Have you ever trained a lot during a long period of time or practiced your climbing relentlessly, without seeing results? You go climb and it seems like you are less fit than usual, that you are even further away from your goals. You draw the conclusion that you should probably just work harder. If you’ve ever found yourself in this type of scenario, you may have fallen into the trap of overtraining, like many of us. The good news is, it is definitely avoidable!
The vicious cycle of overtraining is when we assume that our lack of strength in climbing stems from a lack of training, which causes us to always want to do more. However, when we are overtraining, our body is tired, which is why we feel a decrease in our physical capacities and even our motivation. By continuing to put our body to work, when it’s giving us signs of exhaustion, we put ourselves at risk of injuries, burn outs and it might slow down our progress in the long run.
Prevent, instead of cure
Knowing how to recognize the symptoms of overtraining is a first step in preventing it. Take the time to observe your physical cues, but also the other spheres of your life and pay attention to this: lack of motivation, general and continuous fatigue, changes in your appetite, mood, sleep or concentration, irritability, anxiety or depression, muscle tension that do not decrease with time, significant drop in sports performance, etc. Here is an interesting source on the matter: Overtraining syndrome, A practical guide (Sports Health, 2012)
If you feel significant muscle fatigue, consider varying your training. Since bouldering is mainly demanding on the upper body and fingers and because we train these parts the most, consider focusing on other things, such as slabs, core and abs or your footwork!
You can also add a week of rest after each training cycle (4-8 weeks), which will allow you to recover and adapt better to the next one. Is a full week’s rest seems too much, consider taking an active rest, continuing certain activities, but greatly reducing the load.
Another way to prevent overtraining is to keep an eye on the big picture. While it can be hard to leave a boulder problem behind or cut off a workout, it’s important to remember that an injury will always have more negative impacts than an extra rest day. Giving your body time to adjust allows you to have the gains you want later on. Unfortunately, patiently trusting the process often comes with experience… and with the lessons that sometimes arise from major mistakes.
Ultimately, recovery is key to avoid overtraining and even getting injured. All climbers should value recovery as much as training. My personal rule of thumb is to never allow yourself to increase your training load, if you need to cut back into your recovery routine. A smaller training load with good recovery will be more effective than taking a heavy load, without recovering.
Your recovery routine may vary depending on your needs and habits. Personally, before adding a climbing or training session to my schedule, I make sure that I can regularly release my muscle tension, stretch after physical effort, drink enough water (approximately 3 liters per day), sleep at least 8 hours and monitor my daily stress level. In addition, I frequently observe how I feel on the wall: if I am tense, my flow decreases and I lose on flexibility, I take more time to stretch and recover, while also reducing my load a little.
Why we are at risk
The human body is complex and our adaptation to training depends on several factors. So, it’s hard to understand why we react in a certain way to the workload that we put on ourselves. For some types of exercise, it is normal to feel very tired and underperform on the wall, while for others, like strength cycles for example, we should feel 100% before our session. It’s important to understand what our training is doing and how it affects us.
The concept of “No pain, No gain” is one that can also push us to overtrain. We tend to believe that to reach a higher level in climbing, we automatically need to give ourselves more, which is not always the case. Sometimes, it’s quite the opposite and we need to recover better. Other times, it’s a lack of technique that holds us back. In any case, if you experience pain, do not push through, take a rest and assess the situation with a professional.
In climbing, we are generally very motivated to push ourselves to improve. When our goals are very important to us, it is normal to be tempted to overlook certain signs of fatigue, to repeatedly try a little too much a movement that gives us a hard time or to feel impatient and wanting to speed up the process. It’s especially difficult to navigate all of this without support and feedback from someone who knows you well and knows what to look out for to steer you in the right direction, objectively.
To better guide you through your training and help you avoid overtraining and injuries, contact one of our coaches! They can answer any questions during a private coaching or build you a personalized training plan on our Bloc Shop Fit app.