Year: 2010

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Overtraining and Overreaching: Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I gave a detailed definition of overtraining which I’ve reproduced below.

Overtraining occurs when there is a long-term imbalance between the training load and recovery processes that, for a given athlete, leads to a decrement in performance that takes more than 2-3 weeks to return to normal.

Having talked about the time frame issue along with the “for a given athlete bit” I want to look in detail at the issue of “decrement in performance”.

What Defines Overtraining?

Scientists have spent decades looking for biological markers of overtraining.  I’ll talk about some of them in a later part of the series but, ultimately, most of them aren’t relevant or practical to measure for athletes.   So you’ll see discussion of the glutamine to glutamate ratio in the blood or the testosterone/cortisol ratio.  With changes being indicative that they might be occurring.

And neither of them (and many others) being at all useful in the real world for the majority of athletes. … Keep Reading

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A Guide to Overtraining and Overreaching

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

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Dietary Supplements for Athletes

If there is a chronically recurring topic/question I get or see it involves the issue of dietary supplements.  Both athletes and the general public are endlessly fascinated by them with unscrupulous marketing companies taking advantage of that fascination.  To address the issue, I’m presenting more or less the entirety of  Chapter 11 from my Applied Nutrition for Mixed Sports Book/DVD Bundle.  This list is not meant to be comprehensive and there are always newer products that may show promise down the road.

Chapter 11: Dietary Supplements for Athletes

If there is a single area of sports nutrition that is constantly changing (in terms of the products being marketed) and which athletes are always interested in it’s dietary supplements. As I mentioned in Chapter 2 of this book, I consider supplementation to be the third tier of the pyramid (after overall daily nutrition and around workout nutrition) in terms of what athletes should concern themselves with.… Keep Reading

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How We Get Fat

A while back, I did a Q&A about excess dietary protein and whether or not it could lead to fat storage.  The short answer was that, while the biochemical pathway exists, the likelihood of it ever happening are roughly zero.   For some reason, despite my answer being written in what I felt was a clear way, many people seemed confused.  Among other silly inferences, people somehow heard me saying that overeating carbs or protein can’t make someone fat.  And that was not true.  So to clear it up, let me look at the simple issue of how we get fat.

Energy Balance

.At a fundamental level, fat storage occurs when caloric intake exceeds caloric output and there is a surplus energy balance.  Now, I know that a lot of people claim that basic thermodynamics don’t hold for humans. Simply, they are wrong.  Invariably, the studies used to support this position are based on a faulty data set: to whit, they are drawing poor conclusions about what people SAY that they are eating.… Keep Reading

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No Regrets Part 8

In No Regrets: Part 7 I talked about that final year.  The ups of summer training, the downs of the ice and the final realization that I couldn’t reach my goal.  I had overtrained and had to examine what I wanted to do.  And I had decided I was going back to inline.

Ice to Inline: Part 1

There is little to no tradition of ice speedskaters switching to inline since there’s really no point.  Ice speedskating is an Olympic sport, inline has failed to get into the games for years and that probably won’t change.  Rex had told me that ice speedskaters who do switch find inline easy.  They can do straightaways forever.  Corners are what’s hard on the ice.  Without those, it’s just a matter of having an engine and dealing with the tedium of skating in a straight line for an hour or more staring at someones butt.… Keep Reading