreaching is a planned training tool – you dip into fatigue and come out stronger.
· Non-Functional Overreaching (NFO): This is when you push beyond the functional point – training too hard or too long without adequate recovery – and your performance stagnates or declines for several weeks or more. You’re essentially in a prolonged rut: feeling run-down, not improving, and requiring extended rest to bounce back. NFO is like flirting with overtraining; it’s the danger zone where if you don’t correct course, it could slide into full-blown OTS.
Overtraining Syndrome sits beyond NFO – it’s the chronic condition where performance collapse and fatigue persist for many months, often forcing athletes to stop competing entirely. By definition, OTS is a diagnosis of exclusion – other medical issues are ruled out – and it involves a constellation of symptoms (hence being called a syndrome).
There’s no single lab test for OTS, and its signs can vary, including persistent exhaustion, insomnia or disrupted sleep, elevated resting heart rate or suppressed heart rate, frequent illness, loss of motivation, irritability, and depression.
In simple terms, an overtrained athlete is in a deep, long-lasting hole that training only makes worse.
It’s important to note that some performance decline and fatigue are normal parts of training hard. Coaches often speak of “riding the razor’s edge” – pushing an athlete close to their limit to spur adaptation, but pulling back before it tips into non-functional territory.
Short-term fatigue means you’re stressing the body; persistent fatigue means you’re not recovering from that stress.
The key differences are severity and duration. If a good taper or an easier week fixes the problem, it was likely just fatigue or functional overreaching. If a couple weeks off barely make a dent, you’ve crossed into non-functional overreaching. And if months of rest are needed and performance is still abysmal, that’s the OTS danger zone.
OTS: Rare, Serious, and Overused as a Term
True Overtraining Syndrome is very rare among recreational athletes. It’s something most athletes (thankfully) will never experience firsthand. Research and coaching experience indicate that OTS tends to occur primarily in scenarios of high training load combined with other stressors over a long period – think professional athletes training at the edge, or athletes who ignore the warning signs for far too long. Even then, it’s uncommon.
Why do so many age-group triathletes proclaim “I’m overtrained” after a rough patch? Often, it’s a misnomer. What’s well-documented in elite sports is a completely different story among amateurs. Pros may indeed overtrain by doing massive volumes and intensities; amateurs, on the other hand, usually can’t physically train enough to induce true OTS because life intervenes. It’s not the 2 hours of exercise a day that’s breaking you, it’s how those 2 hours interact with everything else.
In other words, you might feel “overtrained” but really you’re over-stressed overall.
Our bodies have protective fail-safes. Pushing too hard typically triggers minor breakdowns – like nagging injuries or frequent colds – that force a reduction in training and prevent true overtraining. That pesky flu or tendonitis that sidelined you for a week might have actually saved you from digging a deeper hole. Most self-coached athletes will burn out mentally or get injured before they ever reach an overtrained physiological state.
None of this is to trivialize what you’re feeling. Fatigue and stagnation are real. But labeling every slump as “overtraining” is not only inaccurate, it’s counterproductive. If you assume you have an incurable syndrome, you might miss the actual fixable problem.
Most age-group athletes who feel “overtrained” are really under-recovered, under-fuelled, or improperly trained – not in the throes of OTS. In fact, many are essentially “chronically overreached” due to poor training habits, stuck in a plateau of fatigue and mediocre results. Your performance is tanking, but something in your approach – not an unstoppable syndrome – is likely to blame.
So, if not OTS, what’s actually going wrong? In the vast majority of cases, the real reasons behind fatigue and poor performance lie in one (or more) of the following: low energy availability (i.e. you’re not eating enough for your training), poor sleep, high non-training stress, and a training plan that’s misaligned with your needs (too much intensity, not enough rest, lousy periodisation).
Let’s examine each of these factors and see why you’re not overtrained – you’re underprepared.
The Real Drivers of Fatigue and Underperformance
Low Energy Availability: Under-Fueling Your Training
One of the most common (and most overlooked) causes of chronic fatigue in athletes is simply not eating enough. Endurance training burns a tremendous number of calories and depletes glycogen (carbohydrate stores), and if you aren’t actively refueling to meet that demand, your body’s systems start to sputter. In sports science, this state is known as Low Energy Availability (LEA) – when the energy left for your body’s basic functions after exercise is insufficient.
You’re training hard but running on an empty tank.
