You're Not Overtrained. You're Lazy!

Every athlete has said it at some point. A rough week, a heavy session, a bad night’s sleep, and the word comes out: “I think I’m overtraining.”

Almost never true. Most of the time what’s actually happening is simpler and less flattering: you didn’t want to train today, and “overtraining” sounds a lot better than “I’m lazy.”

Overtraining is real. It’s also one of the most misused words in sport. People use it to describe fatigue, soreness, a bad day, a lack of motivation. None of which is overtraining. The actual syndrome is rare, it takes weeks or months to develop, and for the vast majority of people training a few times a week, it’s close to impossible to reach. Understanding why requires separating two things that get lumped together constantly: external load and internal load.

External load vs internal load

External load is what you did. It’s objective, measurable, and independent of who’s doing it: kilograms lifted, kilometres run, number of sets, sprint distances, time under tension. Two athletes doing the identical session have the identical external load. It’s the training plan written on paper.

Internal load is how that external load actually landed on you. It’s the physiological and psychological cost of the session: heart rate response, hormonal fluctuation, muscle damage, perceived exertion, sleep debt, and yes, how your day at work went before you walked into the gym. Two athletes doing the identical session can have wildly different internal loads, because internal load isn’t determined by the plan. It’s determined by the person absorbing it.

This distinction is the whole article, so it’s worth being blunt about it: you don’t get overtrained from external load. You get overtrained from internal load accumulating faster than you recover from it and external load is only one of the things that feeds it.

It’s never one session

Nobody gets overtrained from a single session done at 110%. That session makes you tired, maybe sore for a few days, maybe cranky. That’s not pathology, that’s training working as intended — you apply a stimulus, you recover, you adapt. This is true even when the session is genuinely brutal.

Overtraining syndrome develops from a prolonged period. We’re talking weeks, realistically closer to a month or more where sessions performed around 100% keep repeating without the internal load ever being allowed to come back down. It’s not the intensity of any one workout. It’s the total absence of a dip. Load, load, load, no trough, for long enough that the body stops being able to compensate.

And here’s the part that gets skipped constantly: the internal load side of that equation isn’t only training. A conflict at work, tension at home, exam stress at school. These generate internal load that’s just as real as a hard interval session, and your body doesn’t file it separately. Cortisol doesn’t check whether the stressor was a 400m repeat or an argument with your boss. If you’re training hard and your life outside training is also loaded, you’re not adding two moderate numbers, you’re stacking two high ones, and the training plan that looked perfectly reasonable on paper becomes the thing that tips you over.

This is why the same program can be completely fine for an athlete in one period of their life and genuinely dangerous for the same athlete a few months later, with nothing on the training log itself having changed.

What I learned the hard way

I got overtrained once, during my career as an athlete. I was young and, frankly, not very competent yet. I hadn’t learned to listen to my body, and I believed, the way most young athletes do, that results were proportional to how much suffering I put in. More fatigue meant more progress. That was the whole model in my head.

During that period I stopped sleeping well. Consistently, night after night. That alone should have been the signal to stop and reassess. It wasn’t, because my physical performance didn’t seem to be dropping and that’s the detail that makes the whole story worth telling, because it wasn’t a coincidence.

The training method I was using at the time relied heavily on repetitions done well below threshold. That kind of training is comfortable enough that it doesn’t clearly expose a performance decline in progress: you can keep hitting the same sub-maximal numbers for a long time even as your actual capacity is quietly eroding underneath, because you’re never asking the question that would reveal it. This is exactly why periodic maximal testing during a training block is not optional. Sub-threshold work will lie to you about how you’re doing. A real maximal effort won’t.

What’s remarkable is how the body behaves once it’s been sending warning signs for long enough and nobody’s listening: eventually it stops asking and just forces the issue. In my case that was an acute case of pubalgia that put me on the sidelines. And within a short period of being forced to stop, I started feeling better and sleeping properly again, almost immediately.

What’s equally remarkable is how effectively the mind can bury signals the body is broadcasting clearly. I wasn’t unaware that I was sleeping badly. I just didn’t connect it to anything, because the narrative I had ( work hard, get better) didn’t leave room for the possibility that the fatigue itself was the problem. Learning to actually listen to yourself, and to know the difference between your body’s real limits and the story you’re telling yourself about them, turned out to be one of the most useful skills I ever built. More useful, in the long run, than any single training method.

How to actually track it

The reason overtraining sneaks up on people isn’t that it’s undetectable. It’s that most athletes only track one half of the equation.

External load is the easy half, because it’s just arithmetic on top of your training log:

Kilograms or kilometres per week — the simplest volume marker there is, and still one of the most useful. A steadily climbing weekly total, with no dip built in, is the first thing to check.
Time under tension — for strength work specifically, total time muscles spend under load per session or per week. Two sessions can move identical total weight and have very different time-under-tension profiles, and it’s the latter that tracks more closely with actual training stress.

Internal load is the half people skip, because it requires paying attention to yourself rather than to a spreadsheet:

Heart rate variability — a genuinely useful proxy for how loaded your autonomic nervous system is, when measured consistently, same conditions, same time of day, and read as a trend rather than a single number.
How you actually slept — not a wearable score, just an honest answer to a simple question every morning.
How you feel today — the least technical metric on this list and, in my experience, still one of the most reliable. Ask yourself. Answer honestly.

None of these individually tells you much. The value is in tracking both categories together and watching for the specific pattern that matters: external load holding steady or climbing while internal markers, sleep, HRV, how you feel, are sliding in the wrong direction, for longer than a few days. That combination, sustained, is the actual warning sign. Either one alone, briefly, is just training.

The blunt version

If you want the practical, no-nuance answer, here it is, organised by training frequency.

Training 2–3 times a week? Overtraining is practically impossible. You have four or five days a week where the body isn’t being asked for anything, plenty of room for internal load to dissipate before the next session. If you’re in this bracket and blaming overtraining for a bad week, it’s not that. Train. No excuses.

Training 4–5 times a week? Rare, but not impossible. Especially if life outside training is loaded at the same time. Worth paying attention to the internal load side, but this isn’t the danger zone.

Training 6–7 times a week? Here the risk is real. At this frequency there’s structurally very little room left for internal load to come back down between sessions, which means any additional stressor, a bad stretch at work, poor sleep, a personal problem, has nowhere to go. In this context, proper periodization, with genuine load and deload cycles built into the plan, isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s indispensable. Without it, you’re relying entirely on the internal load from the rest of life staying low, and that’s not something a training plan can guarantee.

So to the people training 3–4 times a week who reach for “overtraining” as a reason to skip sessions: that’s not what’s happening to you. You’re not overtrained. You’re lazy. Train. No excuses.

And to the professional and high-frequency athletes actually living in the 6–7 session bracket: listen to yourselves. Talk to your coach. Don’t run a session just because it’s what’s written on the sheet. Be ready to adjust the plan based on how you’re actually reading your own internal load that day. The program is a starting point, not a contract.

For what concerns how load and deload cycles are actually structured and periodization in general, I’ll get to it soon, stay tuned!