Overtraining Syndrome with Corrine Malcolm⎮KoopCast Episode 6

what's going on trail runners i hope you are all well i hope your week's going good hope training's going well this week welcome to another episode of the KoopCast i am really excited about this episode i had a lot of fun with it i was recently in san francisco california and decided to stop by and go see my good friend karen malcolm check her new place out and more importantly talk to her a little bit about something that is extremely misunderstood in coaching and by athletes and that's this concept of overtraining or overtraining syndrome and the the conversation that we had was actually is both hilarious and illuminating at the same time we came up with this bizarre train stop analogy that i actually think a lot of people are going to uh going to actually resonate with and i'm going to use it in an article or in some other interview in the future i am sure of but we got together and we wanted to really dissect uh this topic because i feel that it's just really confusing and it's mainly confusing because i don't think we use the right terminology we use this terminology overtraining to describe what happens to athletes uh when they have reached a level at which they just can't perform anymore and their performances might actually go

down and all too often the the things that are causal in that whole equation is not the training itself a lot of times they're just under recovered or overstressed in other areas yet we use this blanket term overtraining to connotate the fact that they're just training too much and i think a lot of times we uh we actually miss the mark on that one in fact um whenever i reach out to a lot of the uh kind of high performance experts uh in the united states and around the world they can only point to they can only point to very few examples of elite athletes that they work with every year that are truly overtrained meaning they are doing too much training and it is causing a negative impact on their health and kind of the outcomes of their performance yet we continue to call this thing overtraining or overtraining syndrome for whatever reason and so corinne and i we um we kick that topic around i think this uh conversation will be really enlightening it's also pretty fun pretty fun to listen to as you guys can tell um uh corinne and i uh we uh we have a great working relationship she's one of our cts coaches and somebody that i have a tremendous amount of respect for her in the work that she does with their athletes and also just the knowledge game that she brings to the table super smart had a fun time with this conversation uh in an effort of full disclosure there is some cussing there's some four

letter words in this if you've got kids in the car or if your ears just can't take the one off four letter word you have been forewarned it's really not that bad you guys anyway without further ado here is my conversation with cts coach corinne malcolm already starts right on cue corinne i'm gonna i'm going to uh set up an athlete scenario for you and i'm gonna want you to tell me based on the information that i give you and in your professional opinion is this athlete over trained okay okay so the athlete is not sleeping enough they're waking up in the middle of night with sweats they cannot complete their workouts particularly the hard workouts they're consistently in a grumpy mood their normal training heart rate is high and the heart rate that they can achieve when they're trying to do a hard workout is depressed they don't want to eat and they feel like they're always getting sick is that athlete over trained probably probably more than likely you're covering a lot of bases there mood disturbances um physiological kind of fallout with heart rate stuff is a really good indicator of the nervous system functioning

properly or not it's kind of a that's a maladaption to exercise um inadequate sleep or sleep that's becoming interrupted more frequently is huge um so all things considered yes you'd want to talk to that athlete about like how long it's been going on for um and rule out any other potential medical conditions that could imitate overtraining so here here's the confounding piece of that that we can start to have a dialogue around what within that tells you that they are training too much i.e over training well that's the thing like that is the thing overtraining is is an end point right they're not even completing their workouts at this point correct and the indy like the one of the biggest things when we look for fatigue would be heart rate disturbances but that being said you're not actively overtraining right you're you get to be overtrained so you would say that they have overtrained and based on them doing too much training the scenario that i described that i described tells you that they've done too much training i would say that they are likely beyond what we would call non-functional overreach and in a state of being overtrained overtrained in the colloquial sense or in the technical scientific sense in the technical scientific sense they have reached a state of being

overtrained you don't have to physically do too much training to be overtrained but given their symptoms as long as all other medical conditions can be ruled out anemia hypothyroidism um like medically low cortisol things that would be caused by something else that is like acting as overtraining as long as all those things are ruled out including like anemia then yeah you could probably say that this athlete is overtrained particularly if they don't respond to just a short period of rest yeah so but here's what i'm trying to set up here is that there's a difference between overtraining syndrome and being overtrained overtrained means the training is too much overtraining syndrome describes the constellation of variables that ultimately manifest themselves in the athlete description that i was just talking about yeah i mean i would agree with that i would say that that's kind of where i think as a community we're trying to differentiate terminology right right like i would prefer to say that that athlete was non-functionally overreached versus some like saying like overtrained or under recovered would be like maybe a more appropriate like title for it what would if you could like wave your little corinne magic wand and like give it the terminology that you think is correct what would you i think you call it i think