The effects of under-fuelling can eerily mimic “overtraining.” Studies have found that LEA leads to a host of performance problems, including decreased training response, impaired judgment, decreased coordination, reduced concentration, irritability, depression, and decreased endurance performance. Low energy availability can leave you feeling drained, mentally foggy, moody, and unable to hit your usual paces – exactly the scenario many athletes describe as being “overtrained.” But in this case, the root cause isn’t that you did too much training; it’s that you didn’t give your body enough fuel to adapt and recover.
Crucially, chronic under-fuelling undermines the very adaptations you’re trying to get from training. Without sufficient calories (especially carbohydrates and protein), your body can’t replenish glycogen, repair muscle damage, or balance hormones properly. Over time, this can suppress your metabolism and throw endocrine systems out of whack (for example, disrupting thyroid and sex hormones). There’s even evidence linking low energy availability to the development of overtraining. Some researchers hypothesise that energy deficiency is a main underlying cause of Overtraining Syndrome.
In other words, many supposed cases of “overtraining” may actually be the result of effectively starving the body of the energy it needs to recover. If you fix the energy balance – by eating more – performance and health can rebound.
It’s telling that in a recent comprehensive study of OTS (the EROS study), every single overtrained athlete had at least one nutritional or fuelling red flag. 100% of OTS cases showed either low carbohydrate intake, low protein intake, or overall low caloric intake (often alongside poor sleep).
In fact, inadequate carbohydrate was identified as a significant independent trigger for OTS, especially when coupled with lack of sleep. This makes sense: endurance athletes are heavily reliant on carbs for training; chronically skimp on them and you’re essentially inducing a constant energy crisis in your body. Protein and total calories matter too – without them, you can’t repair muscles or support basic physiology, driving the body into a catabolic, fatigued state.
Many triathletes, in the pursuit of leanness or due to busy schedules, simply don’t eat enough quality calories throughout the day. It’s easy to underestimate how much fuel your training requires – remember that an Ironman training week can burn thousands of extra calories.
If you feel “cooked” all the time, one of the first things to assess is your diet: Are you consuming enough carbohydrates around your workouts? Are you getting sufficient protein (endurance athletes benefit from ~1.2–1.6 g/kg bodyweight of protein daily to aid recovery)? Are you chronically in a large calorie deficit?
Low Energy Availability can be inadvertent – maybe you’re trying to lose weight, or you’re just too busy to eat lunch – but its impact is profound.
A telltale sign that under-fuelling is at play is rapid relief with proper nutrition. Unlike true OTS, which can linger even when you rest, an athlete suffering from low energy availability often experiences dramatic improvement in how they feel and perform within days or weeks of eating more. For example, increasing daily carbohydrate intake to meet training needs can restore muscle glycogen, leading to better endurance and lower perceived exertion. Research shows that endurance performance is significantly impaired by sleep deprivation largely because of decreased pre-exercise muscle glycogen and higher perceived effort – a parallel to under-fuelling, since both leave muscle glycogen low. Fuel up, and suddenly that “dead leg” feeling during workouts goes away.
Before you assume you have an overtraining problem, take an honest look at your nutrition. Chronically running a calorie deficit or skimping on key nutrients will absolutely leave you fatigued and underperforming.
You might not be over-trained – you’re under-fuelled.
The fix: Eat adequately for your activity level (especially carbs around key sessions), don’t fear fueling during long workouts, and treat nutrition as part of your training plan, not an afterthought. Often, the difference between a personal best and a burnout is a couple extra sandwiches and a good recovery shake.
As the science indicates, optimal energy availability is essential for optimal performance – and its absence is a recipe for feeling broken down.
Poor Sleep and High Life Stress: The Recovery Killers
Training doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The hours you spend swimming, biking, and running are only part of the stress equation – the rest of your life matters hugely. Sleep, in particular, is the cornerstone of recovery. It’s when your body releases growth hormone, repairs muscle damage, consolidates memory (motor learning), and rebalances the nervous system. Skimp on sleep, and you short-circuit all those processes.
High non-training stress – from work, family, or just life – similarly saps your recovery capacity by keeping your baseline stress hormones elevated and stealing energy that could be used for training adaptation.
Many age-group athletes lead double lives – they log 10–15 hours of training a week on top of full-time jobs, school or family obligations, often waking up pre-dawn to fit in workouts. It’s a recipe for insufficient rest.
