Overtraining Syndrome

In the world of sports physiology, "overtraining" refers to training beyond one's ability to recover.

If you strain past what your body can recover from (in the time you allot for said recovery) semi-regularly, there's a chance you'll end up with what's called "chronic maladaptive physiology," which means your body is less capable of recovering from strain in the future. You might also end up with an elevated resting heart rate, chronic pain, a weakened immune system, and a variety of other physical issues.

In this state, exercise starts to catalyze negative outcomes rather than positive ones, and that can apply to how your muscles heal (or fail to do so), but also to how you psychologically respond to exercise—you might start to feel depressed, sluggish, uninterested in things that previously excited you, and/or have trouble sleeping, whereas previously the pleasure chemicals associated with your exertions would have resulted in the opposite overall affect.

Sometimes called "Paradoxical Deconditioning Syndrome," "Overtraining Syndrome" (OTS) refers to this collection of flipped outcomes that are most frequently noted in athletes who compete in marathons, long-distance swimming events, or power-lifting competitions.

It's not known what causes OTS, but it seems to show up most frequently in folks who don’t allow themselves suitable recovery time, and there seem to be at least two primary variations of it: parasympathetic, which is most commonly seen in runners, swimmers, and other endurance athletes, and sympathetic, which is more frequently found in folks who push their raw muscle power to the limits (weightlifters, jumpers, etc).

So those who suffer from OTS lose the benefits of working out—their muscles depleting instead of growing, their health deteriorating instead of improving—but they also suddenly lose the fitness-generated drug they previously enjoyed, whatever chemical and psychological satisfaction they derived from their activity of choice no longer resulting in the same outcomes, instead often tipping them into an overall depressed and exhausted state.

Extreme versions of any sport or competition can evolve into what's called a "vice of excess": too much of a good thing becoming a bad thing.

This is similar in some ways to the downsides of overindulging in other generally good-for-you activities which, in excess, become their own opposite.

Mindfulness—a popular flavor of meditation that involves focusing on being in the moment and becoming more aware of what you're experiencing—has been shown to sometimes stimulate anxiety, depression, and to even stoke substance abuse if approached with too much intensity and not enough (for lack of a better term) unmindful time to balance things out; the opposite of what it tends to do for folks who engage in it more moderately.

It's not just physical exercise that can reach toxic levels at too-high doses, then: it's almost anything that helps us grow through the application of (usually) valuable frictions that can accumulate without us realizing it, if we’re not careful.