We talk with Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach about the psychological indicators of overtraining, which can often be the more dynamic signs for athletes and coaches to look for.
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor
Trevor, hello and welcome to fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host. Trevor Cotter, here with Coach grant Halleck in endurance sports, the concepts of overreaching, over training and burnout are ever present, both as something to avoid and at times, something to use as a tool but functional. Overreach. For example, an athlete intentionally pushes fatigue for a short time so that the body can super compensate after a rest. This training method is viewed by many coaches and athletes as a necessary part of eliciting their best form. However, overreach and over training are not just conditions that elite athletes have to worry about. Take, for instance, the athlete who can only train eight hours per week, but whose professional and home life are very stressful. In that case, eight hours can be enough to create an unintentionally fatiguing program. Researchers have tried to find markers of overreaching and over training, but have been unsuccessful. At least on the physiological side, there is no blood test or training device that can detect it. However, what consistently leads to the best means of detection are tools that measure our mood states, so psychological indicators. Here to talk with us about the psychological side of overtraining is Dr Kristen dieffenbach, a professor and the director of the Center for Applied coaching and sports science in the School of Sports Science at West Virginia University. She’s also a cycling coach herself. Dr dieffenbach speaks with us about the difficulties of spotting the sides of overtraining and the key symptoms that coaches can look for in athletes as they start to go down that road, including irritability, a decline in cognitive function, stress, anxiety, depression, and ultimately, a loss of motivation. Finally, we’ll talk about how athletes can identify these signs in themselves, and Dr dieffenbach will give her advice in how to address both the psychological and physiological sides of overreach and over training. Joining Dr dieffenbach, we’ll also hear from elite cyclocross coach and owner of cycle smart coaching, Adam Meyerson, and we’ll talk with professional gravel racer. Alexi Vermeulen, just like the last few episodes of fast talk, this episode is sponsored by training peaks. Trevor, I know you went through an episode of overtraining syndrome many years ago, and at that time, I don’t think you had tools available to help you understand where you were at, how far you had crossed over that line. Do you think if you had that, you would have avoided going into an overtraining state? Yeah, looking back, you’d never know, but I do think these tools would have helped me a lot, because back then, I really had no way of tracking. I mean, I was literally doing the tracking on a sheet of paper. And the whole concept was just train harder. And I can tell you when I came back from that over training syndrome, probably the smartest thing I did was to try to track and look for trends in how I was feeling, how hard I was training, all those sorts of things. It’s something I have tried to monitor ever since. And certainly there’s fantastic tools in training peaks for doing that, they have a whole bunch of graphs where you can track your mood, you can track how you felt on your workouts. You can track how you felt about your sleep. A lot of these things that are really good indicators. And you can, for a day or two, convince yourself, I don’t feel as bad as I do. But if you are tracking these things honestly, and you look at the graphs, and all of a sudden you’re seeing your mood state plummet. You’re seeing your enjoyment of the rides or workouts plummeting. It’s really hard to not look at that and go, Okay, something’s up. I think that’s something that I need to correct. So I have, ever since that overtraining syndrome, really use those tools, and I have a whole bunch of charts that I now look at in training peaks, I find immensely useful to say, Yep, those are the trends, and we’re going to talk about that in this episode of how easy it is to fool yourself and how important it is to be able to watch for those trends. But that’s just one of the many features that you see in training peaks, and they’ve been rolling out a ton of new features, like structured strength workouts, personalized fuel insights, and as a lot of people know, they’ve already added an indoor virtual cycling app, which we’ll talk more about later, but we got a sneak preview and are pretty excited about it. For limited time, you can get 20% off a premium athlete subscription to training peaks. To test out all of this new stuff, just use code fast talk at checkout and see for yourself why so many athletes trust training peaks. That’s code fast talk for 20% off. And with that, find a good frame of mind, and let’s make you fast Well, Dr dieffenbach, real pleasure to have you on the show. I’ve known you for years now. I know grant has known you much longer, but this is your first time on the show. In some ways, I feel I have to apologize for that. No,
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
not at all. Thanks for having me. It’s always fun talking to you guys, so I’m thrilled to be here.
Trevor Connor
Well, absolute pleasure. I know this is a topic that’s near and dear to both of your hearts. We have talked about overtraining in the past on the show, but we really. Talked about it from the physiological side, and there is another side to it that, in probably a lot of ways, is more important, which is the impact it has on our psychological health, basically looking at the mental side of overtraining and grant. I know you were really excited to have this conversation.
Grant Holicky
Yeah, I think it’s just something that’s not discussed enough. But some of this stuff, when you know about it, and you know how they’re tied together, becomes pretty obvious, and these symptoms of overtraining really detrimental in terms of our holistic lives, not just the athletic lives. So it’s a really important topic, and it’s something I don’t think gets discussed enough, so that’s
Trevor Connor
what we’re gonna dive into today. But before we get to that side of it. We did do an episode A while back. This is episode 127, where we talked about both overreach and overtraining. But Dr dieffenbach, maybe I throw this to you. What would you say is the two minute definition of overreach and of overtraining, and how are they different? I think
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
it’s such a great question to start off and make sure everybody’s clear on that, because there are so many different ways. Many different ways these terms are used by so many different people, and they often get all kind of muddled together as people are thinking about them. Overreaching is really what we are trying to do with training. If we’re trying to get an adaptation, we have to reach beyond wherever it is we are, what our baseline is, or what our current state is, and we’ve got to overreach to push the system enough to allow for some sort of adaptation. So that’s just our basic overreaching. We start getting into over training when we’re looking at something that’s maladaptive, something that doesn’t bounce, it doesn’t allow us to make those adaptations we need, and it’s some sort of excessive overload on the system that we just can’t recover from. And it starts to lead to both those physiological and potentially psychological detriments that you guys mentioned just a moment ago,
Trevor Connor
and full blown over training, this is a serious issue, like people can take years to recover from that.