Athletes often fail to get the recommended 7–9 hours of sleep per night, and as a result, up to 42% of athletes may be considered chronically sleep deprived. The consequences for performance are significant. For endurance athletes, even short-term sleep deprivation inhibits performance – one reason being that lack of sleep lowers your muscle glycogen stores and makes exercise feel harder. In essence, if you’re not sleeping enough, your body stays in a semi-broken state from the previous day, and each training session compounds the fatigue.
Poor sleep is also listed among the common symptoms of overreaching/overtraining: it can be both a symptom and a cause. Overloaded athletes often experience insomnia or restless sleep (due to hormonal imbalances or nervous system overdrive), which then worsens their fatigue – a vicious cycle. But importantly, if your sleep quantity or quality has taken a hit due to lifestyle (e.g. newborn baby, late work hours), that alone can produce the “heavy legs,” low motivation, and slow recovery that one might blame on overtraining. The difference is, it’s fixable by prioritising rest, not by more complex interventions.
Now, consider psychological and life stress. The body doesn’t fully distinguish physical training stress from mental stress – both raise cortisol and both require recovery. An athlete who has a high-pressure job, relationship struggles, or other life changes might find their training capacity drastically reduced, even if they keep exercise volume the same. They might also find themselves in a constant fatigued state.
Your 2-hour workout might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back on top of 22 hours of hectic living.
Crucially, stress is cumulative. Imagine a stress “budget”: your job, family and daily hassles might already spend 70% of your budget. Training can only use the remaining 30% before you’re “in the red.” If you try to train like a pro (who may have very low outside stress and plenty of time to nap), you will quickly exceed your total stress tolerance. The result? Constant fatigue, poor adaptation, and maybe getting sick or injured. Not because the training programme was inherently too much for an athlete, but too much for you on that lifestyle. As noted earlier, an amateur athlete in a high-stress life situation might overdo it with a training load that is a fraction of what a pro can handle.
Seven hours a week can feel like 20 when you’re also crunching late at work and sleeping 5 hours a night.
If you suspect “overtraining” but you’re also burning the candle at both ends, step back and evaluate your sleep and general recovery hygiene. Are you regularly getting less than 7 hours of sleep? Do you wake up unrefreshed? That’s a big red flag. Try temporarily increasing your sleep (e.g. by going to bed an hour earlier) and see if your fatigue lessens.
Similarly, assess lifestyle stress: During heavy training blocks, high mental stress (work deadlines, moving houses, etc.) can be as draining as extra training hours. Factors like insufficient caloric intake, poor sleep, and psychological stress are key triggers to rule out when diagnosing OTS. These are often the real culprits.
In practice, improving recovery might mean cutting back on training when life gets crazy, napping if possible, and practicing stress-management techniques (time management, simply saying no to extra obligations). It might also mean talking with your coach about adjusting your plan around high-stress periods. Remember, fitness gains happen during recovery, not during training itself. If you compromise recovery – whether by skimping on sleep or piling on life stress – you compromise gains. What looks like “training not working” could just be training plus life exceeding your recovery capacity.
To be clear, poor sleep and life stress alone typically cause a state of exhaustion that resolves fairly quickly once addressed (a week of good sleep can work wonders). If left unaddressed, though, they can contribute to a longer downturn. While factors like low sleep quality and high work hours do not independently trigger OTS on their own, they often co-occurred with nutritional deficits in all OTS cases.
Think of them as multipliers: lack of sleep magnifies the negative impact of training stress or calorie shortfall. An athlete might sustain a high training load when life is calm and they’re sleeping well, but that same load becomes unsustainable during a busy, sleep-deprived month – leading to a crash.
Bottom line: If you’re feeling wiped out, examine your sleep and stress before concluding you trained too much. Consistently poor sleep and chronic stress can absolutely cause the “flat and fatigued” feeling so often misidentified as overtraining. The solution might not be a fancy supplement or a months-long hiatus, but simply reorganising your life for a bit more rest and recovery.
Sometimes the best training is sleeping. Make recovery as high priority as your hardest workouts.
Misaligned Training Plans: Too Much, Too Hard, Too Soon
Another major contributor to feeling “burnt out” is a poorly structured training plan – one that is misaligned with your body’s needs or your life realities. This can take many forms: doing too much intensity, piling on volume or hard sessions without proper progression, neglecting recovery periods (no easy days or cutback weeks), focusing on the wrong things at the wrong times, or simply training in a way that doesn’t suit your individual capacity. Misalignment in training is often the silent driver behind plateaus and excessive fatigue.
