Too much exercise can be bad for your health. Adding more exercise to your current health regime will not automatically mean you become healthier. Too much exercise can lead to overtraining and potential injury.
Avoiding injury
A common belief is that results happen during a workout, but results actually happen between workouts, not during them. Exercise is a stimulus that challenges your body. With good nutrition and rest, your body recovers and adapts to become more capable of handling challenges (i.e. exercise) the next time you do it.
When you exercise too frequently your body doesn’t have enough time to recover and adapt. By repeating this process of exercising without sufficient recovery, parts of your body may eventually break down from overuse, leading to injury.
A common reason why we overtrain is we feel that if we aren’t sufficiently active, that we aren’t ‘doing enough’. So instead of completing more workouts of the same intensity, break up your workouts with active recovery. This can be anything from foam rolling to brisk walking to stretching. The point is to continue being active in ways that support your goals through encouraging recovery, as opposed to activity that leads to overuse.
Progressive overload
One of the most common methods to achieve results through resistance training is progressive overload. This means that based on time and perceived intensity (i.e. how challenging it feels to you), you’ll increase the weight you’re lifting to achieve the results you want. Your ability to increase the weight will depend on how well you’ve rested and recovered from your previous workouts.
Think of this process like building a house. As you complete workouts and recover between them, you build a foundation through which you can increase the intensity of your workouts with heavier weights. This is because your body will build lean muscle, and your brain will become better at instructing your body how to complete the exercises more efficiently.
When you exercise too frequently, you limit your body’s ability to build foundations for progress. Also, you limit your body’s ability to learn efficiency by not allowing your body to adapt through rest.
The key to consistent progression is to increase your intensity for 3-4 weeks, then proactively reduce that intensity for a week. This is referred to as ‘deloading’, and it’s an effective way to keep progressing. Deloading encourages both physical and mental recovery. When you relentlessly push yourself without respite, your body will simply stop responding to the stimulus you’re putting in front of it.
Keep track of your workouts and the weights you’re lifting, and proactively add in deload weeks to allow your body and mind to recover, rebuild, and prepare for the next challenge.
Motivation
Consistency is an important cornerstone of achieving results through exercise. One of the most common side-effects of too much exercise is you get too fatigued to want to continue. When you work out too much, one of the potential negatives is your sleep is affected. It may seem counter-intuitive, as you’d think that through more activity you’d sleep like a baby.
But too much exercise can make it difficult for your body to wind down at the end of the day. This can lead to disturbed sleep, meaning you’ll be missing the getup and go you need to work out next time. The key is to listen to your body. Sometimes we force ourselves to ‘soldier on’ when our body is trying to tell us otherwise.
If you wake up feeling tired and lethargic, instead of pushing yourself through a heavy workout, either dial back the workout planned or go for an active recovery option. You’ll feel better for it and get back to a motivated headspace faster.
Avoiding stress
You’d think that by exercising more your results would come faster. But if your goal is to decrease body fat, over-exercising can lead to the opposite happening.
Exercise is stress on the body. Your body’s response to stress is to release a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is our ‘fight or flight’ hormone, releasing additional sugar into our blood stream to help us either evade harm or fight through it. Excess exercise leads to excess cortisol release. Excess cortisol release often results in excess body fat carriage around the waistline.
So, by over-exercising, you run the risk of sabotaging your own results and making your goal even harder to achieve.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Staring is the founder and lead fitness coach at Fit to Last Personal Trainers, which offers a high-end, all-inclusive fitness solution for those who’ve tried everything in the past; crash diets, exercise fads, regular gyms etc., all with little to no success or results. Fit to Last works in partnership with you to create a personalised programme of exercise, nutrition (no calorie counting or weighing) and small, simple lifestyle changes, to keep you on track to your goals, injury free and bursting with energy. See: www.fittolast.co.uk
Web: www.fittolast.co.uk
Twitter: @fittolast
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FitToLast/
Instagram: @fittolastlondon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fittolast/
