Have you ever pushed yourself too far with exercise and had trouble recovering the next day? If your body is overtired, sore, and you feel like you just can’t make it through the next exercise session, you may have overtrained.
Most of the time, this will happen when you first start working out and aren’t used to exercising. Your body can also be overly exhausted from overtraining if you’re increasing your goals and aiming for better results or longer exercise session times.
Your body may have trouble handling all that extra training, and I’m going to share with you how to recover from overtraining.
Is Overtraining Just Tiredness and Soreness
A lot of people mix up overtraining with just feeling tired or achy after a workout session, but it’s not quite the same thing. There are a few signs you can watch for to tell if you’re overtraining and if you need to pull back a little bit.
You may have over trained and overworked yourself if you have decreased performance where your progress has plateaued. These are indications that you may be pushing yourself too hard and that you’re not getting the results you want. Overtraining keeps you from achieving your goals and makes it difficult for you to keep pushing on with your exercise sessions.
Overtraining is also characterized by mental and emotional problems like insomnia, an intense desire to continue working out, and the lack of appetite. Overtraining has a serious effect on your body, damaging not just your energy reserves but also your emotional state.
If you continue to overtrain, you can cause long term damage. You will likely affect your mood, making it difficult for you to have a good mood or to have stable emotions. You can also hurt your immune system, causing damage that can be difficult to repair and making yourself susceptible to disease and infection.
What can happen at that point is that you’ll be forced to stop exercising because you can become sick and constantly unwell.
How to Recover from Overtraining
To get back on your feet, bring your energy levels back up, fix your emotional state, and prepare your body for a regular exercise routine again, you simply need to take a break. For most people, taking a little time off from exercising can be enough to recover from overtraining.
Your body needs a chance to recuperate and get back its strength. You’ve pushed yourself hard and far, and you moved your body past the limits of what it can handle.
Now, it’s time to take some time off. You can spend some time relaxing at the beach, getting a massage, listening to relaxing music and otherwise just letting your mind and body recuperate.
Remember that overtraining affects both your mind and your body. You need to let both of them recover, so take time to do things that will not stress you. You should focus on relieving stress and anxiety from your life for at least a little while until you have fully recovered.
How to recover from overtraining syndrome when you’ve been doing it for so long that it just becomes a normal part of your life? You may have to take some serious time away from your regular exercise sessions. It’s okay to keep fit and keep up with a little exercise, but you want to avoid pushing yourself too far.
Ramp down your exercises considerably, cutting back how intense they are, how frequently you exercise, and how long you exercise for. Doing all of that will help your body and mind to recuperate.
It can also help to do different kinds of exercises. If you’re wanting to know how to recover from overtraining running, then one of the important recuperative techniques you can use is to do something other than running. Instead of going outdoors to exercise, you can do pushups, sit-ups, and other stationary exercises inside your house.
This works different muscles than running would, so it’s a good way to take a break. Resting from overtraining doesn’t always mean stopping exercise completely. If you haven’t overtrained yourself too much, you can handle doing some other exercises that are different from your regular ones and still recover from overtraining.
It’s important that you put some variety in there, though, and try not to spend much time on the exercises you did while you were overtraining.
This allows you to have a mental break as well as a physical one. You may even find some exercises you want to do over the long term to supplement or modify your workout sessions with.
How Long Does It Take to Recover from Overtraining
One of the questions a lot of people ask about overtraining and the recovery from it is: “How long dies it take to recover from overtraining?” The answer is that it will depend on how serious your overtraining problem is. If you spent weeks pushing yourself and forcing your body to overtrain, it’s going to take a while to recover from that.
You may need a week or two to fully recover and get back to where you were before.
How long to recover from overtraining if you only did it briefly? If you were only overtraining for a couple of days, you may just need a day or two of rest.
How long do I need to rest to recover from overtraining? It’s going to depend on more than just how long you’re overtraining for. It also depends on your physical state. If you are in good physical health, then it won’t take you long to recover.
If you just started exercising and push yourself too hard to the point where you are overtraining, though, then you could be out of shape and need to take perhaps several days or even a week to recover. Next time, you will want to be careful about pushing yourself too far.
What Other Things Should I Do to Recover After Exercise
I’ve talked already about resting from exercises and taking a little time off to recuperate, as well as trying to relax your mind. All of this is very helpful as you try to recover from overtraining, but there’s more you can do.
When you overtrained, you drained a lot of resources from your body, and you need to replenish them. It’s important to drink a lot of water and stay hydrated when you are recovering from overtraining. You may want to limit coffee, alcohol, and other beverages that can dehydrate you. Instead, drink plenty of water, juice, electrolytes, and teas. These can all rehydrate, rejuvenate, and replenish.
You also want to eat plenty of protein. Don’t go overboard with it, but your body probably needs some protein if you’re overtrained and over tired.
You may have been pushing yourself very hard and not providing your body with enough protein to build up the muscles like it should have been building. So, you can make up for that by adding extra protein to your diet, particularly lean protein like eggs, lean white meat, beans, soya, and similar foods.
Pretty quickly, you will be on the road to recovery.