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
Oh yeah, it can be a short term Hey, I’ve messed up my season, or I’ve messed up my cycle. I’m going for a big race, and I’ve just totally blown off the mark. And we’ve got athletes that we’ve monitored and seen that have pretty much killed years of their career because they just get into such a deep hole. So
Trevor Connor
one of the challenges that you see with both overreach and over training is how to measure it. And I do find it interesting that I’ve reviewed the literature again last night, just to remind myself of everything we’ve talked about in the past, there really isn’t actually much of a physiological measure to say, yes, you’re over trained or you’re overreached. They actually tend to go the mental side. So they use things like palms, which is the profile of mood states, profile of mood states. Thank you. And then the other one, which I do remember, is the D, a, l, D, A, which is the daily analysis of life demands. Those can actually give a better indicator. Well,
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
one of the challenges here, and this goes back to some work done by the physiologist quite a while ago, but there’s over 200 different symptoms that we can take a look at that have been pulled into the literature of different ways in which we could categorize tipping towards overreaching, towards overtraining, falling into overtraining. Randy Wilbur was at the sopc, their head sports physiologist, and he talks tons about the different hormonal markers and endocrine markers and other ways that we can test we run into multiple problems. We’ve got invasive testing that requires time and money. You know, whether we’re looking at saliva tests or blood tests, or if you’re really hardcore and want to go for those muscle biopsies. But the problem with all of those tests is that they’re on the other side. They’re once someone is already in the tank and in the hole and in a deep sense of hurt, and we’re going to have to back off and recover. And so what we have found with some of those psychological measures, the palms and the daily life one, and then there’s also the rescue from the group out of Germany, and a few other different variations on those, is they allow us to monitor how someone’s feeling about something, and if we’ve been tracking over time, we can get a good sense of we’re tending that way. We’re getting to a spot that’s unhealthy and pull back before we get to the need for those invasive tests that, like I said, are also expensive.
Grant Holicky
And I think one of the things that’s also really important to note about this. This is one of those things that a coach or peer or an even an athlete themselves, can start to track and recognize just along the way. They don’t need to be in a place where they’re going. You know what? I think maybe we’re in a place where we’re overreaching a lot. I better check and make sure we’re not over training. This is something you can observe along the way. Coaches, for sure, when you can put eyes on an athlete, or even simple as training peaks comments, when you start to watch a difference or real Delta in their mood states and how they react to these things, that’s an indication of maybe even just opening your eyes and ears more. All right, now I’m gonna really pay attention, and that’s when you can maybe do an evaluation with rescue or palms or something like that. But this is something that I think is really important in this whole discussion. Is for such a long time, exactly as you were referring to Dr dieffenbach, we would get to a place where we would go, Oh, man, something’s wrong, like we’re really in the hole. Now we got to. React. Reaction in any training situation is usually the wrong way to go, right? We want to be a slightly, at least slightly ahead of this curve. And the psychological markers are a really interesting way to be ahead of the curve as a coach or as a really aware athlete, because you can recognize, oh man, I am just not a nice person to be around right now, or I am not involved in my relationship right now. And we’ll get into some of these more specific things in a little bit.
Trevor Connor
I was gonna say this is where as a coach, sometimes you can just see it. You don’t even need these tests. If you have an athlete who’s showing up every day and being mouthy to you and complaining they didn’t sleep, they’re either partying too hard and they’re a jerk, right? Exactly they’re starting to push in some overreach or over training,
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
you just hit such an important piece. So that idea of being self aware and how easy it is for our athletes right now to rely on other things tell them how they feel. You know, all the metrics and the toys and the tools and the monitoring and the core of this is really that awareness of your own body and what’s going on, and that’s where I think the psychological side really shines through in the self awareness piece that we can support athletes with, because they’ll figure it out far before any of the tools that we have.
Grant Holicky
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s a great point. There might be a whole lot of this today. Trevor and I apologize, of myself and Kristen kind of going back and forth, one upping each other on things that we think of as we talk. This is pretty notable in our experiences. But, yeah, athletes live in a bubble, and we’ve created this mindset that, you know, okay, if I’m gonna be hyper perfect in everything that I do, optimized in everything that I do, I get to live in this little bubble with everybody handling me with kid gloves, and I’m not gonna worry about any of this stuff, and I’m gonna pick my head up at the end of this block. The problem is we lose the interaction. We lose self awareness. We’re losing these pieces of the puzzle, and oh my god, don’t get me started on the reliance of data and the reliance on what everybody likes to call hard science, when as we came back to and I love to make this point, if we’re going to recognize over training, we’re recognizing with it the quote, unquote soft sciences, like, if you don’t know this stuff, you’re going to put yourself in trouble, and there’s no easy way out.
Trevor Connor
I mean, I will back that up with the studies, and we’ll put these references in the show notes. But I looked at multiple studies that were trying to figure out, how do we measure over training and just again and again and again? It said these measures of mood, these measures of the psychological side, were much better predictors, much better indicators, than any physiological measure they could find, Trevor, something that
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
you probably also found your research that I’ve always found fascinating in this area of research, when they’ve tried to take athletes into the gym and over train them, just for the sake of the study, it’s actually been something that’s really difficult to do, like we can’t seem to do it the same way there as we can in real life, active, applied training. And I noticed you’re laughing, because it’s one of those weird things about the science of it that we just can’t replicate it, but we know it’s happening. We know the outcomes, we know the problems, and so the psychological seems to give us a better solution to working with it.
Trevor Connor
Well, I mean, it’s also ethical concerns. I mean, we want to do research on overtraining, but that’s a health concern. It’s very hard to get permission to say, I want to intentionally over train athletes.
Grant Holicky
Yeah, yeah. Going to overtraining requires a buy in on the athletes part that is kind of next level. And you’re not really going to get that in a lab rat, so to speak, right? Because they’re not going to push that. Why am I pushing that hard for 50 bucks? And this is one of those little things that I think Seiler even mentions, it’s the real world versus the lab. So much of what we get in the lab is great knowledge. It’s really great information, and it’s really good on training physiology, but it’s as Rob pickles always says, training performance and training physiology are different things. So you know, we have to use a lot of this anecdotal information that we know from our past and our
Trevor Connor
experience. Well, I have to share this story with you. I went to a presentation about 15 years ago these researchers that did an overtraining study where they actually took a professional North American cycling team and spent a month with them to over train them. And so they had them riding 100 plus miles a day, but they were taking care of everything for them, taking care of their bikes, feeding them food. Feeding them food, taking care of their rest. All that. All they had to do was ride the bikes. And they did this for a month, and nobody was over trained by the end of it. And so watching their presentation, their conclusion was, over training is a myth that doesn’t exist. And I went, No, you just gave a bunch of professional cyclists a one month vacation. Yeah,
Grant Holicky
exactly, you took away their cognitive load. Of course, they’re not tired.
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
They’re in heaven, actually, with that. Yeah, exactly, if they had a month of just training and everybody taking care of everything, that’s like a dream month. Yeah, no kidding.
Trevor Connor
Well, doing nothing but riding sounds like a dream vacation. Adam Meyerson offers his thoughts on what to do when we get too fast. Fatigued and why we have to be careful about removing all structure.