One common mistake among self-trained age-groupers is falling into what coaches call the “moderate-intensity rut.” This is when nearly every workout is done at a medium-hard effort – not easy enough to truly recover or build an aerobic base, but not hard enough to elicit high-end adaptation. The athlete ends up training in a grey zone, accumulating fatigue with little payoff. Over weeks and months, they stagnate and feel continually tired.
If you’re doing a heavy diet of threshold runs and high-tempo rides each week because “that feels like training,” you might be frying yourself without realising it.
Another aspect of misaligned training is lack of periodisation and recovery. Fitness is built in cycles – you apply stress, then allow recovery/adaptation, then repeat with a slightly bigger stress. A well-structured plan will have lighter days each week and every few weeks a lighter week. Skipping those breathers can lead to non-functional overreaching. Pushing continuously hard without backing off is a guaranteed way to stagnate or regress. If your training log has no easy days or every week looks identical in load, that’s a red flag.
Too much intensity relative to your base fitness is a classic misalignment. High-intensity workouts are a potent stimulus but also very taxing. They require sufficient aerobic base and recovery capacity to handle regularly. Doing HIIT or hard interval sessions too frequently – or without the aerobic miles to support them – can overwhelm your system. It’s like revving a car engine into the red repeatedly; eventually, something overheats.
Many amateurs love hard sessions and pack their week with tempo runs, track intervals, and hard group rides, not realising they’re inducing a ton of stress and not allowing for repair. Even with good sleep and fuel, a plan skewed too heavily to intense work can lead to burnout. High intensity is effective in moderation; in excess, it’s destructive.
Another misalignment can be training that’s not appropriate for your current level or goals. For instance, following an advanced marathon plan when you’ve just started running, or doing Ironman-level volume while also trying to maintain a full social life – the plan might look good on paper, but it’s not aligned to you. Training plans must be individualised. A sensible coach will take into account your work schedule, family duties, and personal recovery rate when designing your programme. If they don’t – or if you’re following a generic plan without adjustments – you may end up with a schedule that is technically well-structured for an ideal athlete, but completely misaligned with your reality.
This misalignment shows up as constant fatigue or niggling injuries.
Let’s not forget poor exercise distribution and technique. If your training heavily stresses one aspect repeatedly (say, doing hard run intervals on track every week without variety), you might be overloading specific muscles or joints leading to overtraining of a local nature (e.g. overtraining your calves leading to achilles issues). Incorporating cross-training or varying stimuli can help. Triathletes have an advantage here – three disciplines mean variety – but only if you manage each intelligently. Doing hard track workouts the day after hard hill repeats on the bike, combined with a hard swim, for example, might stack too much intensity across disciplines at once.
Misaligned training often boils down to “too much, too hard, too soon.” We get excited and do more than our current preparedness can handle – especially common after a bit of success or at the start of a season. Or we hear what others are doing and try to match it, even if our body isn’t ready for that. The result: we stop improving and start feeling exhausted. This often precedes true OTS in extreme cases, but for most, it leads to a big blow-up (injury or deep fatigue) that forces a stop.
The solution is to train smarter, not just harder. That means ensuring your plan has structure and alignment: proper easy-hard balance, built-in recovery, and appropriate progression. A good rule of thumb is the 10% rule for volume increases and not boosting intensity load dramatically all at once. It also means aligning training with your personal limiters: if you know you struggle with recovery, maybe you need fewer intense sessions. Or if you have a chaotic job, maybe a low-volume high-quality approach works better than a high-volume plan that just leaves you exhausted. As an athlete, don’t fall for the “more is better” trap – remember, training is only as good as the recovery it allows. Doing enough is important; doing too much is dangerous.
Many age-groupers who feel “overtrained” simply had a training plan that set them up to fail. The encouraging news is that this is fixable. Adjusting the training load or distribution can quickly reverse the stagnation. If you suspect your plan is to blame, consider consulting with a coach or revisiting its design: Are you doing mostly quality workouts on a shaky base? Are you resting enough? Is your plan accounting for your lifestyle?
A well-designed programme will challenge you and allow you to absorb the training. When those are in balance, you should see incremental improvements, not a continual downward spiral.
