Not to worry, fatigue is a part of serious SUP training, and you don’t necessarily need to panic and treat every instance of being a bit tired as a possible overtraining situation requiring drastic corrective measures. You do need to try and be as objective and aware as you can when it comes to listening to your body. If you have the slightest doubt of whether you are being lazy or truly are on the verge of going overboard with more training that is the time to utilize your coach. He or she will be able to give you the objective feedback you are looking for.  Most times you know the answer and just need the coach to reaffirm the correct answer.  The symptoms are many and varied, including mental burnout, soreness and fatigue that is not relieved by rest, unmanaged weight loss, illness (colds/coughs) due to compromised immune system, persistent high resting heart rate relative to your normal rate and  general crabbiness towards loved ones and co-workers. That crabbiness is often the first sign. When people start bugging you for no good reason – take note.

Overtraining is not the result of one workout or a handful of workouts, it is a long term, cumulative, persistent problem. Yes, one solution is to back off for a period of time to let  your body catch up and rebuild, and if you feel you are in a severe state of depletion, that’s what you have to do. The key is catching this before you get to the point that weeks are required to recover.

If you are working with a coach or following one of our programs or you designed your program based on recommendations in the book chance are good that your new training program is properly periodized with lower volume weeks scheduled in allowing you to recover after several build or harder training weeks.  If you don’t see a recover week at least every 3 weeks you should chat to your coach about this or revise your training program accordingly.

Over-extending on one workout on the other hand is a less complicated situation, and a day off or an easy day should have you back to normal, but if that becomes a habit you need to re-evaluate what you are doing to yourself and why. If over-extending results in an actual injury (pulled muscle, tendon damage etc) then that has its own consequences but this is a  another topic. Look at the goals of each training session and try to stick with it.  The odd hammer session with a group when an easy session is schedule is fine, but you will start to run into trouble if you overdo it during every group training session.  Serious SUP racing takes a lot of control and patience so what better place to practice this then in training.

Next time you start to pour it on during a workout, listen to the little voice (the good one) and try to hold back if quality or a long duration is not scheduled. Easier said than done, but don’t always be that guy…the one that wins all the training sessions and then can’t understand why he imploded on race day.

Roch and Huddle