What are the two most important days you should skip to avoid an overtraining injury? Well, that is what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
What if I told you that you could skip two days and avoid an overtraining injury altogether? Well, if you are injured, you would probably go back and skip any two days I picked on your calendar in order to give up not running, being injured and all of the hassle you have right now as a consequence of your overtraining injury.
Overtraining injuries are preventable. You do not get overtraining injuries because you ran too much. You get overtraining injuries because you did not recover enough before the workout that you were not strong enough to withstand. How do you tell which two days to skip? Well, this is pretty easy.
When you are about to get sick or you are about to get a cold or you are about to get a flu, what do you feel like? Usually, once you get sick, you look back and recognize that the day before or maybe the previous day before that, you felt really worn down and you could sense something was wrong. That’s when you should skip running.
So, I have experimented with this many times over the years and I know that I have that feeling that I’m about to get sick and if I go for a run, I will get sick. And if I don’t go for a run, I won’t get sick. So, as a general rule, I would like to skip two days when one of these three things happens.
One of them is I feel sick. I feel like I’m about to get a cold or the flu. The second one is I notice that my resting heart rate is going up. So, if you track your resting heart rate with a fitness app and you see that your resting heart rate for some reason is creeping up, that’s a time to be wary that your body telling you that it’s stressed out. You are really at risk of getting an overtraining injury.
The third one is if you notice any sleep disturbance at all. If you sleep really well normally but suddenly, even when you’ve worked out hard that day, you are waking up multiple times in the night, that sleep disturbance can precede an illness or an overtraining injury. So, I really believe that if you feel like you are going to get sick, your resting heart rate is elevated and you have a sleep disturbance, you should skip the next two workouts on your calendar no matter what they are.
I know you are thinking, oh, if I don’t do those workouts, I’m just not going to be able to finish my marathon on time. Totally not true. But if you get sick and you have to miss two weeks of running, you are definitely not going to finish your marathon on time. So be prudent, watch your heart rate, watch for when you feel sick, watch for when your sleep is messed up, and skip two days and you can thank me later.
If you like this episode, like it, subscribe, send it to a runner who needs to hear it, and I’ll see you in the next training.
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