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
I do think you have to be careful about that too. Because sometimes when you remove the restrictions, people will do more. They think if they don’t have a plan, it means they’re free to over train almost. So yeah, maybe the assignment is to ride to the coffee shop. I think a lot of what you have to do is be your athlete’s therapist in those moments and support them and say, Hey, sometimes it’s like this, and it’s okay. You can rest for as long as you need to, until that feeling comes back. We can just do recovery rides where you’re checking in with yourself to see how you’re doing, until that excitement comes back and you will be probably faster after that, even if you lose some fitness, what you’ll gain in freshness, physically and mentally, because those things are tied. The physical freshness has to come back before the mental freshness will come back. That excitement, those things go hand in hand, so just supporting them through that and reassuring them that their season isn’t necessarily ruined, but it will be if they don’t rest. So there’s only one answer, and it’s to shut everything down and not worry about training for a little bit until you are excited again.
Trevor Connor
So let’s dive over there. GRANT You sent me some things that you wanted to talk about as the psychological indicators, so you brought up irritability, stress, anxiety, depression, decreased cognitive function and just kind of a drop in motivation and burnout. So let’s dive into those. Where would you two like to
Grant Holicky
start? Well, I think I almost want to start in a way that as this would progress, how would the psychological markers progress along with them? So when we get to burnout and lack of motivation, we’re pretty far down the line. Frankly, we’re probably in a place that we’re into over training. I think when we talk about irritability, or we talk about stress, decreased cognitive function, these are things that can happen during overreaching that we just have to keep an eye on as they progress. So starting with irritability, as you noted, Trevor, the research on this is thin. I won’t say it’s non existent. It’s thin. I wrote some about this in grad school, the links between overtraining and depression, and most of my citations were articles about a different topic, and I was finding the information I needed within that other topics paper. So it’s there. It’s just a little thin, but I think this is one of the first things we’re going to start to see. When an athlete is fatigued, they’re going to struggle to do the other things that they need to do in their life, right? They have responsibilities. Very few of us are like those athletes in the study that you’re referring to, Trevor, where we don’t have to worry about anything else. We still have to pay bills, we still have to maintain relationships. And I think one of the first things that starts to come is our normal, quote, unquote, normal interactions socially with our space, at home, with the people around us work. Those interactions start to become troublesome, annoying, difficult, however we want to put that. And this comes back to the whole self awareness thing that we all need a little bit more self awareness of, like, maybe the problem is me, but just having this kind of repetitive issue with our relationship or with our social interactions to the point where it’s annoying us, we’re really frustrated and snapping back and then starting to have an effect in both directions.
Trevor Connor
So Dr dieffenbach, what are your thoughts on this? And I know you emphasize those mood state analyzes.
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
Yeah, I think it’s what my grandmother used to call right, having a thin skin, when you start to get that thin skin, and every little thing starts to irritate you. And I think it’s such an important recognition that that irritability that’s going to come with overreaching, and that line that starts to come right, and so the athletes are going to be feeling that, and they’re there. And now it starts to become too much now it starts to become just too close to the surface, and something they can’t manage. You know, the idea of being self aware, one of the biggest challenges is the fact that you’re irritable makes it harder to see that you’re irritable, right? Because you’re annoyed with everybody around you. And so in the light of day, you go, Oh, yeah, I was really but in the moment, because you are pushing that hard, or you get into that space from a physiological perspective of just being so tapped out, which is why it’s so important to have the conversations early and often about what it looks like and what it’s going to feel like to push and what we’re going to be watching for. It’s really hard the first time through with an athlete to catch until you’re a little farther along, and then the better you are at talking about this and going through it, the more likely you can catch it sooner in successive cycles. But that early phase also means that we’ve got to help athletes make sure they’ve got people around them that are cued in and know what to look for, and can help sort of have some of those conversations. That’s why training in a bubble is. Such a challenge when somebody’s got, you know, like, I’m an athlete, I’m training for all this stuff. No one in my family is, or no one around me is, and my coach is at a distance. We’ve got to really have some good conversations and make sure some people are in place to help monitor my self monitoring. You’re going to need other eyes and ears on that.
Grant Holicky
It’s interesting. I think there’s this trend in coaching junior athletes, they’re like, let’s keep the parents out of it. We want to make sure that, you know, we got the athlete this and that. But this is why you need a back channel to the parent, especially with a junior athlete if, like, Listen, my phone is always available, and you can call me when you see something that I’m not going to see, that I need to know about. This is when I need you to tell me, you know, if you’ve been with an athlete for a really long time as a coach or a mental strength provider or any of those things, you’re going to probably develop some sort of a relationship with them and their family, or you’re going to least know about their family. And when you start to hear these conversations, my tendency is to think the tipping point is when I start listening to athletes go from very acute interactions. They’re just talking about this annoyed me, and this annoyed me that it starts to tip over the edge, that it’s global. My relationship’s in trouble. Instead of man, my partner is giving me a hard time, or school’s too much. I gotta be done. I can’t do this anymore. That’s one of my indications that, okay, we’re tipping
Trevor Connor
hard. So I have a question about this, thinking about it from the athlete’s perspective, and I’ll share a very quick story from personal experience. About a month ago, I was pretty overreached. I went to the weekly Tuesday night crit. I wasn’t racing very well. The next day, I’m at the farmer’s market with my girlfriend, and she just says to me, Trevor, you’re a grouch. And I was about to argue with her and say, No, I’m not a grouch. And then just went, Yeah, no, that all checks. And then went home and changed my training plan to take a week off, basically. So I’m like, I’m overreached. There’s the proof, but it was hard. You know, I’m a coach. I know this. I’ve seen when I’m overreach, I know I’m irritable when I’m overreached and I still wanted to argue with her. So how, as an athlete do you get past that and go, yeah, that checks out. I think
Grant Holicky
part of it is, and I’m really big on this in general, is, instead of punishing ourselves when we do something wrong, note what we did, file it for later, and try to make that correction going down the line. I think this falls into even performance in terms of tactics or anything like that. On the bike, I’ve watched why too many athletes get really mad at themselves when they make a tactical error, or they get in this situation where they’re overreached, then they’re reacting quickly and they’re being kind of mean, or any of those things. They get really mad at themselves. They get really frustrated, but what they’re not doing is analyzing the situation and saying, Okay, this is the mistake that was made. I need to be able to recognize this situation in the future and be able to move forward from it, so it’s starting to get an understanding of what it is that it triggers you in this situation. And unfortunately, that means every once in a while you have to have this situation where you get a little overreached and a little irritable, and you note what the influences and problems you have are.
Trevor Connor
So Dr dieffenbach, what are your thoughts on this?
