exercise burnout

I think I just hit a wall. I joined the gym almost a year ago. (April 2008.) I've had burn out phases or just to busy to get there quite a few times over this last year where I just don't go for a week or two. My longest was over Christmas and New Years and it was 3 weeks. Anyway, I'm there again. Can't stand the thought of going, feel tired all the time, uninspired ... and just blah! I was doing so good after the New year, I finally got my cardio up to an hour. (When i started a year ago it was more like 4 min's because I smoke.)

Anyway, anybody have anything new or inspiring that's going to get me excited about going again? Right now it just seems like a struggle to get there with kids and work. I don't know- I need some inspiration. ?!@#$?

What do you guys do when you get bored with it?

I wish I had some fun suggestions, but I am in the same boat as you! I cannot get out of bed and go to the gym. Ugh. i think I am going to try to walk outside more and take more yoga classes. I just need a change!

Whenever I'm bored at the gym, I try something new: a new class, a few program from my trainer, etc.

find something you LIKE doing. does your gym offer classes? i take zumba and kick-boxing at my gym, and don't even feel like i'm working out (minus the sweating and heavy breathing) because i'm so into it and having so much fun.

if you really want to stick with it, you have to find something that's actually FUN!

I've been having the same problem. I try to go to the gym 6 days a week and do 45-60 mins cardio. I feel like I have hit a huge wall, I used to like the gym now I dread it :(

 Exercise burnout and hitting the wall are both signs that you're overtraining for your current capacity; while someone who've built up to it over a while can handle training 5-6 times a week someone with less training age in that particular fitness dimension should only do 3-4 times a week at most.

  Cut down to 3 sessions a week of any one type of workout, do crosstraining and knock it off with the eternal cardio, you're compromising your recovery by hitting your body all the time.

Hi Melkor. I've been doing that much cardio for about 2 years and the problem is that if I do less cardio then I haven't done "enough". I would really like to add more strength training though.

Original Post by katelyn_palone:

Hi Melkor. I've been doing that much cardio for about 2 years and the problem is that if I do less cardio then I haven't done "enough". I would really like to add more strength training though.

 Enough for what? If you don't enjoy it, why keep doing it? There are so many ways to have fun while getting exercise--you don't have to "work out" even! Find a sport; it can be so much fun to be part of a team. Take dance classes, like ballroom dance or folk dancing, both of which are a LOT more vigorous than almost anyone who hasn't done them will realize!! Ski, skate, rollerblade, ultimate frisbee--all of these can give you an amazing workout while being fun. I always loved running and now I "need" it to support my soccer addiction; thank goodness I love it! I don't think I could make myself workout just for the sake of . . . working out.

As for the original OP, I think it sounds like you are overtraining, so maybe try cutting back and mixing it up to see if that rejuvenates you. Good luck!!

 Yeah, I should have been more clear - you'd need 10-15 years of training experience to be able to withstand the impact of 5-6 days of high-intensity exercise per week.

 I'm familiar with the training schedules of a couple athletes aiming for the Olympics and they aren't going hard 6 days a week. You absolutely must program in recovery and a sensible intensity variation over time - it actually gets more critical the more highly trained you are, the dose/response curve for exercise gets steeper the more highly trained you are.

 Which means that as you get into better shape you can train yourself to a performance peak higher up the scale of your absolute genetic maximum, but the performance drop off from overtraining gets sharper.

 This is frequently characterized by loss of interest in exercise, burn-out phases, feelings of depression or of having hit the wall, actual avoidance behavior related to exercise and so on since overtraining manifests in the CNS first, long before the physical symptoms start happening.

 The Russians always had this Bataan Death March approach to training athletes - start with 100.000 people, give everyone a ton of drugs and train all of them 6-7 days a week. The 5 or 6 athletes who even survive the meat grinder will beat the world, but all the rest are wrecked but good and have their athletic potential destroyed by overtraining.

