Are you Overtraining?

Training hard is essential to increase performance, but so is resting hard! High intensity training breaks your body down and makes you weaker, rest makes your stronger. Think of exercise as a stress to your body, which it is. You must put your body under stress in order to increase your physical capabilities, but your performance will only improve if the stress load is appropriate. If the stress load is too intense, too long in duration, rapidly increased or you fail to incorporate adequate recovery time into your regime, then a state of overtraining will occur.

The most common symptoms of overtraining are:
Fatigue
Feeling moody and irritable
Depression
Decreased desire to train
Increased Muscular Soreness after training
Increased recovery time needed between sessions
Increased illnessess and injuries
Decreased performance

The most common causes can include one or more of the following:
Lack of recovery
Increasing load or intensity too rapidly
Increased duration in endurance training without progressive measures
Lack of sleep
Excess alcohol, nicotine, caffeine
Lack of relaxation time
Poor nutrtional habits

If you train when you are showing symptoms of overtraining, you will only break down your body even further and will not make further gains. The best thing that you can do is recover. Eat well, relax, get plenty of quality sleep, stretch and mobilise your body and begin training again when:

You feel like you have slept well
You are looking forward to your workout
You feel energetic
You have a good appetite
You have little muscle soreness
You have no sign of injury or illness

The time needed for adequate recovery from overtraining can vary from days, weeks or even months depending on the severity. Therefore, as soon as you feel like you maybe overtraining, take that day off, miss that training session or 2 if needs be, it could prevent serious problems and help you keep those gains that you have already worked so hard for.