Overtraining?

Hey Celestial! You may want to keep track of your resting heart rate each morning when you first wake up. My usual HR is 48-52, so if it starts climbing in the mid to high 50's, I know that is one indication that I am fatigued. Mood is another factor. When I am training well, I wake up in the morning and can't wait to get to the pool! :banana: But, when I am fatigued from overtraining, I find myself lounging in bed with an unenthusiastic attitude. When this happens, it's time to go back to :bed: and make adjustments to my training regimen! As for nutrition, make sure you are getting plenty of lean protein in your diet. I prefer seafood, chicken, beans and nuts over beef and pork, but that's just me... Don't forget to eat your fruits and vegetables! :D Good luck! :cheerleader:

Your resting heart rate (upon waking) will be higher than normal. Also good to have blood work every few years at our ages

Sometimes, like today, I get to the point where I just can NOT muster up the energy to put any real effort into the swimming ... When that happens to me, I get out of the pool. Bonk. There's no point going on, so why go on? I would love to play my A-game every day. But, you know, some days, it ain't gonna happen. Maybe I didn't eat the right thing last night, or maybe my biorhythms are just out of phase. I'm not swimming for some freak-of-nature, hyper-demanding youth coach anymore, I'm swimming for me. When my body tells me I should be doing something else that day, I give myself permission to do it. Your training schedule is already pretty rigorous. What are you training for? My guess is that when you bonk, it's a clear signal you need some extra rest.

I would suggest you can't use a single workout as a gauge. We're all going to have off days. However, if you swim day after day and can't seem to break out of a funk then it's very possible you are overtraining.

I'm 50 and dealing with the same issue. If you hit the weights hard enough to be sore, you're usually going to swim like crap the next day. Just accept that and slog through it. As your body adjusts to the strength training, you will have to keep increasing the weights to get as sore. In other words, you get stronger. After a few more weeks, you may consider approaching two of the weight sessions as strength maintenance and only one for maxing out. Then you can be more productive in the pool the days after the weight sessions that aren't as vigorous.

I have learned that you have to listen to your body. In general we need more recovery as we age (I am 55). I think it can be challenging to find the right amount of weight training. Personally I believe that three days/week is too much. I typically lift twice weekly, and as a distance swimmer I lift primarily for maintenance. You could try a gel of some sort during swim practice. But the key is adequate nutrition after working out--carbs and protein within 30-45 minutes so that you replenish your muscle glycogen stores. I agree with Gull. I've had much better pool workouts this past year cutting back to drylands 2x per week. 3x a week left me too fatigued to swim fast. And you can't always do weights on a "recovery" day. Could your weight workouts be too long? 6000 meters sounds very long and hard to me -- 3000 m before the main set?! Is this still the age group workouts? Muscle soreness and fatigue also could be related to red blood cell magnesium levels. Mine is chronically low.

I have learned that you have to listen to your body. In general we need more recovery as we age (I am 55). I think it can be challenging to find the right amount of weight training. Personally I believe that three days/week is too much. I typically lift twice weekly, and as a distance swimmer I lift primarily for maintenance. You could try a gel of some sort during swim practice. But the key is adequate nutrition after working out--carbs and protein within 30-45 minutes so that you replenish your muscle glycogen stores.

Thank you all! I went back and read some similar posts from 2004 & 2006, and an article Fortress posted on Whitney Meyers. Very informative, and I think after your good words of advice that I haven't overtrained - yet. But I think I will take the advice a couple of you have given and go down to doing weights only twice a week - perhaps if I feel the need to go to the gym, I will do core work on the mats only on that third day. I enjoy doing long workouts of 4-5000, but lately we've been doing more, and I've been so proud of myself getting such yardage!! But I'm getting older, and I don't want to lose my love of swimming - luckily I can tell you all, my RHR remains around 52-54, but I am going to take all your good advice and cut back a bit. I've been a lazy butt all day & plan to repeat it tomorrow, for starters!!

It sounds like your body thinks you are stringing together 6 hard days in a week even if you think of it as 3 hard swim days and 3 days of recovery swimming + weights. I agree with some of the things said above; when you get to a certain point with the weights, think about maintaining rather than constantly ramping up. Your body will adapt to that level and before too long you will be doing the weights without the extra soreness (which is holding you back on those hard swim days). As far as nutrition goes, what you describe at about 3K in your planned 4.5-6K workouts does sound like a bonk rather than overtraining... especially because your body has more nutritional needs to help it recover from the added strength training and you are beginning your morning swim in a fasting mode. That may have worked well when you were just swimming, but your body is deploying the nutritional intake differently now that it's trying to repair and recharge muscles. I don't like having a lot of food in my stomach before a workout either, but liquid calories might be an option... have you experimented with sports drinks? Remember after about an hour, your muscles have burned all of their stored glycogen and you need to replace it for them to keep going... if you started out with a deficit, you're going to feel it a lot sooner. I'm not a 50-something yet, still a 40-something, but toward the end of OW season last year had definitely overtrained myself... much higher than average RHR, trouble sleeping, constant unexplained fatigue in the legs, general malaise, ever poorer performances... even accounting for good nutrition. I took off 4-5 days and came back slowly, still feeling the blahs. It took about a month to recharge. Check your resting heart rate and look up some of the other symptoms... it sounds like in your case you might be able to avoid overtraining by just making a couple of little adjustments here and there. Small set back of a week or so would be much better than the month-long setback I had at the end of last summer.

If you don't have off days --- how do you know when you have a really great day ?? Sometimes your body just does not want to run/swim at full throttle. Sometimes the brain is into something else in your life.