 You're overtraining, and need to cut down on the excessive volume of exercise you're performing. Crosstraining with strength training and spending a bit of time in the recovery zones will be more beneficial for you than to keep smashing yourself into the ground.

 Don't take this to mean that you can't do something every day of the week, but you absolutelly cannot redline your efforts every day of the week. Not and expect results, anyway. Recovery workouts where you've got the exercise intensity even lower than the "fat-burning zone" let you get in more of a calorie burn and some volume for distance work, and aids in recovery without pushing you over the edge into burnout.

 Crosstraining is also useful, though mostly for injury prevention purposes. Peak performance is exercise-specific enough that you're really lucky if crosstraining is more than neutrally correlated to performance.

 Appropriate sports-specific strenght training can be combined with the recovery workouts or placed on high-intensity days, depends on what you're going for in terms of performance and phyique goals.

Original Post by melkor:

 

This is frequently characterized by loss of interest in exercise, burn-out phases, feelings of depression or of having hit the wall, actual avoidance behavior related to exercise and so on since overtraining manifests in the CNS first, long before the physical symptoms start happening.

Yep this describes me... Thanks for the wake up call.

That's good info Melkor! Just a few questions for you? What would be a good example of a recovery workout? And if you have to be working out for 10 + years to do 5-6 days per week of high intensity then how should I increase my workouts? My goals are muscle growth & fat burn.

As for switching things up I live in a very cold climate, snow on the ground until mid March-early April. I do switch my cardio up in the gym, (Bicycle, eliptical, treadmil...etc.), but outdoor activities are not an option right now. I also weight train 2-3 days per week and switch that up quite regularly. My gym does not offer any classes nor can I afford any right now but loved the idea.

Thanks

.... one more ques- so once you've already reached burn out, (such as where I am now), should I force myself into the gym and do half as much in hopes to get the ball rolling again? or just wait until I actually feel like going again?

I don't know about you guys but I find the more I go the more I want to go, the less I go the less I want to go.

  A recovery workout would be something like a walk, or a spin on the exercise bike at 140rpm with no resistance - basically, around 2-3 on this scale from Paige.

 3 is actually a bit high for recovery workout; think "walk in the park" or "moving to stretch your legs and get the blood flowing".To someone looking in from the outside it might look like "just going through the motion", but the reality is that you're approaching this like an athlete in training and keeping intensity in check so your body has an actual chance of improving.

 That's a good pace for burnout recovery as well. That way you're still using your scheduled time and don't fall out of the habit of exercising but you aren't working out hard enough to impede recovery.

 The combination of weights and intervals are great for fat loss, but for athletic performance they aren't a silver bullet - intervals need to be managed with recovery in mind otherwise you just smash yourself flat. The combination works wonderfully when you only have 3-4 hours total to work out and do 3 hours of weights and maybe a couple interval sessions, but if you've got more time than the bare minimum it's definitely not a case of more being better. Out of a hundred thousand people you might find 5-10 who can handle that over a timeframe longer than 3 months, but most people will hit burnout at about the time when the 3-month BFL challenge is over.

 Which is sad, since a more sensible approach with the occacional recovery weeks where you cut workout volume by 2/3 every 4 weeks and a week off every 8-12 weeks plus managing intensity along the way is a program you can sustain indefinitely.

 If you've already hit overtraining, you'd pencil in workouts at intensity levels no higher than 2-3 for a week and see if your desire to train recovers - in that case, you were merely overreaching and just needed a break to let fatigue dissipate. If you still dread the gym and thoughts of higher intensity, you need more recovery time; and there's no set guideline for this, you just need to learn to listen to your body's signals and coast until the thought of hitting the gym hard no longer scares you.