you can actively i think you can actively under recover but i think that overtraining syndrome like there shouldn't be another phrase that is similar like overtraining syndrome is the end point and this person is in the end point they they have reached their final destination on their training journey and they are now like in full ots like yeah why can't we just say they're fucked i mean i would prefer that because that would be a whole lot more because so when when this initially came out right when we started calling when we started saying okay athletes are overtraining right i remember sitting down with a lot of coaches and we were all consistently confused because the training component of it is not what was necessarily over there was a lot of it there's a lot of training you know sometimes 20 25 30 hours a week for a runner or even a multi-sport type of athlete but that wasn't the sole thing that was causing the either the the scenario that i kind of set this whole thing up with or anything else that kind of emanates from that right they can't do their workouts they're underperforming they experience you know two to three underperforming chronic underperformance they spend you know two to three weeks just in the whole recovering the training wasn't necessarily the sole component of that and so as coaches what was happening is we were looking at that going okay well if it's overtraining and we remove the training there's there therefore is no overtraining so the athlete should therefore magically be better and that wasn't necessarily the case and so my my my my contention with that is

that when we when we colloquial colloquially say that athletes are overtrained it's not a very good description in many cases of the situation at hand because training isn't the only thing that's causing all of these negative outcomes yeah i think people misuse it as being like an active tense i think we've gotten to a place as a community where we've been able to separate the two things and because i've personally i think it's really hard to overtrain but i think it's almost impossible yeah it's i mean i'm a person who's i i've trained 30 plus hours a week before and you can do that and be and be fine and be healthy the issue with athletes there is that they are generally under recovering there's inadequate recovery in order for them to compensate from the training load plus maybe they've got a stressful job or they've got a stressful relationship or there is some other factor that is adding stress that is not physical stress but your body doesn't know the difference between physical stress emotional stress mental stress and so i think what needs to change as far as us having a conversation about ots and like the overarching you know way we look at it is kind of navigating those terms in a way where everyone's like in agreement yeah the term that that is coming up more often now is non-functional overreaching so they're not even they're not

even getting into the training component at all right and i think that that's actually really enlightening on from the way that the vocabulary has evolved from when we initially started describing this to where it is now where there's a much better recognition of just what you mentioned all of the other constellations of variables that exist so that this non-functional overreaching state right athletes cooked and they're not getting any better from the training that they have done which that's what that's what non-functional overreaching is describing there's all these other things that are at play that training is just one component of all of those yep yeah 100 and i think that it helps to look at it as a spectrum right absolutely there's there's healthy there's a healthy a healthy training load and then we have to recover from that training load and generally that's considered like functional overreach we want we want to overreach correct and then we bring you back right we we step up to that imaginary line between like too little and too much and then we bring you back and then you step to the line or maybe over it and then you get brought back a training camp a peak a peak volume week all these things would be like a functional overreach as long as it's paired with adequate recovery if you add additional outside stress for a long period of time or continuing to have that physical stress without adequate recovery then you step like further down the spectrum into non-functional overreaching and if you stay there for a very long time without without rest without

complete rest to kind of reset the system then we can get to that like we're going to call it the like the final stop that the train goes to end of the line yeah ots like overtraining syndrome is like the end point i think that it's okay that that term still exists as long as it functions within that spectrum where we kind of have like the the healthy functional overreach the like oh no we've made some errors but we can still correct if it addressed properly non-functional overreach with a combination of a lot of training not enough rest and other life shit essentially yeah other life shit which is important yeah yeah and then like if you go beyond that because you're hanging out there for way too long then you are at this other place and it's not i think you can actively be non-functional overreaching but the end of the line end of the spectrum is not it's not a verb anymore like you're just there so let's go through the whole spectrum from there's a lot of hand gestures in this podcast that no one can see by the way my hands are spread out way wide let's go through this whole spectrum from sedentary to training to functional overreaching all the way down the line and let's kind of the first few are going to be easy to explain but let's like just set the boundaries right of what this whole continuum is because that's what's really important for athletes that are trying to really make sense out of all of this convoluted terminology that keeps switching around is a what does it all mean and then b what do i do