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
Well, I think going back to something you said a minute ago, when you said you were being a grouch, right, I think there’s something to be said for letting athletes know that that’s okay, right? We intentionally over trained, and so you might occasionally be grouchy for an afternoon when it’s multiple days or multiple things in a row, then we’ve got a little bit of examining to do, but allowing athletes a little bit of that conversation of hey, you may just want to be aware that this training block this weekend is going to be really hard, and so you might be a little extra tired and a little grouchy and irritable. Warn the people around you or check in on that, but that’s not necessarily that they’ve screwed up or messed anything up, because that’s functional overreaching. We need to do that. It’s the how many days of grouchiness is too many days of grouchiness? How many days of poor sleep or irritability? When we start getting into that, what are the stacking symptoms that we start looking for that start to say, Hey, we’ve gone just a little too far. Let’s pull back. That becomes, to me, the really important conversation helping athletes check between functional and non functional.
Grant Holicky
That’s a really interesting point, like one of the things that I’ve started to do, and when I know I have a couple really hard days in a row, I’m gonna finish that last day of the block with a gap of an hour before I have to see my wife, or I have to see my kids, or I have to see those things where I can get the food in me. I can get a little bit of a moment. I could take a shower, I can just calm myself. And y’all have heard me talk ad nauseum about transition time like I think that’s one of the things that we’re not really great in life, is having that transition time between the one thing to the next thing. So we can go from being an athlete to a parent, or from being this to that, and all those things overreaching, we’re probably going to require a little bit more of that time. You know, maybe there’s an extra 20 minutes of me time to eat another handful of Pringles or something. Just get myself sorted before I’m going to face these interactions. And. That combination of things can get you in a lot of trouble. And that’s the point we’re trying to make here, I think, is, again, when it’s acute, when it’s one workout or two workouts, or one interaction, or this or that, then I don’t know it’s a big deal when it starts to become global. And this is one I love to use as an example. You’ve had a rest day. You’re even on one of your easier days and you’re still wildly irritable. All right, that’s something that we need to pay attention to. So
Trevor Connor
Dr dieffenbach, does it help if the athlete is aware they’re going into a harder block and they’re probably gonna be irritable?
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
Oh yeah, I think it always helps. Something that grant just said that I think is really important is the idea of those little things don’t make sense in the moment, but my athlete needs to know, because I need them to keep track in their training log. I need them to think about some of these little things that don’t seem like they’re a big deal in the moment. I tell my athletes that all the time is, even if it’s not a big deal, write it down. I’m not gonna knee jerk, reacting like, oh my god, we gotta back up, or we gotta take it easy. I’m looking for trends, and if you don’t get me the data, I can’t look for trends, so tell me when you’ve been a little crankier, you didn’t sleep well, and we’ll start to monitor and see where that line is. That’s a huge piece of it for me.
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Trevor Connor
So the next thing in your list, I think is really important to talk about, and I’ve certainly seen this in the literature, is a decrease in cognitive function as you start to overreach and get over trained. So can you talk to that? What do you see? And I know there are ways, because I’m going to talk about a study in a second, that you can measure it. But what are ways that athletes and coaches can see this?
Grant Holicky
I think athletes can see it. I’m just not doing a very good job, but the other things I need to be doing a good job at. It really, is this idea that you’re gonna start to see effects in your non athletic life. And this is not an exactly parallel comparison, but I have a friend who’s a bike mechanic, and he jokes that when he starts dropping tools, it means he needs to eat. And he’s very specific about that. You know, here we go. I’m working on this. He’s done it 8 million times in his life, and he drops the Allen wrench, he picks it up and drops it again. That’s when he tends to put the Allen wrench down, walk away, go get something to eat, and start to move on. So I think it’s that same kind of mentality or same approach when you’re going through things in your life that you’ve done a million times from a cognitive perspective, when you’re balancing your checkbook, nobody does that anymore. You’re balancing your checkbook and you’re making math mistakes, or you’re forgetting things. You’re going to the grocery store and you’re coming back with half the stuff that you needed and a whole bunch of stuff you don’t these are things that are kind of showing us that there’s a decreased cognitive function going on.
Trevor Connor
So Dr dieffenbach, how does an athlete recognize this drop in cognitive function in themselves? And what should they do when they start seeing this?
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
This one’s a lot harder to recognize, because at this point it’s more internal, right? It’s things I’m doing, as opposed to my interactions with other people, as I’m starting to slip on these little things. And so this is, again, where athletes need to be really cognitive. This is something they should be paying attention to. Hopefully they’ve had some conversations about the fact that they are pushing hard, or that physiologically, they’re doing something. And so these are things that they’re intentionally paying attention for that it’s taking me a little longer to do this, or if I’m I work a lot with students and with younger athletes, and if we’re not doing so well in those little homework checks and those little homework quizzes, or if we’re not following our normal patterns with school, those are some of the things that I have them paying attention for and talking to me about. Or it might be some conversations early on about what are some of the things they do at work that are normally not a big deal, and then me as a coach, checking in on those or asking them to think about how they might self check on those things?
Grant Holicky
Yeah, I think one of the things that that I tend to observe on this is, I’ll go back to the athletes and they’re saying, Well, I was really off at work today. Or I’ve even had athletes like, I like to give a complicated workout here and there. And I’ve had athletes go, I couldn’t follow the workout. I had no idea what was going on, and I wrote it with a very simple pattern in mind, right? We went 30 seconds, we went a minute, we went 90 seconds, we went two minutes, and we went back down. This is something that I’ve watched them follow that pattern in the past, and I’ll tend to go, how’s your sleep? Oh, my sleep’s really good. How’s your food? My food’s been really good. My recovery has been really good. But I’m off, and it’s almost one of those things of it’s the same kind of day you would have if you went and had a late night, really late night, got four hours of sleep and somebody asked you to get up and function. You’re not functioning very well. You’re a little slow on the uptake. And
Trevor Connor
I’m just going to throw one thing I did mention. There was a study that I read leading up to this. It’s called Impact of overtraining on cognitive function. And endurance athletes a systematic review, and they showed pretty clearly that, yes, there’s a decline in cognitive function when athletes are overreached or over trained. But a test they in particular looked at was the Stroop test. So that’s that test where they’ll show you the word red, but it’s colored green, and then they ask you to identify what color the letters are in, not the right not the actual word, and it’s how quickly you get there and how many mistakes you make. And that’s an easy test you can find online that can help you, and they do see decreases in reaction time and more mistakes. And interestingly, though, they didn’t explain exactly how they did show that the Stroop test could differentiate between people who are just overreached and people are starting to over train. Well,
Grant Holicky
I think it’s important to do a baseline first, because some of us can’t do that test, no matter what
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
an even easier measure sometimes in that conversation is when you can’t make a decision, like you find yourself just standing there staring at the stuff on the shelf, going, this isn’t a big deal. Why can’t I figure this out? You just can’t process things. It’s just too much. And so those little daily decisions, what toothpaste do I pick? When that’s a big challenge that could be something to sort of pay attention to, if the situation is one more watching.
