In this Police Fitness video tip we want to talk about overtraining.
One of the things I really love about working with police applicants is that they are always motivated, they’re always prepared to put in the effort and do the work but sometimes that can backfire on us. While training at a high intensity is really important, if you are overtraining and not giving your body enough time to recover, and your body is tired, then you simply won’t get the most benefit from your training sessions.
So, in order to ensure that you can put in 100% intensity into each and every training session you need to allow your body to rest and recover, that’s really the best way to go. So after a high-intensity training session allow for a good recovery period and you will be able to hit your next training session with 100% intensity again.
Over training is like Flogging a dead horse
A common fault that we hear a lot from people is “I’m doing the beep test every night after work and I just can’t seem to get a better score!” (Just doing the beep test as your training program is not a good strategy and something we’ll cover in a future video).
If you are following this type of routine, be it the beep test every night or even a high-intensity training session of the same type of exercise then one of the reasons you are not getting anywhere is this type of training is a little like flogging a dead horse.
Let’s look at an example to try and explain what we mean. If you came home from work one Monday night jumped on your trusty horse and gave it a good hard ride for an hour or two your horse would be full of spirit and be happy to ride hard and give you 100% intensity. Now let’s say you did that every night for a whole week giving your horse a good hard workout each night, by Wednesday the horse is tired and although he might be giving you 100% effort, after a few days of hard intense running he’s tired so the output is not going to be as high. In actual fact, the output is going to decrease each day because the horse is tired and fatigued from simply overtraining and not having enough recovery time.
Recovery is the key to training at full intensity
So what you should be aiming for is to be as fresh as a daisy for each of your training sessions, this will allow you to train at full intensity and get the most out of your training session. After this kind of session you’re going to need 1 to 2 days or maybe even 3 days to recover before your body is fresh again ready to hit another training session hard.
By training hard every night you are lowering your output, now this might be to 90% or your full intensity or maybe even lower as the days add up. Training every day at a lower intensity output is not going to give you the same benefit as being able to train at 100% and giving yourself enough time to recover then hitting your next training session again at 100%.
So I guess it’s the old story of more is or not always better, sometimes less is more. It’s all about getting the right balance with your program the right intensity, the right recovery time, the right nutrition, enough rest, enough hydration etc. etc.
Trainers Tip: Over Training Could Be Doing You More Harm Than Good!
Okay, that’s it for this training tip, get out there, get stuck into it but don’t forget to rest up as well.
Train hard, train right!