The Culture of “Burnout” as a Catch-All Excuse
In endurance sports, there’s almost a cultural meme around being “burnt out.” Athletes sometimes use “burnout” as a buzzword to explain any dip in motivation or performance. Feeling bored with training? Must be burnout. Had a couple bad races? Burnout. Didn’t hit your goal time? Probably burned out. While burnout is a real phenomenon, using it as a catch-all explanation can be a convenient cop-out that glosses over specific issues.
First, let’s clarify burnout versus overtraining. They’re related but not identical. Burnout is generally considered a more psychological state – a syndrome of mental and emotional exhaustion, often accompanied by a loss of interest in the sport and a drop in performance. It’s often brought on by monotony, unrealistic pressure, or simply too much stress for too long without adequate mental recovery. Overtraining, on the other hand, is usually viewed as a primarily physical state of chronic physiological fatigue, which can have psychological side effects.
The distinction: if you’re overtrained (physically), you often also feel mentally drained; if you’re burned out (mentally), you’ll definitely feel some physical lethargy too. The overlap is why the terms get tangled. But not every case of feeling “done” with training is true burnout in a clinical sense – sometimes you’re just demotivated because something in your approach sucked the fun out.
The endurance community sometimes glorifies working so hard that you get burned out – as if it’s a badge of honor signalling you gave it your all. There’s also a tendency to label any fatigue as burnout because it sounds more acceptable or external (“the sport burned me out”) rather than admitting “I made mistakes” or “I’m not taking care of myself.” It’s easier to say “I’m burned out” than to say “I neglected sleep for months” or “I’m training wrong.” This is where burnout becomes an excuse – a way to avoid digging into the real causes. If you attribute your slump to a nebulous “burnout,” you might just take time off and hope for the best. But if the actual issue was, say, under-fuelling or a poorly structured plan, then a break alone won’t solve it – you’ll be right back in the hole when you resume, unless you change something.
Another facet of burnout culture is the all-or-nothing mindset. Athletes fear burnout like it’s an inevitable monster lurking if they ease up even a little on their enthusiasm. But ironically, that mindset – going full throttle all the time, never taking a break – is what creates real burnout. We see athletes so afraid of being labeled “uncommitted” that they won’t acknowledge when they need a mental break. Instead, they push on until they truly can’t stand the sport, and then collapse in burnout. It’s far healthier to incorporate planned mental recovery (downtime, fun training, off-seasons) than to ignore mental fatigue until it forces you out. Feeling occasionally unmotivated or stale is normal; it doesn’t always mean you’re burned out, sometimes you just need a refresh or a new stimulus.
Monotony is a big contributor. Doing the same training routines, year in and year out, can wear on your psyche. An athlete might say they’re “burned out on triathlon,” but perhaps what they really need is to change up their training environment or goals – join a group ride for fun, do a trail running block, or simply try a new programme to inject variety. Burnout can often be staved off by keeping training enjoyable and aligned with one’s intrinsic motivation. If every session has become a chore or solely about hitting numbers, the joy can seep out of the sport.
When an athlete complains of burnout, a good coach will gently question why. Is it truly that they’ve been training too hard for too long (and thus both mind and body are exhausted)? Or is it that something is misaligned – maybe their goals were unrealistic, or they were training for someone else’s expectations, or they neglected the rest of life and now feel resentful? These nuances matter. It’s possible to be mentally burnt out without being physically overtrained at all – for instance, a triathlete who is simply tired of the grind of structured training after years of it. Conversely, one can be physically in an overtrained state and that precipitates a feeling of burnout. Addressing the issue requires knowing which it is.
Using “burnout” loosely can be dangerous because it might lead you to the wrong solution. If you declare “I’m burned out,” you might think the only answer is to quit or take a very long break. In some cases, a break is wise. But in others, what’s needed is a change in approach. Maybe you need to reduce your training load for a period, not abandon the sport. Or maybe you need to work with a coach to bring some fun back into the process. If there are underlying causes (like the ones we’ve discussed – lack of fuel, lack of sleep, poor plan), those need fixing. Simply calling it burnout and walking away means those issues remain if you ever return.
Finally, it’s worth noting that true athlete burnout (especially in younger athletes) is often tied to high pressure and lack of balance – e.g., a junior athlete pushed by parents and coaches year-round with no off-season, eventually they emotionally break. For adult amateurs, the “pressure” might come from within, but the principle is similar. The antidotes are balance, perspective, and ensuring that sport remains enjoyable. Endurance sports are hard – that’s part of the allure – but they shouldn’t feel like a job you hate. If you catch yourself using “burnout” as a blanket term, pause and analyse: are you truly emotionally exhausted by the sport, or is your mind and body telling you that some aspect of your routine (like intensity or schedule) needs adjusting?
