Warnings of excessive workouts

What is over-training?

Physical workouts are indispensable for the healthy development of both the mind and the body.

However, sometimes you may tend to overdo your workouts regularly, or you may not intake the required calories that your body demands. This often leads to physical and mental exhaustion. This phenomenon is called over-training.

Some people get captivated by motivational pictures or videos, especially those who have just start their fitness programme. This leads to over-training and can cause undesirable health effects.

What are the signs of excessive workouts?

Whenever you push your body beyond the limits, it will show some signs. These are the times where you should pay attention to your body and pull back for a while.

Some common over-exercise side effects are as follows:

Increased physical injury

Most of the physical workouts involve weight training. When you are regularly lifting weights, your muscles get sores and strains. This leads to muscle distress.

Sometimes lifting excessive weights overstretch your muscles leads to muscle tearing. This, in addition to causing pain, also reduces the mobility of your muscles.

Sudden pain, swelling, stiffness and weakness of muscles are some of the symptoms that tell you that your muscle has been damaged somehow.

Exhausted even after sound sleep

A sound sleep naturally recharges your body and mind. But if you feel tired even after 7 or 8 hours of sound sleep, it means your body is strained by excessive workouts.

When you overdo your workouts, it will also affect calm sleep. This is the indicator that tells you to pull back yourself a bit.

Decreased levels of performance

A sudden drop in your workout performance is one of the early over-exercise side effects. Over time, your motivation level decreases and the time you spend on workout will turn out dreadful.

This is when you should change your workout pattern. If you are following a similar routine, maybe you should consider deflecting from it.

Fatigue

It is highly common that your body feels tired after a workout. But fatigue makes you tired for a long time.

Fatigue is one of the early over-exercise symptoms you may feel if you are over-training.

Fatigue also affects your mental health. It makes your mind tired and may even lead to depression. Feeling fatigued for a long time is a cause for concern.

Mood swings

Normally, when you don’t have enough sleep, you feel irritated and uninterested. You will have a similar effect if you over-stress your body.

Anxiety, depression, anger and constant mood swings are some of the signs that tell you that your body is exceeding the limits and is getting drained.

When you are stressed emotionally, your body releases stress hormones. This leads to anger, confusion, depression, etc.

These stress hormones will get released even if your body is over-stressed. It makes you experience all those mood swings even when your mind is not stressed.

Increasing heart rate

For average human beings, the normal heart rate varies between 60 and 100 beats per minute. When the beat rates show a reduction, it means that your heart is functioning properly.

Usually, persons with regular cardio training and athletes have beats per minute as low as 40.

But if you put stress on your body more than certain limits, your heart will pump faster and it is a bad sign for your cardiovascular health.

If you feel increased heartbeats often, it is an indicator of over-training.

Over-eating

Naturally, you crave food after workouts. But overdoing workouts affects your dietary balance.

If you stress your body more than your fuel intake, your body releases more hunger hormone called ghrelin.

An extra portion of food here and there won’t affect you much. But you unknowingly start to intake irregular food because of the over secretion of ghrelin.

This may lead to an increase in your body weight and your fat.

How much exercise you can do in a day?

It is difficult to come to a conclusion on how much exercise is too much in a day. However, you can chart out certain workout patterns according to the advisable workout limits to avoid over-exercise side effects.

Fitness experts recommend, in the case of aerobic training, approximate 75 – 150 minutes of training is enough for a day.

In the case of weight training, 3 sets of 12 – 15 repetitions are advisable.

However, according to the majority of fitness trainers, taking a break every third day will give your body the necessary time to replenish itself.

Now one can even ask how much exercise is too much for women.

Although there is no perfect duration of workouts to pinpoint for men and women, at least 30 minutes of daily workout along with stretches is advisable.

Key takeaway

As they say “too much of anything is good for nothing”, doing physical training more than your limit leads to various over-exercise side effects.

As Zen philosophy says, sometimes doing nothing is also okay.

When you feel any of the over-exercise side effects at any point, take a break and replenish your body with more calories.