Trevor Connor
I remember going to the grocery store after a six day training camp and looking at the apples and being like, do I want the Empire apples or the Fuji? I just don’t know.
Grant Holicky
That’s why you need to be in Europe. Just go to Lidl. Then you don’t get a choice, right? They only have one type of Apple done. Get out the store. That’s why it’s built that way. It’s built for German cycles.
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
That goes back to your point earlier, though. I mean, I know we’re joking about it, but that was your point earlier with the guys with the 100 miles a day, yep, when all that other stuff is being taken care of, it’s easier. And so it’s just that loading on that makes us non functional in our daily life, and that’s where we’re getting into trouble. So
Trevor Connor
I will give a serious example of that that people could potentially use, one of the ways I’ve noticed, because I saw this when I was doing training camps when I’m starting to get fatigued, my girlfriend, she’s always texting me, hey, what do you want to do for dinner? What sort of food do you want? And normally it’s a quick conversation. When I am fatigued, she’ll text me, you know, what do you want to do for dinner? I’ll be like, leave me alone. Just figure it out. It just feels overwhelming Well,
Grant Holicky
and what you’re going to see in here is some of the same things that people have when they just have increased cognitive load and fatigue due to increased cognitive load, when we’re talking to our partner after their three hard days of work and we ask them what they want to do for dinner, they don’t have an answer for us, and we have to provide that answer. And you know, we’ve made that comparison, that physical fatigue and mental fatigue are comparable, and a lot of ways, they’re not, and we’ve talked about that, but they are in some ways. The symptoms of those things can be very similar, and that’s what we’re talking about with decreased cognitive load. And then, Trevor, to your point. Kristen, to yours. I just can’t right now. I just can’t do this. And I think this is a nice segue, because it starts to go into this next phase that we’ll tend to talk about, because that decreased cognitive function can, in and of itself, lead to a degree of stress and lead to a degree of anxiety in the athlete, because they’re recognizing this. And it’s almost that we get to this point when we physiologically and we’re over trained or overreached, where we start to see a decrease in performance, which stresses athletes out, and athletes then kind of react, a lot of athletes react with, oh, no, I’ve lost fitness. I need to train harder. And we’re creating this feedback loop of, not only do we have a physiological load, we have a cognitive load, and we’re really starting to spin this stress and anxiety up together. To
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
me, that’s one of the things that’s most concerning as a coach, because if it’s my soccer players and my hockey players, that inability to make a good decision might just mean that they don’t get a good pass off, they’re likely to get hurt, but not the same way my cyclists, whether they be roadies or mountain bikers or gravel folks, the inability to make the kind of decision making that they need to do quickly from a safety perspective when they’re on the road or on the trail, that starts to become really concerning. And when they dig that hole a little deeper and all of a sudden they’re not reacting to the car fast enough or to the drop fast enough, or to the route fast enough, I start to get really worried about our ability to stay safe in our training environment.
Trevor Connor
No, I think you make a really good point that any athletes who are intentionally doing a fatigue block. Pick what you do towards the end of that block carefully. Don’t be riding on really busy roads. Don’t do some technical descent or some technical trail when you’re getting towards the end of that fatigue block, pick routes and rides that require no skills.
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
There’s something else really challenging about this for athletes that’s, I think, important to recognize, is that when we train, especially when we’re training really competitively, whether we’re recreational, elite or competitive elite athletes. In this space, we are intentionally overriding all the systems that tell us to slow down and back off, because that’s what it takes to train and push the next level. And so the very thing that we have trained into athletes and pushed and honed. And develop can start to become that big Achilles heel. And so the finer you’re trying to put a point on that pencil, you know, the higher you’re trying to take your performance, the more you have a responsibility to pay just as much attention to your recovery, to watch for these signs and markers. It’s a very fine line as you get up there. And so know that you it’s going to take you really far that you can push it through, but the really good athletes know when to also pull it back.
Trevor Connor
So I think this is a good point to segue, because grant you already brought this up. Another side of this is stress, anxiety and depression. So let’s talk to that for a minute. Yeah,
Grant Holicky
I think that some of these things can loop on themselves, and one of the things that we know as a physiological marker of overreaching and overtraining is a lot of athletes will have trouble sleeping. And what we’re talking about here in terms of some of that stress and anxiety is that that stress and anxiety may also, in itself, lead to a struggle for athletes to sleep, trouble falling asleep, waking up in the middle of the night, pondering things, stressing about things, you know, Oh no, I’m not in a good place, or I’m not feeling super well. Those things tend to compound, and all those symptoms of stress and anxiety in and of themselves, struggle with sleeping, struggle with eating, struggle with recovering, are gonna feedback this in a negative way, they’re going to loop this in a negative way. So it’s something that we have to be aware of in terms of breaking that cycle, and they can be hard to recognize. It’s really hot and bolder right now, I’m in a training block. I don’t find anything appetizing to eat at two in the afternoon. I just am not hungry, so I’m having to force myself to eat so that can be easily confused with just Man, it’s hot out, and I don’t have an appetite right now. But when it becomes global instead of acute, when it becomes dinner and the next day and it’s breakfast and I’m really struggling to sleep after an easy day, this is when I think we really have to get our ears up a little bit and pay attention to this.
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
The Depression side, is the piece that I think concerns me the most. When we start thinking about that, when someone starts to feel that lack of motivation to do things, we’re starting to tip towards burnout, when they’re starting to feel just that sense of heaviness that comes with depression. And for a lot of the athletes I’ve worked with, when they’re starting to feel that way, it goes right to what Grant was talking about, before they start to double down. I must be failing. I must be doing this wrong. I have to work harder. And they can’t see the forest for the trees. And this becomes especially concerning for athletes who may have some challenges with mental health, or may have some other concerns and issues in that space, that training can set off a cycle that can be hard to pull back from. And so knowing what that looks like, and knowing what that means, and knowing what some of those signs are. Again, just that self monitoring we talked about right at the beginning becomes so important of and it’s where those tools, again, can start to track and catch things that you might not see. The Kelman scale the rescue, which is a three day monitoring tool that lets you and there’s apps for it, as well as some paper versions. There’s a really long 76 item version, and then there’s some ones that have been made much shorter on that. And just taking those simple questions just about in the last three days, how have I felt, kind of thing, and then looking for those trends over time can really help somebody see, oh, wow. I guess I have been feeling this way, or I guess I have tips there. There’s some great studies that they did where they looked at folks at National Camp and were able to show with rowing those trends that allowed for a little more probing and questioning and little tweaks, whether it be enhancing recovery side of things, or decreasing training side of things, to pull back from the edge before the depressive episode became something because with depression, we know there’s hormonal changes in the brain that impact your psychology, and so those cycles can be really hard to break once we’ve gotten the biology involved.
