Overtraining Is Real, but It's Hard to Do

People ask me about overtraining all the time, and most of them are asking for the wrong reason. They aren't overtrained. They're afraid of working too hard. That fear costs far more progress than overtraining ever will.

What overtraining actually is

Overtraining is a real condition. I want to be clear about that up front, because every time I talk about this subject someone hears "overtraining doesn't exist." That isn't what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that true, chronic overtraining takes a great deal of work to reach, and it is not something to be afraid of every time you walk into the gym.

Someone's going to email and say, "Oh, you said overtraining is not real." It is real. It's just not something you need to be fearful of every day, because you've got to work pretty darn hard to be chronically overtrained.

There is a ceiling on how much the body can rebuild. If you train enough, you can break the muscle down faster than you can build it back. But for the average person, that ceiling is rarely the thing standing in the way.

There is a point of no return, but obviously there's nothing wrong with hard work. Your body's going to tell you when you're working out too hard. Never think, "I should stop working out now, I might be working out too hard." That's probably not going to happen.