about it so let's take the whole spectrum and explain what each stop on the on the train since that's your analogy each stop on the train right train route actually means starting from sedentary sedentary means you're not doing anything yeah in fact it would be from an athletic standpoint it'd be like too little stimulus to create positive adaptation right that's too little right and that can actually happen goldilocks right right so you have an athlete that's just they're they're they're probably fitter right from from a health perspective yeah than they were if they were just sedentary but certainly there's not a meaningful training adaptation there yeah maybe and and i think there's probably a functional time of year for that right like let's think of like off season or something else where you're not maybe making like meaningful physiological changes besides like allowing your body extra rest or something or you know you're brand new to running or i don't know you've you're mentally exhausted and you take 12 months off i've got plenty of athletes 12 months i've got plenty of athletes who like have come into coaching being like i did this thing i garnered all the points i needed to garner in order to like you know qualify for UTMB or whatever it is i haven't run in 12 months like they are starting off from so that would look more like the i don't know if this is old or not because i haven't kept up with this recommendation too closely but the old acsm recommendation for cardiovascular health which is three days a week 20 minutes of cardiovascular activity is all you need to optimize your cardiovascular health that would be the exercising part of the train stop yeah okay so let's move into

training we're moving into a normal athlete this is this is where most of the most of the listeners will identify with right so let's talk about just training normal training what are the boundaries of that that's going to be like a typical training week those are going to be you know you're doing an intensity workout you're doing a long run if you're an ultra runner a marathon runner um so you've got endurance you've got some intensity you've got a rest day you've got recovery runs or spins or whatever you know your sport of choice is and so you're pairing right you're pairing little bits of stimulus but not like anything extra like extraordinary like nothing crazy with adequate rest because you're sleeping and you're eating and you're you know you're functioning as a human you're not short cutting there's no like magic pill life hack just training and after that period of time is the athlete better worse the same generally there's small improvements in a positive direction right because you're causing a little bit of a little bit of adaptation like you're like it's like a push it's a stimulus and then you recover and then you should recover to like above baseline and then that should like progressively move you like in a positive not always linear direction i like the way you put that small positive changes emphasize small right from the very get-go yeah okay so that's the first part of the train stop this analogy is gonna flub me the rest of the time that's the first train stop is training the next train stop is functional overreach okay describe a functional overreach so functional overreach a great example of it would be like a training camp you go and you're

going to do more training probably volume and or intensity than you normally do in a week or a weekend or three to you know three to four days i think they generally like a training camp situation would last anywhere up to two weeks and that's probably more like the elite level um being able to handle a functional overreach load for that long but for most of the like most individuals it's like a three-day weekend where you're doing more training over it or um maybe ultra runners using a back-to-back long run even would i think would fall into like a functional overreach because it's an atypical training stimulus so they need to have some concentrated recovery after that functional overreach period yeah yeah just like and like just like you need recovery after any training you definitely need recovery um after about a functional overreach and then what happens after that concentrated that concentrated recovery phase is the athlete better worse or the same generally better the goal is to be better right after you've recovered hence the name functional you're you're making actual positive adaptations to training okay so that's the functional overreach stop on the train route yes the next stop on our over training on our over training syndrome train train god is would be non-functional overreach okay describe what a non-functional overreach looks like so non-functional overreach would be kind of probably like ramping up too too quickly so just like loading