Grant Holicky
This is one of the main reasons I wanted to do this episode. Like I said, I did some research and some writing on over training and depression when I was in grad school, and it’s really important for coaches to kind of take note of those specific phrases. And one of the phrases that has come up for various reasons, and it’s I’m just sad. I don’t know why. I’m just a little slow, and I wake up in the morning and I’m just sad. And to me, that word, or something similar to that, is a huge trigger that makes me go, oh, wow, we need to really reevaluate some things. And I think it’s important that people recognize this, because, as Dr dieffenbach noted, when the biology gets involved, it’s not a simple fix, it’s not a quick fix. You’ve gone over the edge, and it’s going to take a whole bunch of work, and in the end, there may be some really good benefits coming out of that, because a lot of cases, we have athletes that’ll go into therapy in that state, and they haven’t done that before, they come out as a better athlete. They’re much better for it. But once we get into the biological piece of this, it is very difficult get out of it. And as we both noted, most athletes reaction to. At this is they double down on training, or they double down on what they’re doing outside of training, and they really start working harder, and that’s dangerous. It’s very important to note that depression, due to overtraining, and for that matter, a concussion, will present exactly like depression. It is not its own breed, or it’s not this a horrible way to put it, but depression light, it is the same thing. We are dealing with the same issues and the same triggers and the same feelings back from the athlete, both emotionally and physically. Is really important for coaches and athletes to recognize that depression will also present physically. You feel certain ways when you are in a depressive state, and these are really important things to recognize.
Trevor Connor
Very quick thing I’m going to add. Something I read that really caught my attention was the fact that the age range at which people tend to be most focused on sports is the same age range that you are the most likely to be diagnosed with anxiety or depression. So it’s also important, if you are an athlete and you’re experiencing this, not to just say, Oh, it’s just training, because it might be more than
Grant Holicky
that. Well, and there’s a lot of the same triggers. There’s a lot of the same things that go on in sport, that go on in life in those same age groups, in terms of social interactions, in terms of how you feel about yourself from a success, failure point of view, there’s a lot of those same things that happen in life, that are happening even sometimes more specifically, in a sport environment. So sport can accelerate these things. And as we move forward and we start to talk about burnout, we’re starting to hear about burnout in terms of everybody’s lives, not just athletes lives. We’re watching it be referred to for workers in the work population, they’re starting to burn out. This is something we’ve watched, noted. It’s got a hard place in the literature for sports psychology and psychology in general, from sport, we’ve been seeing burnout in sport for decades, and we’ve talked about it for decades. Now we’re seeing it come over into life. So I think in a lot of cases, sport magnifies some of these things. So
Trevor Connor
let’s jump over there, because that was the final thing in your list that is kind of a culmination of all these different psychological factors that you see come into play with overtraining and overreach, but motivation and burnout. I mean, that’s ultimately where psychologically you’re going to end up if you are pushing overreach or overtraining.
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
Yeah, there’s actually two things. I mean, you’re going to get potentially into some of the physio, and we’re not talking about that today, but just acknowledge the continuum, right? You’re going to physiologically get into a place where we could have some injuries and issues that are going to happen from that perspective. And then when we get to the psychological side, if you’ve been lucky enough not to get an injury or an overuse issue going on, you’re headed down that road of some sort of psychological crash in the form of the burnout or something in that space. And we do have space of there’s burnout and there’s withdrawal. You have the I just need to get away from this. I can’t do this anymore, and I’m leaving this space, but the recognition that someone can be burned out and still stay in the space. But it’s miserable. It’s I have to be here. I don’t know how to get out of it. And I often find athletes who kind of get into that space are in this sort of love hate relationship, right? It almost becomes a bit of an abusive self relationship with sport, where it’s given them so much, it’s helped so much, it’s done amazing things, and now they’ve tipped over into this burnout space, and it makes them miserable. It’s actually hurting them, but they also know the good that it can bring, and they can’t quite get off that seesaw, and so it can become a really detrimental and that’s where we talked about at the very beginning, when people get trapped for a long period of time before we see what’s going on and are able to pull them out and help them get healthy again.
Grant Holicky
That’s a great example, and it’s a great thing to note about burnout. You know, I have this conversation and even borderline argument with parents a lot, and a lot of it came from my old profession in working with swimmers. And I can’t tell you how many times I was told swimming is a burnout sport, and I used to respond and say, No, there’s no burnout sports. There’s burnout situations, there’s burnout coaches, there’s burnout programs, there’s burnout athletes, but there’s not necessarily a burnout sport. Some sports are harder than others. They have a solitary piece to them. They have a spotlight piece to them. You’re the only one that people are looking at when you race things like that. But it’s such an interesting thing to note regarding burnout that we are going to watch people fight burnout with every fiber of their being. No, I have to continue to train. I have to continue to do this. How do you feel about the sport? I hate it right now. I don’t like it. I’m miserable. It makes me feel bad about myself, but I have to keep training, getting that person to back off. Getting that person to change training styles is one of the hardest things you will do as a coach. So much of their self worth is sometimes tied up in how good of a trainer they are, how good of that athlete they are at that sport, and separating those things. It’s one of the things that can lead to burnout. It’s one of the things that we really are trying to separate is an athlete’s identity from their sport identity, because that’s a really good marker of when somebody’s gonna get burned out. If they define themselves by the sport, there’s a good chance they’ll burn out. So that separation becomes really important as we go through this too, and it’s something important to notice.
Trevor Connor
Let’s hear again from Adam Meyerson and his thoughts and how to stay motivated. I think
Adam Meyerson
it’s important to remember that whatever level you are doing the sport at, you’re doing it because you love bike racing. And even as a professional, there are sometimes days where it’s hard to get out the door, and that’s okay. But if you start dreading what you’re doing, and you stop looking forward to the thing that you love most, that is a real big red flag, training for racing at whatever level should be your escape. It should be the thing that you want to do more than anything else, and it requires that passion. It’s why there’s so much turnover in the sport. It’s not an easy sport at any level, so I always will dig deeper or take that as a very big red flag when an athlete’s just not excited and recovery can be assigned until that excitement comes back, until you catch yourself accidentally going hard up hills and are happy to go out the door and look forward to being on your bike as the escape from all of the other obligations and responsibilities you have.
