The grand bargain promised by exercise is that your results will be proportional to your efforts. The harder you work, the fitter you’ll get. It’s very satisfying, even addictive – until the deal breaks down.
Sooner or later, everyone who exercises regularly will hit a patch of diminishing or even negative returns. You’re working harder but getting worse results. Figuring out why this is happening is one of the key challenges faced by fitness seekers and elite athletes alike, and it’s the topic of a new study in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance.
A research team led by Rune Kjosen Talsnes of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology assembled a panel of a dozen of Norway’s top endurance coaches, collectively responsible for more than 350 Olympic, World, and European championship medals in sports including running, cycling, and cross-country skiing. They put together a list of key warning signs that precede bad patches in training and outlined the steps they take in response – insights that can be valuable for all of us.
Signs that a bad patch is imminent
The most obvious sign that something is wrong is a drop in performance. Your running pace is slower than usual, or you can’t lift as much weight.
But there’s a more subtle sign that can pick up problems earlier, which is a mismatch between how hard you’re working and how hard you feel like you’re working. You may still be able to hit your usual pace or lift your usual weight, but it takes more effort than it normally does.
This mismatch might also show up in data from your wearable tech, but not always in the ways you’d expect. For example, a lower-than-usual heart rate at your normal running pace might indicate that you’re getting fitter, but it could also be a sign of nervous system fatigue after a period of heavy training. As a result, your perception of how hard you’re working is a more reliable sign, even though it’s harder to quantify.
Another red flag that the Norwegian coaches watch for is changes in mood. Feeling uncharacteristically irritable and snapping at the people around you might be a sign that you’re not recovering from your workouts, especially if it’s accompanied by changes in how you perform or feel during exercise.
How to recalibrate
The response to these warning signs should be proportional to their severity. If you’re stumbling around like a zombie and barely able to put your gym clothes on, you probably need to take a few days completely off. If you just have the vague sense that your body doesn’t feel right, then shortening your planned workout or reducing its intensity might be enough for you to bounce back.
The details of your training are only part of the story, though. The problem may be what you’re doing between workouts, rather than how hard you’re pushing at the gym. Are you getting enough sleep? Eating enough throughout the day to replenish your muscles for the next day’s workout?
Why you need a break from working out
More broadly, what else is going on in your life? Your body’s capacity to handle stress doesn’t make neat distinctions between the physical stress of training and various other stressors you might be dealing with, such as deadlines at work, staying up with a sick child or frequent travel.
Some of these stressors may be within your control, in which case you can choose to dial them back if they’re interfering with your workouts. But more often, they’re unavoidable, which means that your workout plans will have to be adapted to give you more recovery than usual until the deadline has passed or the child is feeling better.
One final note that the Norwegian coaches emphasize: Make sure there isn’t something else going with your health, such as an undiagnosed infection, that’s sapping your workout energy.
Perhaps the trickiest point of all about bad patches is that fatigue is a normal part of exercise. It’s the whole point, actually. You can’t start slacking off and skipping workouts every time you feel tired, or you’ll never get fitter. But if you pay careful attention to how you feel from day to day, and perhaps even note it down in a training diary, you’ll be able to recognize when something is different – and adjust accordingly.
Alex Hutchinson is the author of the forthcoming book The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map.
