Overtraining in Lockdown

I feel compelled to write this as I am currently experiencing this first hand. I stupidly did not listen to my body, and I am reaping the consequences, and going to share my experience, so hopefully you don’t experience the same thing.

If you are like me, and lockdown sent you into “omg panic mode I am about to be moving so much less so I need to move so much more” then you need to read this.

Whilst yes, we may be moving a lot less - the reality is, if you are making a conscious effort to stay active by increasing your NEAT, you are probably not moving that much less than normal - especially if you already had a sedentary job prior to lockdown.

For example, I am still hitting my 10k steps per day, and I didn’t really get that much more than this before lockdown to be honest, maybe around 12-15k on a good day. But I would have one day where I basically did 0 steps and took a full rest, whereas now I hit my steps every day, so I am still sitting on around the same average steps. But for some reason - I thought I needed to HUGELY increase my exercise, and I mean to extreme overtraining levels which is just stupid. I already teach 8 classes a week at the moment, and I do every single class (this alone is too much), and to begin with in lockdown, I was also training four times a week (again stupid), then I started running a bit as well without warming up properly or cooling down. Basically I was asking for injury.

A quick little side note, I am intrigued to see the effect allowing my body to rest for a significant period of time will have on my appetite. I havent researched into this at all so don’t hold me to it - but when you are mentally under a lot of stress, you tend to overeat to compensate - I assume the same would be the case if your body is under a lot of physical stress, therefore overtraining may be causing me to over-consume, hindering fat loss goals. I am always SO hungry and eat a lot, and I am not going to lie, I struggle to stick to my macros most days because I just want to snack all the time. But on days when I don’t train, I really am not that hungry. So I am interested to see how the next few weeks pans out in terms of my appetite.

Back to my story, basically the inevitable happened - I got injured. I was asking for it. A few weeks ago I started feeling this niggling ache in my hip joint whenever performing any sort of hinge movement. Stupidly I ignored it and it got progressively worse. I was also experiencing the same sort of thing in my shoulder, but that is also due to an old injury which unfortunately I didn’t give enough time to recover. So I only have myself to blame.

Just because we are in lockdown, doesn’t mean you have to go crazy on your training. Especially seeing as we have limited equipment and access to heavy weight, so we tend to stick to a high rep range, high impact moves and the same sort of moves. With my hip and shoulder, to put it in very simple terms, the joints are being over used therefore movements are causing too much friction and inflammation. So I now have to go from maybe 10+ hours of exercise per week to basically 0 - a few rehab moves to get my body happy again. I have also been doing daily hour walks which I have been LOVING, its like therapy for me - I also have to reduce these to 20 minutes for the time being. So please do not do a me, don’t worry so much about your movement that you overcompensate then actually do have to worry for reals.

My advice is to keep it simple, realistically we don’t want to be training more than 4-5 hours a week, plus a daily walk to get our steps up. If you are doing anything high impact to get those calories burning, then great! But be careful, maybe limit this to a couple of sessions. Ultimately listen to your body, do what works for you - if something hurts, don’t ignore it. I wish I took my own advice sooner.

But for now I am going to fully relax, let my body recover and give it the rest it clearly needs, you only have one body, make sure you look after it in every way you can.