Challenging misconceptions around burnout means acknowledging that feeling low or unmotivated has a cause we can often address. Don’t accept “I’m just burned out” as the end of the conversation. Be honest about what led you there. The culture should shift from wearing burnout as a martyr’s medal, to proactively preventing it through smart training, recovery, and keeping the fun in the sport.
The Coach’s Role: Identifying and Solving the Real Issues
A good coach can be the difference between an athlete spiraling into chronic fatigue or making a quick course-correction to get back on track. Coaches bring an outside perspective and experience to identify the red flags that an athlete might ignore. When an athlete says, “Coach, I feel overtrained,” the coach’s job is to play detective and problem-solver: is it really OTS, or is the athlete underprepared or misaligned in some way?
Firstly, a coach should ensure the training plan itself is well-structured and individualised. This means accounting for the athlete’s life outside training. A cookie-cutter plan that ignores these factors is a recipe for trouble. Coaches need to know when an athlete is going through a high-stress period at work, or not sleeping because of a newborn, or any other life change – and adjust the plan accordingly (e.g., dial back volume/intensity that week). Communication is key: the athlete should feel comfortable sharing how they’re coping, and the coach should ask regularly about energy levels, mood, and motivation.
Monitoring is a critical part of a coach’s role. This can be both objective and subjective monitoring. On the objective side, coaches look at metrics: pace or power trends, heart rate responses, or resting heart rate. For example, an unusual drop in maximal heart rate or a rise in resting HR over several days can signal accumulating fatigue.
If an athlete who normally nails 200W intervals is suddenly struggling to hold 180W, that’s a sign to investigate. Known-effort benchmark workouts can flag when performance is trending down despite normal training – a potential sign of overreach.
Subjectively, coaches rely on the athlete’s feedback: reports of heavy legs, persistent soreness, poor sleep, irritability, loss of motivation, etc. Tools like wellness questionnaires or simply weekly check-ins (“How are you feeling? How’s your mood? Any trouble sleeping?”) provide invaluable clues. Often, it’s the combination of a few minor signals that paint the picture – maybe the athlete mentions they’ve been unusually tired and their resting HR is 10 bpm higher and they had two poor workouts in a row. A good coach will connect those dots early and intervene.
What does intervention look like? If an athlete is heading toward non-functional overreaching, the coach will typically pull back training load – perhaps prescribe a few days very easy, swap that interval session for an easy swim, or turn a long run into a short one. It’s always better to err on the side of more recovery when in doubt.
Coaches also might advise medical checks if something seems off: for instance, getting blood work to rule out anemia or vitamin deficiencies, which can cause fatigue (and be confused with overtraining). In fact, part of diagnosing OTS is ruling out medical issues like iron deficiency or illness. A savvy coach will keep those possibilities in mind: sometimes the athlete isn’t overtrained at all, they might just have low iron or a brewing virus. Encouraging athletes to seek a doctor’s evaluation when fatigue is unexplained beyond training is good practice.
Coaches also educate athletes on the importance of nutrition and recovery practices. If a coach suspects an athlete is under-fuelling (“You’ve lost weight rapidly, you mention being hungry often, let’s talk about your diet”), they’ll address that head-on – possibly referring the athlete to a sports nutritionist or at least instilling the mantra “fuel the work.”
Similarly, if an athlete logs workouts at midnight and 5am, the coach might point out the sleep deficit and literally adjust training to allow more sleep. It might be as simple as telling the athlete to skip the optional easy spin and use that hour to nap.
Crucially, a coach must sometimes protect the athlete from themselves. Athletes, especially motivated triathletes, often want to do more and more, or are reluctant to take breaks. A coach provides the objective voice: “You’ve done a lot – we’re scheduling a down week now, no arguments.”
Some age-groupers will insist they’re fine until they hit a wall. A coach can recognise the trajectory and enforce rest before a minor fatigue becomes a major fallout. It’s analogous to having guardrails – the athlete might veer, but the coach keeps them from going off the cliff.
