Overtraining – Good or Bad

Overtraining will help you to improve your natural abilities, but you must be careful not to hurt your body with too much time on the bike. If you want to make yourself a better rider, sometimes you end up over training.

Just because hard work will produce good results does not mean that you have to train to be a better rider. Countless kilometers riding, hours of cross-training, tons of weight lifting, stretching your muscles for hours on end and hyper-focus on skill improvement is not necessarily the best way or even a way to become a better rider.

Proper balance and adversity

Over training is the result of a training routine that is not properly balanced with recovery time in the training scheduled to let your body recuperate gaining strength and endurance. Your body’s response to training is complex on many levels. The many levels include, but are not limited to the way your body uses the fuel you feed it, the way your blood cells adapt, the way your heart and lungs respond. Improved performance is the result of the correct training, with adequate recovery time for your body to rest and build strength along with proper endurance. If you over train your body will respond adversely. At a specific stress level, your body no longer gains improved performance from the stress of training. Every athlete has natural abilities that may be heightened. If you train at or slightly above your natural abilities over a period, you will be able to raise your abilities and even gain new abilities.

Overtrain for short periods?? Some bikers will over train for short periods followed by a rest period. The rest period will allow their body to increase in strength and endurance beyond the point they started. This will result in achieving a new higher level of fitness. After this short period of over training followed by an abrupt rest period, they will resume their regular training schedule. If they do not rest their body after the short period of over training, they will only decrease their abilities.

Habits related to overtraining

Other training habits that can cause a decrease in abilities may include repetitive training with no flexibility or change, frequent competition, medical problems, poor nutrition, too little fluids, stress from work, school, family, relationships and life in general and adverse weather factors.

No matter what the reason is for over training, over training can have both good and bad results on the body. All athletes must take precautions to assure that they do not over train in a way that adversely impacts there body and/or their abilities.