As sports science evolves, more and more understanding around the relationship between endurance training, recovery, and nutrition are developing. When most athletes and coaches think about overreaching or overtraining, they think training too hard or too much - and the solution is just take a few days off. Yet we’re beginning to discover that overtraining is really a misnomer. A better term perhaps would be ‘chronic under-recovery syndrome’ where low energy availability (and carbohydrate availability) underpins this concept.
In this podcast, I discuss some of the recent research on this topic, and some of the key ideas to understand as it relates to performance, recovery, and nutrition for endurance athletes and ways to avoid heading down the path of non-functional overreaching or overtraining.
References:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33651630/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34181189/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23247672/