Functional or Non-Functional Overreaching
by George Blackwell
For this week’s blog, rather than delve into a recently published paper, I’m going to go over one of the most basic principles to help you adapt to your training:
Stress + Rest = Adaptation
Functional Overreaching © TrainingPeaks
Although it sounds very simple, getting the right balance between these two components can be tricky. How much stress is enough to stimulate improvement? How much rest do you need to allow yourself to adapt? And equally, how do you decipher between a functional level of overreaching, and one that is ‘non-functional’ where you’re seeing your performance baseline decrease?
The truth of the matter is that, until you drop the overall level of stress (and this includes other life stressors, not just training stress) on an athlete, whether that’s in a taper for a race or a recovery week, it can be challenging to tell the difference between a functional or non-functional level of overreaching, especially in elite athletes, where the training loads are high and margins for error are small.
From an online coaching perspective, there are a few metrics we can use to monitor and evaluate how athletes are tolerating training. These include Heart Rate Variability, Resting Heart Rate, Pace : Heart Rate or Power : Heart Rate responses in training sessions, as well as subjective measures like RPE, motivation to train and overall feelings of fatigue. However, numbers often only tell half the picture. I often find myself trying to acquire as much detail as possible on the lifestyle of an athlete to better understand the full picture of recovery.
Relevant questions to ask athletes (or yourself if self-coaching) include: How much sleep are they getting? How well are they fuelling their training? Do they have a stressful life away from training, such as a demanding job or a hectic family life? Although it’s difficult to quantify, factors such as these can have more substantial implications on adaptation / improvement than the training itself.
My ‘call to action’ for this newsletter is to give your coach as much of this contextual information as you can. Whether it’s a comment on a workout on TrainingPeaks or updates on WhatsApp, this information can be crucial when interpreting your responses to training, and can help your coach to ensure your balance between stress and rest is a functional one!