With Coach Kelvin, offering Online Running Coaching for We Run and the We Run Virtual Running Club, and 1:1 Running Coach for Leeds and surrounding areas.
Overtrained or Under Recovered?
I’m gonna share some thoughts on ‘am I overtrained or under recovered?’
Quite often I speak to people and they say things like, oh yeah, runners generally train too much, do not they? Or they train too hard or the easy runs are too hard or they’re always getting injured. And quite often in this context, when we think about training, we’re thinking about training load.
What Training Load Really Means
The actual runs that we do. So when I think about training load, I think about frequency, intensity, time and type. And we can think of time also in miles and kilometres.
But what’s often the case is people are actually under recovered so they’re not recovering well enough.
The Three Pillars of Recovery
When we think about recovery, we’re thinking about hydration, nutrition and sleep.
If a runner’s got hydration, nutrition and sleep pretty well dialled in, they can usually handle fairly high volumes of training with some intensity in there, maybe some strength training as well. If they do not have the recovery in place, training’s not really gonna work or it’s not gonna work as well as it could.
Hydration, Nutrition and Sleep
When we think about hydration, we’re thinking about that two to three litres a day plus the right amount of sodium.
When we think about nutrition, we’re thinking about making sure that our macro split is somewhere near where it needs to be and our overall caloric intake is enough to support the training we’re doing, including making sure that when we’re doing our actual runs, that we’re hydrating and fuelling those runs appropriately.
And that sleep is somewhere between that sort of seven to nine hours in that sort of range somewhere. I’m not gonna go into quality of sleep. That’s just the quantity.
Why Recovery Matters More Than You Think
It is worth just checking in on those things because most people, when their recovery is in place, they can handle more training load than they think.
So I hope that makes some sort of sense and if you’ve got any questions, please pop them in the comments below. And for now, happy running.
