Working 
as a trainer for 13 years, I’ve heard the word “overtraining” thrown around a lot. Your average gym-goer can be fearful of “overdoing it” as they are afraid of overtraining and thus making their hard work counterproductive.
Yet is it possible to overtrain? And if so how does one do it and what exactly does it mean? Consequently, is “overtraining” a myth or not? Overtraining by definition is training so hard that it exceeds your capacity to recover. So, how do you avoid this and where do you get the most “bang for your buck”?
First off, let’s look at your average muscle building-focused routine. About 70% of people out there use this split and not much else: 6-10 reps, 4 exercises per muscle, 4 sets per exercise, chest Monday, back Tuesday, shoulders Wednesday, etc. with one or two muscle groups per day.
If you want to improve your fitness level, you’re going to need to do one of a few things: Change your exercise format, increase load, decrease rest periods, or increase volume – this is often referred to as overload principle theory (OPT).
OPT is defined as the body’s system requiring an overload stimulus in order for adaptation to occur. Muscles experience overload when exposed to a stimulus greater than normally accustomed to, as stated by the American College of Sports Medicine. In comparison, activity below habitual level causes detraining, while continuing an accustomed lifting intervention maintains your current muscle strength and size.
Wait a minute, if you keep trying to overload your body won’t you eventually overtrain? This is where things get complicated and where overtraining starts to become a concern. You must constantly progress in the gym if you want your body to make changes, plain and simple. The truth is that the body will eventually adapt to the stimulus it’s given.
Think about it this way, when farmers, blacksmiths and miners performed manual labor 6-7 days a week, 12 hours a day, do you think any of them overtrained? At first they may have but eventually their bodies adapted to the new stimulus and work became easier as their bodies improved its ability to perform the tasks they were doing.
With that being said, if you add an extra set or perform 5 exercises instead of 4, you’re not at risk of overtraining. You obviously can’t do 20 extra sets or use the “do more work” method if you want to continue to increase your fitness level. So, after increasing workload, you should eventually go through a period of degression or change the format of your workouts to set up the body for continued progress.
Adam, you still haven’t answered the question: “Is overtraining possible?” Simply, YES! Recently in the exercise science world there has been a lot of talk about overtraining and whether it is actually possible to overtrain. Yes, it’s a fact that overtraining does exist and is not a myth.
The good thing is that it’s likely that you never will overtrain. I’d be bold enough to say that most people truly don’t have what it takes to overtrain. I know I don’t. Huh? Well here are the facts: In order to reach a true state of overtraining, recent research performed using athletes found that it would take three times the current volume of work being performed consistently for three weeks. If you do the math, that means that your current 16-set Monday chest workout would now be a 48-set chest workout. No thanks! I love training chest but 48 sets sounds absolutely terrible, not to mention that it would require 3 weeks to actually overtrain.
Now that we put it down on paper, overtraining seems absolutely ridiculous. Kind of like time travel but even that can’t be disproven. Okay, okay, I’m an exercise science nerd, not a time travel science nerd, so that’s way too complex for me to dive into and I’ll just stop there.
So, where do you go from here? The facts are now laid out and you can rest assured that you aren’t at any risk for overtraining, even if you push the volume a little. One thing to consider is the more you train without exceeding your capacity to recover, the bigger and stronger you’ll get. In other words, do work and do work intensely! Don’t be afraid to push it during workouts. Take your body to the limit if you want to quickly create an amazing physique.
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