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Trevor Connor
So we just talked about burnout. But what about the motivation side? What’s the impact of over training and overreach
Grant Holicky
there? I think we see a real drop in motivation. And we watch athletes who love the sport, who love training, who love the grind, who love those things, start talking about I was really struggling to get on the bike today. I was really struggling to do my workout today. I was really struggling to even just want to fight to hit the marks. I think we watch it a lot in racing. No, I just I wasn’t there. Man, our competency drops, our relatedness drops because our social piece of the puzzle isn’t quite as good, and our autonomy goes all haywire because we don’t feel like we’re in control of what’s going on, because we’re tired all the time, or we’re cognitively not as good, or all these things start to slip. So we watch the markers for motivation, or the things that drive motivation start to slip, so we’re not really shocked that we see
Trevor Connor
motivation slip. So Dr Diep muck, I’ve got a question for you that I’ve been really interested in asking before we move on to the practical side. We just talked about motivation, depression, stress, decrease in cognitive function and irritability. I want to ask the chicken or the egg question. Are those things just symptoms of overtraining, or can they also be one of the contributors to overtraining?
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
Well, I give you a really academic answer, and I’ll say yes, right? Because it’s both ways. It’s definitely something that’s happening they can sort of be a chicken or an egg. So it can definitely be something where the athletes, they’re getting into a space of overreaching. They’re tired, they’re fatigued, their motivation starts to wane, and then they get further and further down into the overtraining side, and they’re feeling that way. And certainly becomes sort of that cyclical thing that we’ve been talking about, where it’s just hard to break out of that cycle. And sadly, a lot of times, the athletes who come to me to talk from a sports psychology perspective, it’s, oh, my motivation is not where it should be, and I’d like to be better. And one of the things that we often have to dig on and sort of look at is this actually may be what’s going on, but they’ve been surviving that way for quite a while, until they finally come to the recognition that they’re not loving it anymore. And sadly, for some people, that means they decide they’re not going to do it anymore, and just because it’s gotten to a place where they can’t figure out how to bring it
Grant Holicky
back, and when they’re in that place, they need so much love, so much understanding, so much support to allow them some of that space. Yes. And one of the things that I’ve done with swimmers in this place and with cyclists in this place is, let’s keep you on the bike or in the water, but let’s eliminate all the pressures. Let’s not make this a competitive environment anymore. Let’s make this a social and enjoyable environment now and see what happens. We talked about it with the burnout piece that is so hard with a lot of athletes, especially as you noted Dr dieffenbach, who have been in it for years. We’re not talking about months, we’re talking about years. That it’s really hard to separate those two things. They’re not mutually exclusive. And it goes
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
back to that interesting conversation we had, too about how hard it is to replicate this, because you asked that question about which came first, chicken or egg if someone’s struggling with performance and some of those types of things, and so they’re having issues. They don’t feel good about themselves. They don’t feel good about what’s going on the bike or going on in whatever sport they’re doing. And now, all of a sudden, because of that, they decide to push harder and harder. Now the motivation challenges that they’re having because of other external forces can drive pushing too hard and overreaching too far, and getting back into that over training from the egg side, if you will. Since we were talking about the chicken
Trevor Connor
or egg so at the time we have left, I would love to dive a little bit into the practical side of, how do athletes see them this in themselves? How do they recognize these psychological sides, and then what can they do about it? And you know, I’ve shared a couple hopefully somewhat humorous stories about myself when I was feeling pretty cooked. And in retrospect, they’re funny just seeing how much of a mess I was, and I could tell 100 more of those stories, but at the time, it was not funny. At the time, it was hard to see. Yeah, you know, when I was stressing about which apples to buy at the time, that was a real issue.
Grant Holicky
I was really stressed. So how do
Trevor Connor
athletes, how can they step back and see this in themselves, and then what can they do about
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
it? I think the biggest thing for athletes, how do they see themselves, is to start to get into the habit of keeping good notes about your training, whether it’s as simple as a couple of little pictures that you’re filling in the little colors, or you’re jotting down a little bit about how you’re feeling, get in the habit of thinking about what’s going on in your training and how you’re feeling, so that you can start to look for patterns, because you’re the best indicator of your patterns of any tool that you have.
Grant Holicky
Yeah, that is the answer. I think we put so much into training, we put so much into what we’re doing with our training. We log so much of our training, but we don’t always go back and look for patterns in our training, whether that’s physiologically or psychologically. We’re not looking for patterns. When I did this type of workout, I was super successful. When I did this type of workout stacked on one another, I started to fall apart. And this is even one of those dangers of where we get with data. I said it to an athlete literally early this morning, my CTL right now is exactly the same as it was 365 days ago, but I guarantee you I am not the same athlete right now that I was 365 days ago for a variety of reasons. And so I think it’s really important that we take those notes, and we’re kind of making those observations along the way, because they’re really important. They tell us so much, and they tell our coaches so much.
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
And grant, if I could just add onto that, athletes today more so than ever before, right? They keep so many different pieces of metrics, but they’re all being gathered from biometric perspectives, making sure you’re also taking notes about how you are feeling. Not just, oh, my legs felt fresh or my legs felt tired, but how did you feel? You know, how are relationships taking stock of those things that are on a regular basis took me like you were saying earlier. You know, how long to get work done or get homework done, the little pieces, making notes about those things, so that you have data beyond just heart rate and power,
Grant Holicky
right? I think it’s funny. It’s our sport doesn’t even open a door to the mental, cognitive, psychological pieces, right? Because we don’t even ask somebody how their legs feel. We’re told, I had the good legs or I had bad legs, we get these black and white answers on things that it’s not measurable, right? Like, how did you feel? Well, I felt really tired. Okay, there could be a million reasons that we feel tired, and only a couple of those are physiological, or, let me rephrase, only a couple of those are sports specific. So many of those are outside of sports, sleep, food, recovery, mood, anxiety, stress, they all have distinct repercussions in how we feel.
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
You know, an example to that. A number of years ago, I had an athlete that I was coaching at the time, and she was she had just gotten one of those new rings that kept the sleep data for her, and we had about a two or three period where she was getting increasingly uptight and grouchy and frustrated, and yet nothing else was indicating that we were overtraining, and I was having trouble figuring this out. And finally, I started asking some questions, and she told me about this ring she got, and I hadn’t known it. It wasn’t something that was uploading into training piece at the time, so I didn’t know she had this data. And she said. Like, I can’t seem to figure this out. Nothing I do is making my sleep better, and I’m sleeping terrible. And so I started asking some more questions, and the data from the ring was telling her her sleep was terrible, but when I was asking her sleep was it didn’t line up. And so she was trusting the data from this little metric thing over the fact that she was waking feeling well rested and all these other things. So going back to our chicken or egg, she was working herself into a state where she was risking getting over trained because she wasn’t listening to her body the way she needed to be, and it was causing her to make all kinds of pushes and changes and adjustments that they weren’t making any sense, but because, again, she wasn’t developing a good sense of where she was. So
Trevor Connor
I guess last question that I have for you is, once you’ve identified this, how do you address it? Do you address it first, physiologically or psychologically?