 Well - most people find that a week off or a recovery week is enough; you aren't close enough to your genetic peak performance potential that you can exceed your recovery margin by such a wide margin that you need more than a week's worth of backing off. On the other hand, I vaguely know an athlete who needed 6 months off training when he overtrained on the Olympic speed skating team before he was sufficiently recovered to train for anything at all, missing the Oly tryouts as a consequence. So the better shape you're in, the longer it takes you to recover if you do smash yourself flat.

Awesome! That all makes perfect sense. Perhaps something I need to work on but I seem to not be watching what I'm eating when I'm no longer training. It kind of just feels like it goes with the territory. I'm just sooo sick of fluctuating weight. I actually love working out and the gym, (MOST of the time.) Just gotta figure out how to get back in slowly.

My other problem is that I can only get to the gym when my husband is home, (because of childcare), and I'm not working, which is a max of 3 times per week. So when I go I feel like I have to "overtrain" to compensate for not going more often. I don't know the answers but I do like the advice so I will give it a try.

OH, and while were on the subject, one more ques.... obviously you do want to increase your work outs at some point, so how can/should I be doing this? Simply increasing the weight amount? Or cardio? Or both?

Thanks!

Ps- Why am I not seeing any progress after a year of what "I" consider more on than off in the gym? What is it going to take for me to see those much needed body changes? Better diet? I just dont want to feel like I'm wasting my time. I have weighed less over the last year than I have in a very long time but haven't seen any muscle growth. What's up with that? Lol. :)

Whoa... so I definitely haven't hit burnout, but my head is totally spinning from all of this melkorness. Seriously? Can I get a 3-4 sentance summary?

Basically I train in MMA/Muay Thai Boxing 1 hour 3x/week & strength train (weights/pushups/situps/jumpsquats/etc) 1 hour 2x/week.

I feel great, but I can't wrap my head around what you're saying. Is it ok to train 5x/week as long as it's not all high intensity? There are atheletes who compete & train for hours at the gym! Rounds training alone is 2 hours of pure hell.

 3-4 sentence summary? Oookay - be aware that is an optimal dose/response curve and it varies with your training age. The more you've consistently done, the more you can withstand before you're overtraining - but once you're actually overtraining you're hurting a lot more when you're working higher on the dose/response scale.

 Actually, just drew you a picture - beginners and intermediates have a harder time telling when they're overtrained because their dropoff when they're exceeding the training volume they can handle for optimum performance is less dramatic than when someone closer to their peak genetic performance potential does it.

 And that dose/response curve is sports-specific. Lance Armstrong placed 863 in the NY marathon and said it was the hardest thing he'd ever done physically; when it comes to running he was somewhere between beginner and intermediate at best even if he'd been an elite cyclist for most of his adult life.

 It's also impact-specific and person-specific; you can only take so much of the higher intensities a week, but you can coast on a 2-3 RPE pretty much all week. You wouldn't do two hours of hell 6 days a week and even survive unless you had one-in-a-million genetics - but some people do have that capacity and can train 6-8 hours a day for 6-7 days a week and win every swim event at the Olympics where that training load would outright kill anyone else.

 So it's not an absolute in any sense of the word; you could potentially be one of the ones who not just survive but thrive on training loads that would break anyone else. I just wouldn't want to plan anyone's training around the assumption that they're part of the 0.000001% who can do that and get away with it, know what I mean?

 To my knowledge, there's 5-6 people with genetics that are a couple or ten standard deviations away from the norm here on CC alone, so it's possible to meet people like that around. But most normal people can't follow the training regime of a Greenkev, Duke, Jasontarin, Littleshellys or Smartjock without absolutely destroying themselves.

 As for results - well, that's all in your diet. Without accurate calorie counting and taking control over your diet, absolutely nothing worth noticing will happen - while the talk of exercise non-responders has been misinterpreted in the media to mean that some people can defy the law of thermodynamics, it's actually much simpler; people who don't count calories tend to compensate for increased energy expenditure by increased energy intake and lowered activity levels outside of formal exercise, so they're in a net energy equilibrium despite nominally increasing exercise volume.