someone with volume with no with no adequate recovery it would be um going to a training camp or like having an a training weekend that's really big without the proper recovery afterwards so it's basically it's it could have been positive at one point in time but because it's not paired with adequate recovery and or you've done like a personal miscalculation or you're adding in outside stress and and therefore like suboptimal recovery a normal training load can become non-functional overreach so some component that of the overreach itself and over overreach is like the training that kind of sets it up some component of that is inhibiting the athlete from actually improving and that can that component can be as you mentioned external factors they don't get the right nutrition they don't get the right sleep there are other external stressors affecting the athlete or they just deliberately or maybe not so deliberately don't take a proper recovery phase after that overreaching component and so during this non-functional overreach where we might not even have an endpoint with that right yeah and that's kind of like the confusing part is that i think that when we talk about you know quote-unquote over training syndrome and athletes a lot of people probably actually fall into this non-functional overreaching category um there isn't necessarily like a super defined endpoint to be non-functionally overreached besides you know fatigue um mal like you're maladapting to training essentially so you're

going to start to see like funky heart rate stuff potentially but it's a performance decline right like we're looking for a decline in performance that can be training performance that can be racing performance that can be daily performance like not wanting to get out of bed that that is a decline in performance as a human so during so during this part during this train stop yeah during this train stop at this train stop it's a long train stop it's a long train stop at this train stop the athlete is either the same or more likely worse generally getting worse generally getting worse yeah and the confusing part for a lot of athletes is that when you're in this phase you just you can just feel out of shape and so instead of being like maybe i need rest we're count like we're counterintuitive right right now like instead of being like maybe if i rest for a couple days i'll get better it's like i'm out of shape so i need to train harder and so i feel like non-functional overreach can be kind of like this vicious cycle of not getting better and continuing to maladapt to training for various reasons and feeling out of shape and therefore just doing more yeah but if they're worse why don't we just call it maladapted i am not the like overlord of terminology we let someone do this this is where we are my wife the english teacher would be pulling her hair out right now yeah okay so we have non-functional overreaching where there's just too much there's not enough rest other things are contributing to it and the athlete is normally worse maybe just the same with a whole lot of training stress on on

their on their system but they certainly haven't gotten better they definitely aren't getting better like that that's why it's called non-functional right you're no longer functionally like i mean functionally overreaching doesn't seem like a great phrase either you're no longer the training you are doing be it your training stress or your life stress combined with training stress is no longer creating a functional adaptation so you you can't get better in this place you're gonna that's like a i wouldn't even define it as like a plateau though because you can i think that's probably just like not enough training generally speaking this is a place where you're going to eventually decline you're gonna have a decline in health you're gonna get sick more frequently the difference between like where non-functional overreach ends and overtraining syndrome like probably begins is just like a duration of non-functional overreach and it's kind of arbitrary like how like how long does it take to get better how long have you been experiencing a decline in performance is like generally the factor that like pushes you one way or the other okay so that's the next stop in our train journey the function the non-functional overreach train has left the station and is on its way to its next destination final destination which is overtraining syndrome and what does when the passenger steps off the train at the overtraining syndrome station what does it look like so i'm starting to like this analogy more and more now it's growing on you it's growing on so what is what is what is what is the passenger see when they step off the train so honestly it's

not that different from being like at the previous stop right non-functional overreaching you're you're fatigued you um are having mood disturbances potentially you're um we see anemia crop up here kind of chronic inflammation can be an issue these aren't dissimilar from non-functional overreach the difference is that generally speaking you have to have a decline in performance for at least a month um in non-functional overreach to then bump into what we call like the final destination of overtraining syndrome and this is a phase where i think too like this is where the athlete like goes to put their shoes on to go run and just sits there for an hour so they're they're not completing their workouts they can't i don't i think at this point they're not you know at this point generally speaking we see a real decline in um motivation potentially and and that can be confused with like being burnt out in a way but it's kind of it's the extreme it's the you're not necessarily even training anymore because you're not you're not getting out the door you're not completing your workouts you're um you're struggling with a lot of other stuff but generally it's defined as you know i feel like non-functional overreach and overtraining syndrome technically probably have like the exact same symptom list but it's a duration and symptoms that makes the difference and then ultimately the best way to kind of like figure some of that out too is forced rest and how long it takes for you to come back kind of it also can say oh you're probably non-functionally

