Since the 1980’s, when everybody tried to follow the drug-fueled training models of the Eastern Block Countries and got completely broken off, a constant cry and fear in the training world is that of “overtraining”. People throw around the term in the most interesting of ways and most of those ways are incorrect. This is especially true in the general fitness/physique world where ‘overtraining’ has come to be synonymous with ‘I got kind of tired’ which is not what it means at all.
But it’s clear that the concept of overtraining (and I’ll admit that I tend to be a little bit free in throwing the term around from time to time) is very unclear for folks. So I want to set about unclearing it by looking at a variety of concepts. Two of the primary ones are overtraining (aka the overtraining syndrome or OTS) and a related idea called overreaching.… Keep Reading