When “burnout” is in play (in the psychological sense), a coach also plays the role of a mentor to help realign the athlete’s mindset and motivation. This could mean adjusting goals to be more realistic, incorporating fun sessions (like group workouts or races for fun rather than always pushing for a PR), or simply giving the athlete permission to take a mental break. Sometimes an honest conversation is needed: “Why are you feeling this way about training? What changed?” A coach should encourage open dialogue – maybe the athlete is afraid to disappoint the coach by revealing they’re mentally exhausted. By having that talk, the coach can lighten the plan or try a new approach (e.g., remove rigid metrics for a while, or switch focus to a different sport for cross-training) to rekindle enjoyment.
A key part of the coach’s role is education. Many athletes don’t recognise the signs of under-recovery or don’t know the difference between normal fatigue and danger fatigue. Coaches can teach them: for example, explaining that “if your performance is dropping and you feel lousy despite rest, let’s take that seriously,” or conversely “feeling tired at the end of a build week is normal – that’s planned fatigue, not overtraining.”
Educating athletes on concepts like overreaching, recovery, and the factors discussed (fuel, sleep, stress) empowers athletes to self-monitor better. Ideally, an athlete begins to notice “Hey coach, my morning heart rate is up and I’ve been irritable – maybe I need a recovery day,” which is a win for both parties.
In practical terms, a coach might implement monitoring tools: for instance, using TrainingPeaks or similar to track training load (ATL/CTL metrics) and note if an athlete’s acute load is spiking too high relative to chronic load – a risk factor for overtraining. They might have the athlete keep a training diary with notes on sleep hours and stress rating. These data points help catch trends. Communication can be as simple as “You seem a bit off this week, is there something going on?”
Finally, coaches should foster a team approach to prevention. They encourage habits that keep the athlete away from trouble: regular recovery routines (stretching, massage, etc.), sensible race scheduling, and setting boundaries. For example, a coach might strongly advise against doing back-to-back marathons or too many races in a season, knowing that each race requires recovery. By planning the season intelligently (with ample recovery after big races), a coach protects the athlete’s longevity.
In short, a coach’s role is part scientist, part strategist, part psychologist. They identify whether an athlete is truly at risk of OTS or just needs adjustments, and then they act to correct the course. Through communication, monitoring, and educated adjustments, coaches help ensure that athletes don’t confuse being “underprepared or misaligned” with a mythical overtraining curse. Instead, they guide the athlete to fix what’s fixable and come back stronger.
Conclusion
Overtraining Syndrome is not something lurking behind every yawn or bad race. It’s a severe, uncommon condition that requires extraordinary circumstances to set in. For the vast majority of us, when performance falters and fatigue mounts, it’s not that we’ve heroically overstepped into some elite level of overtraining – it’s that some fundamental aspect of preparation is off. You’re not “overtrained”; more likely, you’re under-fuelled, under-rested, or improperly trained. And that is actually good news, because it means you can fix it.
By clearly distinguishing true OTS from everyday training mistakes, we avoid the fatalistic shrug of “oh, I’m burned out, nothing to be done.” Instead, we pinpoint actionable changes: eat more and smarter, prioritise sleep like it’s part of your workout, align your training plan with your life and capabilities, and keep the sport enjoyable. We also foster accountability – rather than blaming an abstract “syndrome,” we take charge of our habits and choices.
In challenging the misconceptions around overtraining, we come back to a core principle: fitness = stress + rest. If you imbalance those, you pay the price. But the fix is in the formula – not some mysterious cure, just a rebalancing. Coaches can guide this process, but ultimately it’s on each athlete to honestly assess their situation and address the root causes of their fatigue.
The next time you’re tempted to say “I think I’m overtrained,” pause and dig deeper. Chances are the truth is less dramatic and more practical: you might need a steak and a nap, or a re-jigged training week, or a conversation about why you’re doing this in the first place. By dropping the overtraining crutch and confronting the real issues, you’ll come out the other side faster, fitter, and wiser. In endurance sports – as in life – preparation and alignment are everything. Get those right, and you’ll rarely have to worry about the specter of overtraining again.
At Sense Endurance, we don’t hand you a cookie-cutter training plan and hope for the best. We work with you to align training, recovery, nutrition, and life demands in a way that actually works. No fluff, no gimmicks—just grounded, proven principles applied with precision to your real-world context. If you’re tired of guessing whether you’re doing too much or not enough—and want to train smarter, not just harder—this is where we start. Let’s fix what’s holding you back. Explore coaching with Sense Endurance.