overreached versus oh you're at the the end of the line all right so we've got this analogy now this train stop analogy we're gonna we're gonna come back to it and and really paint the picture of how do you make sure that you get off the train at the stops that you want to get off of which are the training one yeah which is totally fine yeah it's a good stop or the functional overreaching one right how do you make sure that your athletes that athletes that are listening to this out there get off at those two stops and don't stay on the train to the non-functional overreach or the overtraining syndrome um so we're gonna we're gonna discuss that later but i know that you have like a personal story with this yeah and so how about we just start out with that and tell your story with it and what part of the train stop analogy yeah where where did you go through and where did you miss and where did you end up yeah so i my um like story with overtraining syndrome doesn't come from running the sport that i'm now very actively involved in um i was a member of the u.s biathlon team so i skied in a circle with a with a rifle essentially for a number of years it's such a simplistic way to put that sport i love it i know it's great it gets right to the point i was a member of the u.s national team a young member of the u.s national team is probably an important part of that story didn't have a development team in place jumped into the sport got immediately thrown into the senior national team my teammates are 10 years older than me um so young chronologically and experience wise yes yeah and if i kind of look back at my

training style and motivation and that kind of stuff too i probably had coaches earlier on in my development as an athlete who did a really good job of holding me back i was an athlete who like needed to check the boxes needed to complete what was on the training plan for the week and if i didn't complete it was not necessarily a good person like i was not fun to be around type of type of deal and so i think i had coach good coaches early on who who knew that about me and knew that if they told me to take a rest day i was going to do it because they they told me to do it um i had very good stick-to-itiveness you know they told me to jump i said how how high as an athlete you'd be high on the grid scale yeah and so um falling into this you know kind of new environment as a young athlete on a senior level team you know we're trying to make the olympics there's world championship teams on the line um that's really stressful for for sure yeah right huge stress um i kind of just got thrown into the mix and so there was no kind of subjective or objective feedback for me as an athlete that seemed that mattered really like the only goal for me was to keep up like literally the only goal i was told was was to keep up was to like get closer to my teammates and so i was literally chasing a finish line that was continually like literally skiing away from me and so um that's that's that's really stressful and motivationally is really hard because you're you're trying to reach

a goal that keeps moving keeps shifting um and i accelerated really fast because of it initially so probably some functional overreach that was really positive initially like i got i got much better very quickly you know and there were probably some early instances in the first year being on the national team where maybe i got sick and so i had to like take like i had an easier week or i went home because we kind of had a break in a training plan and so that was an easier week and so i skated by in a way um for a long time with that and then it i could no longer skate by essentially and um it caught up with me and i would say that that is a point kind of where all of a sudden you're going from functionally overreaching to you know being really stagnant and moving into this non-functional overreach and i think i had every single symptom that we can find out in the world wide web that is listed associated with um like stereotypical what now we'd consider non-functional overreach and then eventually over training syndrome which are oh i was just rattle off i mean mood disturbances right chronically like chronically um depressed um actually like sought a psychologist and because i was so paranoid about our team like having we had a team psychologist and i was so paranoid that that would reflect poorly on me that i went to our sports med staff at lake placid and requested that i get a psychologist who was not associated with our team so i was assigned someone through

colorado springs um to be my sports psychologist because i felt like i was you know in a fishbowl like i was like being observed always right so i wanted someone else i wanted someone who wasn't a direct link to my team to talk to so i was depressed um i had you know super elevated heart rates when i was skiing easy and at the same time we'd go and do um we'd go do a hard session and i couldn't get my heart rate high enough um which is really frustrating that dichotomy is like hard for athletes that don't like keep track of this stuff to really wrap their heads around totally and so you could describe it as like easy efforts feeling way too hard and hard efforts just like not you're like so a marathon runner like you just wouldn't be hitting your splits consistently right something of that nature like you're coming up against a wall and maybe and maybe at some point you're pushing through that but it's a lot more draining i mean i would sit literally i would sit outside the training center trying to put my shoes on to go for like my shakeout run before strength workout and i would just sit there like i couldn't that's as far as i'd make it into my run um wasn't hungry couldn't sleep well um had chronic upper respiratory tract infections which is fairly common as well kind of when you're in this in this stage of stuff um because your immune system isn't working right and like chicken or the egg right like you're not like you've got depression you're not sleeping well your immune system's obviously not going to function perfectly so i'm chronically sick um yeah it was just kind of a funky a funky state of being well i think the

