Overtraining & Time

I began this year working with my left leg propped up on a big green suitcase, trying to keep the swelling in my knee down. The reason? Overtraining. It’s a rookie mistake that I still keep make after all these years. I knew repeated days of trail jogging with my dog immediately after a two-week vacation wasn’t wise, but it felt so darn good to be back and hitting my training hard—until the next day when my knee swole up like a balloon.

A quick search will tell you all about the pitfalls of overtraining, including:

• Chronic Fatigue and Burnout: Persistent tiredness and mental exhaustion that sap your energy.
• Hormonal Imbalances: Particularly troubling for men as they affect testosterone levels.
• Increased Risk of Injury: Aging joints and tendons take longer to recover, leaving you vulnerable to overuse injuries like tendinitis or stress fractures.
• Plateau or Decline in Performance: Your progress can stall—or worse, regress—because your body isn’t getting the recovery time it needs to adapt.
• Sleep Disruption: Poor sleep quality undermines one of the body’s most important recovery mechanisms.

But there’s one drawback that doesn’t get enough attention: TIME.

Overtraining has now cost me at least three weeks without cardio or HIIT training—three weeks of sliding backward. That’s the real price. Overtraining doesn’t just slow your progress; it actively sets you back.

The problem is that our minds still think we’re 30 years old, fully capable of pushing hard every day without consequences. Sure, we can still do many of the same things—but not with the same intensity, frequency, or recovery speed. To reach our goals, we must ramp up slowly, embrace recovery days, and adapt our training as we age. Even the best of us recognize this, like 61-year-old Olympic table tennis champion Ni Xia Lian. As her husband and trainer noted in a WSJ podcast:

But she simply can’t train the way that she used to. She tends to train every other day instead of every day. Instead of running, she uses the elliptical machine or she jumps rope.

(From: ~WSJ Podcast~)

How to Avoid Overtraining as You Age:

1. More Tortoise, Less Hare: Take a slow and measured approach to any new training or a return after a break.
2. Rest as Hard as You Work: Plan at least one recovery day between workouts. If alternating muscle groups, you might still manage strength training on consecutive days, but listen to your body.
3. Be Suspicious of the Endorphin High – That “I can do anything!” rush you get during intense cardio—don’t trust it anymore. It’s like that no-good hottie making a pass at you after you’ve had one too many drinks. You’re old enough to know better. Pause and really think about how your body will feel about the workout (or the hottie) come the next morning.

⠀P.S.: The AI-generated image of me above? Not quite accurate, but it nailed the trail and the dog. 🙂