Kelsey Kinney: So I wasn’t on that webinar obviously, but Chris actually has a web page article that talks about overtraining in general. So Lauren will bring that up right now. So we can post that link. And what this talks about is just overtraining in general. But he also discusses how it can potentially lead to weight gain or just weight changes that aren’t what you’re looking for. And why some people might not feel good when they are overtraining. He also links to an article by Mark Sisson which talks about the symptoms of overtraining in there too so you could print that one out and give it to your client as well. But just giving them some reading to do about the topic is usually good and then having a conversation with them about it as well.
This is one of those topics that can be a little bit tricky because typically the people that are overtraining really don’t want to hear that they’re overtraining. It is for them something that has become a habit. They do it every day or five or six days a week. It can feel like a stress relief to them. And so when you say listen, you really have to cut back on your exercise, there can be a lot of pushback to that suggestion. So giving them some reading materials like this or I wonder actually if there’s any podcasts about it. I can do some searching for you guys with that too. But just having them listen or read stuff about this topic that just might introduce them to the topic a bit before you have this conversation with them, can be potentially useful. Because it sort of opens their eyes to the idea before you say okay, we have to reduce your exercise.
Or you can bring up the topic as a general point of conversation with them in your consultation and then say, do you feel like you’re overtraining? Do you feel like you’re exhausted or you’ve gained weight despite how much you’re exercising? Do you relate to any of these symptoms that are talked about in these articles? So kind of you want to get them to start thinking about overtraining as a whole and whether or not they fit into that picture. And when I talk to my clients about overtraining, I also like to talk about under recovering because really the two go hand in hand. If you want to train like an Olympian, you have to live like an Olympian. So you need to eat thousands and thousands of calories, you need to have pretty low stress otherwise, you need to sleep a lot. You can imagine that an Olympian’s life is focused on taking away any other stressors to the body that they possibly can so that they can do this insanely intense exercise day in and day out. And people that just live like all of us do, where we’re not Olympians, can sometimes not completely understand that.
So they may be doing intense activity like CrossFit or weightlifting, competing in weightlifting, and so they really truly are an athlete. But they’re not living their life or recovering as if they’re an athlete. So they’re maybe not sleeping enough because you know they have to wake up at 6:30 in the morning to do the activity in the first place, and they’re still going to bed at 11 because maybe they’re working or answering emails late at night or just staying up and watching TV. So they’re not prioritizing that recovery time to make that exercise possible for them. Maybe they’re not eating enough, that’s super-common, or not eating enough carbs to fuel the type of activity that they’re doing. Maybe they have other health conditions going on that aren’t under control right now and their body is just stressed out in general because of all of these things going on. And that exercise at that point is not necessarily beneficial to them, or at least not beneficial in the amount that they’re doing it.
So I like to ask about if someone’s doing a lot of exercise, okay, what are you doing to actually recover from that? What steps do you have in place to make sure that you are refueling, that you’re getting adequate sleep, that you’re lowering stressors elsewhere in your life to make it so that you can actually feel good and fuel yourself properly for the type of activity that you’re doing and the amount of activity that you’re doing. So I really encourage you to talk to your patients about overexercising because I think it’s a huge, huge issue, especially if you are working in the Paleo world at all where CrossFit is really popular. It’s something I see almost every day, literally. I see it all the time, and it’s especially common in women, I’d say. And again I work with a lot of women, so maybe I just see it in more women because I work with more women. But even when I was working with more men than I am now, I would say it was still more common with women.
And what I like to do is either give them some of these articles, talk to them about it and then definitely ask them how they are recovering. How are you feeling after exercise immediately after? How are you feeling the next day? Is your soreness lasting far too long? Does it feel unnatural, the amount that you’re sore? And then I like to ask about their recovery steps that they have in place. Are they actively thinking about the recovery that they’re doing? And a lot of times they aren’t. And to me that is one of the major signs that we need to deal with is that we need to make sure that they are recovering properly. And if you’re recovering properly, you can do a lot of exercise. But with the way that a lot of us live, we’re working eight or 10 hours a day, we’re rushing around outside of that, we’re stressed all the time, we’re not sleeping enough, those things just really make it hard to recover properly to do that amount and that intensity exercise.
So just make sure that your patients are doing well. They are recovering, they’re feeling good with the amount of exercise that they’re doing, and if they’re not, have a conversation with them about that. And make sure that you implement some ideas, some processes in their life to help them recover or reduce their exercise.