The Overload Syndrome: When Exercise Becomes Dangerous

Everyone knows that exercising is a fundamental part of being healthy. Like everything in life, balance is key here too. Regular and consistent training is necessary for your well-being. However, exercising too much is not only harmful to your body, it can also lead to overload syndrome.

When you train, it is important that you do not spend too much time on it. So keep reading. Learn more about overload syndrome and how to prevent it.

What is the overload syndrome?

Exercising has countless positive effects on health. On the psychological side, it reduces depression and anxiety. It also helps you deal with stress better.

Training also improves your self-confidence and your relationships with others. From a physical point of view, exercise helps to prevent obesity and cardiovascular disorders.

The problems arise when you start to spend a significant amount of time training or playing a sport.

If your training becomes more intense and you have less time to recover between training sessions, then you need to be careful. After all, this cannot only affect your performance. However, it can also have a negative effect on your body.

You may also feel completely absorbed in the sport you play. You will feel exhausted mentally and physically. You may be experiencing a bad mood and feeling apathetic. You may also have sleeping problems.

If these symptoms persist and become chronic, you may have overuse syndrome. At that moment, your body is so full that you can no longer recover from your physical exertion. This affects your performance.

What makes this syndrome difficult is that many athletes increase their training when they notice that their performance is decreasing. That creates a vicious circle. So they assume that they are not doing very well because they do not train enough. So they start training even more. As a result, their symptoms and their performance get worse.

What are the symptoms of overload syndrome?

Physiological and psychological changes are one sign of the overload syndrome. Another signal is the maladaptive symptoms.

Usually, a person with the overload syndrome suffers from fatigue, insomnia, loss of appetite, weight loss, headaches, muscle aches, regular infections, digestive problems and even amenorrhea and osteoporosis.

Psychologically, people with this syndrome suffer from depression, anxiety, damaged self-confidence, apathy, mental fatigue, problems with concentration and emotional instability.

They may also notice changes in their athletic performance. Their strength, resistance, speed and coordination can suffer.

You can imagine that someone with overload syndrome also makes more technical mistakes. As a result, they have a harder time achieving their set goals. However, this is not all. At the physiological level, their heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen consumption peak.

What can you do about this syndrome?

When you have reached this point, it is not enough to interrupt the training for a while. That is also why it is so important that you diagnose the overload syndrome as soon as possible.

If you’re hoping to reverse the effects, you’ll need to make several major changes. You need to reduce the amount of training time and the intensity of your training. Also allow more time to recover between sessions.

It is also important and useful that you introduce variation in your training program. So try to do different types of exercises that you enjoy doing. It is also important that you stimulate your motivation and your self-confidence.

Finally, you also need to learn how to effectively deal with the emotional problems associated with the overload syndrome. So set up some healthy habits and prioritize a good diet and lots of rest.

Featured images courtesy of Joshua Jordan and Marc Rafanell Lopez.