At one time, I ran a blog called Fitterverse: A universe of fitness. This post originally appeared there. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I’ve been able to recapture the text. I’ve published them here on their original publication dates.
Recently, I found myself inexplicably grumpy, just about all the time. Initially I thought it was because I gave up drinking, and was just going through withdrawals. But it didn’t seem to let up the further away I got from my “quit date.”
Then I started noticing something else. The amount of weight I was able to lift started declining steadily, particularly in areas where I’m generally weak to begin with, like my chest and biceps.
And then I got tendonitis in the bicep tendon nearest my elbow, and had to reconfigure my workouts to avoid curls and rows for a month or so.
A few workouts later, I noticed the beginnings of tennis elbow, apparently from overcompensating for my bicep problems.
All of this made me more grumpy.
And then I read this post on Facebook from Gymface. If you don’t feel like clicking the link, it’s a list of some symptoms of overtraining. A few that caught my attention because I was having them:
- Always sore in joints and muscles
- Decreased immunity – getting sick frequently
- You hit a seemingly unbreakable plateau
- Frequent injury
- Always tired and lacking energy
- Irritable
- Can’t do as many reps or as much weight
- Trouble sleeping
- Headaches
Those aren’t all the symptoms, those were just the ones that I was having. Unfortunately, Gymface didn’t really offer a solution, but sometimes problem recognition is half the battle.
So I headed out to my old standby, Bodybuilding.com, and found this article that offered some solutions. One of them was to reduce the volume and intensity of training, but that’s not really something I can do with my personality, as I’m a bit of an “all or nothing” kind of guy. So I chose their first solution, which was to take some time off. I also decided that I needed to get some fat back in my diet, as I’ve been cutting pretty hard for probably four months.