How Do You Know If You're Overtraining? (Signs to Look for)

How do you know if you're overtraining? There are a few telltale signs to see if you're overtraining—so let's chat about them.

How to Know If You're Overtraining

1. Fatigue

The first thing would be just feeling overall fatigued, like throughout the day throughout the week—just not feeling yourself not having your usual energy. That is a clear sign that you're just doing a little bit too much, especially if it lingers for weeks on end.

2. Lack of Motivation

The next sign of overtraining would probably be just less motivation to exercise. Less motivation to train and go to the gym. If it starts to feel like a chore, then you might be overtraining.

If that's happening constantly and you're just feeling like you have no motivation at all to train, that is a clear-cut sign that you might be overdoing it.

3. Decrease Performance

Another sign would be just decreased overall performance. If you're not seeing that you're progressing in your workouts, then that could be a sign that you're not recovering optimally. I'm not saying that every workout is going to be amazing—but if you're not noticing that you're getting better over time, that's gonna be a sign that your performance is decreased. And you might be overdoing a little bit too much.

4. Overlapping Soreness

Okay, so the next sign would be overlapping soreness from session to session. It's completely normal to have some soreness, especially after the session or the next day. But if you have continued soreness, that's overlapping each session, and it's not going away, that would be a sign that you're just not recovering optimally. You need to make sure that you're paying attention to that because if you're going into every session super sore, your muscles are not recovering.

And so you're not gonna be able to add new tissue if your muscles are still trying to recover from the last stimulus that you had. Make sure that you are not sore every single time you go into your workout to make sure that the work that you're actually putting in in the gym is going to benefit.

5. Poor Muscle Pump

Another sign of overtraining would be that you're just not getting muscle pumps or you're having poor muscle pumps. That means when you are training, you have blood flow coming to your muscles, and they're kind of filling up. You should feel like you have a kind of tightness in your muscles. So, if you're not having good muscle pumps, that could be a sign that you're overdoing it, and you're not recovering properly.

6. Crappy Sleep

Another sign would be crappy sleep. So if you're just not getting good quality sleep, and if you're having trouble falling asleep at night, that is a sign that you might have a little bit more cortisol floating around at times when it shouldn't be. At night, cortisol is supposed to be lower. And it's supposed to rise as you wake up in the morning.

If your cortisol is kind of a little bit out of whack, that can have that can cause issues with falling asleep. And we know that cortisol is a kind of our overall stress hormone. And if your cortisol is chronically high, that could be a sign that you're overtraining or just doing too much. Some cortisol is good—we need it. Cortisol should go up a little bit during training, that's a natural process.

But if you have chronically high cortisol levels, that is a telltale sign that you might be overdoing it. And one of the ways to know that is if you are just feeling wired and tired and not feeling rested despite how much sleep you get.

7. Increased Irritability

And last but not least, lots of irritability. Getting annoyed with people that you might not be normally getting annoyed with. Or you just get irritated by things that you're not normally irritated by.

That's another sign that you might just be overdoing it with training. Obviously, there are a lot of other lifestyle factors that are going to play into it. But if you have kind of a lot's of your ability, crappy sleep, and any of the other signs that I mentioned before that are kind of lingering, those are all the things that you want to address and make sure that you're just giving yourself ample time to recover because our muscles are not, you know, built when we're training in the gym.

They're built when we are recovering. So you're breaking your muscles down in the gym, and they're building and recovering when you are sleeping. And if you can't recover optimally, all of the hard work that you're putting in the gym is kind of just going to waste. Make sure that you're not overtraining training because it's just going to be a lot better for you in the long run.

Want to avoid overtraining in the future? We have just the thing. Check out the exercise, nutrition, and recovery content we have here on the blog and on the podcast—they'll cover everything you need to know to train at your best.