Grant Holicky
So my gut would be, is that when we’re in an overreach place, and this goes back to what Dr dieffenbach said about preparing athletes to be in overreach and talking about some of the symptoms that may come up. This is where I tend to try address it a little bit from a psychological point of view. Okay, we’re pretty fatigued. We may see a down turn in performance, just a little bit. Yeah, I’m grouchy at home. I tend to take athletes through a psychological or mental strength piece to try to help them through that phase, while at the same time, documenting it all in my head, and kind of noting where are we so that we don’t tip over when we go into over training, and when I have an athlete that’s no overtraining, we have to rest. And the response always is, it’s time to rest. Physiologically. We need to take a break. We need to shut things down. And that may be three days, that may be a week, that may be three weeks, depending on where we are, but we’ve got to shut it down. And we’ve got to shut it down until we start to see a psychological rebound.
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
You know, there’s always a piece of me that says it depends, and it’s going to depend a lot on whether or not this is a surprise to me as a coach, or is this something that I was monitoring and figuring we might have a chance, like, if someone all of a sudden hits a place where I think they’re over training and I didn’t anticipate that being something that was likely to happen, then my first reaction is always going to be, okay. We’ve got to back off right away, because there’s something unknown here that I can’t figure out what’s going on, whereas, if it’s something where I kind of expected us to get there, I might start a little more on the psychological side of how do we help address what’s going on? To see if we can’t pull this overreach out just a little further and then turn it around. But yet, there’s something there about when it hits you as a coach, out of the blue, definitely time to back off right away with the physical training.
Trevor Connor
Sometimes the best solutions are the easiest. Here’s Alexi Vermeil in giving the simplest and most powerful solution for when we start to get mentally fatigued.
Alexey Vermeulen
I’m probably the last person to talk to about this, because the glass is always half full. For me, when you start feeling tired multiple days in a row, I don’t know why you don’t stop riding your bike. To me, that’s the biggest thing. There’s times, even as a professional athlete, where I have a job to do and focus on, I will call my coach and we’ll have a conversation. I will take two steps back. I think digging that hole is a lot of times this place we’re in the world that says train harder, stronger, earlier every day, which just is not the case for most of us. So I think mentally, it’s just about reminding yourself that you have to do these days, to do the hard disk, and that enjoying that time off is what it is to be a highly functioning athlete?
Trevor Connor
Well, I think it’s time to wrap things up. Time to move on to our take homes before I get there, though, we do have a question for the forum, and that’s, have you had time in your past where training too hard put you in a poor mental state? What was it like, and what did you do about it? So we’ll put that up in the forum. If you’d like to give us your answer, go to forums.fasttalklabs.com, so Dr dieffenbach, first time in the show, we finish out with what we call our take homes, which is basically you have a minute to summarize what you think is the most important thing for our listeners to take away from this episode. And with that said, I think I’m going to give you the final word today. So grant you want to go first. Sure. What
Grant Holicky
I think is just so important about this is that so many of the things that we refer to as the soft side of sport, not only can they be the quintessential trigger for us to respond and go, Oh, wow, we’re in overtraining or overreaching, but also they’re so valuable in how we recognize and play with our training cycles. And what I mean by that is that we can really use our psychological responses, our mood states, the places we are, to recognize where we are in a cycle when we need to back off, when we can stay on the gas for just a little bit longer. All of those things, there’s just so much information that you as an athlete can glean from it, and coaches can glean from it. And then the other piece that I want to point out, and I’ve said it before, but I’m going to reiterate it, because I think mental health for athletes is such an important piece of a puzzle. How. All over training and overreaching can present psychologically, with the culmination, often being burnout or depression. This is something that we all need to recognize, and all need to be very aware of as coaches and athletes, because when we get to that point, if it does get to that point where we’re in a burnout state or in a depressive state, this doesn’t just upend a season. It can upend a career, and it can upend somebody’s joy in sport completely and totally. So it’s such an important piece of the puzzle, and it’s something that we really need to increase awareness about and continue to talk about.
Trevor Connor
Mine’s a simple one, and it’s kind of related to one of my favorite expressions, which is nobody ever wins an argument, because when people are arguing, even if somebody recognizes that they’ve lost the argument, they will continue to argue to death. And I am aware of this, yet when I get into an argument with somebody, I’m like, I must now win it, and we’ll keep arguing. And I see something similar here. It’s very easy right now to stand back and talk about the psychological side and all the ways to see this, and it’s very clear, well, you’re depressed, you’re stressed, you’re irritable, you’re having cognitive function issues that should all be easy to identify, but my take home is when you’re in the middle of it, no, it’s not. And you will come up with every excuse under the sun to say, no, that’s not what’s going on. I’m fine. The fact that I almost went through a red light because I couldn’t process the difference between a red light and a green light doesn’t mean anything. And it’s really important as an athlete to be able to step back and say, yep, all those signs are there. It’s time to take a rest with that. Dr dieffenbach, what’s your take home? What’s your final thought here?
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
You’ve got me spinning on you never win an argument as somebody who has a 14 year old at home that is hitting very close right now. So you sidetracked me. What I would sort of leave people with is sort of weaving together something that both of you have said is coming to this centerpiece of when you’re going to pursue something and you’re trying to go for your peak personal performance. You know, like we do in any of our training environments, we tend to pride ourselves on how hard we can push and how hard we can go, and how much we know our numbers and all those types of things, because that’s what we’re measuring things by. But if you really want to hit that mark and really want to get to that space where you are optimizing what your potential is, you have to become just as much of a student of and a scientist of your own self awareness and your own feelings and what’s going on in those spaces, so you can balance out the self care and the recovery just as much as you’re pushing the numbers and pushing the training plan. And so I would just leave people with an idea of if you really want to master your performance, you have to be dedicating just as much energy and time to both sides of the equation and monitoring and paying attention to those things.
Trevor Connor
Great place to leave it. So Dr dieffenbach, really happy we finally got you on the show. Thanks for being part of this. It was a real pleasure talking with
Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach
you. Well, the pleasure is all mine. Thank you guys. Always enjoy hanging out with you,
Trevor Connor
too. That was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions Express and fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever prefer to find your favorite podcast. Don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube as always, be sure to leave us a radio and a review. To learn more about this episode, from show notes to References, visit us@fasttalklabs.com and to join the conversation on our forums. Go to forums.fasttalklabs.com for Dr Kristen dieffenbach, Adam Meyerson, Alexi Vermeulen and grant holicky. I’m Trevor Connor, thanks for listening. You.