important thing to take from that well one of the important things to take from that is that it wasn't just the acute training load that got you into that state i mean you you mentioned the psychological stress of like always having to keep up with this ever moving finish line yeah and all of these other things that kind of go into the non-functional part of non-functional overreaching oh yeah like i was living in a very stressful environment my boyfriend and i at the time broke up like it was just not not a great environment to be in i was very isolated most of my teammates were from the east coast so on a recovery week they could go home i couldn't go home and so i was very very isolated in a small community um yeah it was a combination of more than just training load over time essentially so you had all these different stress and fatigue arrows kind of being slung at you from every different direction yeah including the training one which is hard including the training piece which is which is hard at the at the level that you're trying to to train at and underneath the you know umbrella that you're trying to train with it's always hard yeah it's always hard and i would periodically like pop a really good like result essentially where i could like it wouldn't look like i was falling off as much but the the general trend was like me falling further and further behind this like moving target of keeping up with my teammates and so that's kind of like the biggest the biggest indicator would be like that over time despite training despite whatever it might be and i was totally the athlete or i was like maybe i'm

just really out of shape yeah well i mean yeah i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of other athletes yeah there's a lot of athletes well you're exactly right at a certain point that is actually the case but the out of shape in air quotes is uh it's it's caused from it's like in turn it's in so i i call when i'm trying to explain overtraining syndrome to people i describe it as a metabolic injury right like it's which is like a term that i have now made up yeah there you go but it is it's a metabolic injury you can't feel like physiologically you can't do what you're supposed to be doing because your body's job is to keep you alive and so this like has really cool overlaps into now what we're kind of you know like it's not overtraining syndrome it's not it's not on our train it meets none of the stops would be like um we call red s in sports or relative energy deficiency in sports um similar but different because it's more about inadequate nutritional intake um paired with training load compared to this and you can definitely there definitely are overlaps with that i think being in a state of low energy availability would probably push you further or well usually confounds right compounds the overtrainingness right of everything i think it can you can have one without the other but i think that they you probably can trip from one into the other as well for sure um and so i define it as this this metabolic injury where you can't you look you look fine from the outside um but that

that you can't train to make it better yep and so just like breaking your ankle or having a stress fracture or whatever it might be um you need adequate rest and and adequate ways to deal with other stressors in your life as well in order to recover like same thing that you'd need you know if you had a stereotypical injury right that's just this just one like lies like just beneath the surface yep so here's the crux of it right how how do you know as a coach in working with your athletes kind of looking at what they're doing day to day what train stop they're at and what do you do when they start to get a for further along the tracks than you would like them to do yeah so the thing is that we don't have like there's no clear marker despite what people might say there's no clear biomarker you can't go and get a cortisol test and they're gonna be like oh overtrained heart rate variability yeah there's no perfect biomarker yes like major differences from your baseline are probably an indicator that something's wrong but those are also indicators of like doing work right right and so as long as that work is paired with recovery you're fine so when it comes to to working with athletes like initially as a coach super scared to be a coach was worried i was gonna hurt everyone you bring you bring what you know right yeah i remember you saying that yeah um and so i think part of that is just because there's no clear marker of this stuff is the data is wonderful

like watching people's workouts and understanding you know like how different is this from baseline what is their heart rate doing um but it's that it's that objective feedback as well from the athlete you know you're getting that if you get that chronic message like i just i felt tired today i felt tired today i felt tired today i felt tired today my legs were heavy my legs were heavy when those comments become a consistent theme not just one but not just one you can be tired like i have we all bad days yeah i have days where i feel like hot garbage on the trail but as opposed to cold garbage as opposed to cold garbage worse than cold garbage i think so like dumpster fire is kind of where my brain's going okay um so that being a periodic phase so oftentimes like so say i've got athletes who are doing a big training block big big training block maybe it's like a peak week of training i'll tell them like hey you're gonna be tired this weekend like i know it and that's okay and kind of send them into the end of the training block knowing but telling them to like you've got recovery coming on on the other side of this so that would be like me trying to force them into a functional overreach and then giving them the adequate recovery on the other side that being said if i've got an athlete who's trending to that like i feel my legs feel heavy i'm tired that also becomes a conversation of like hey are you sleeping okay like what else is going on because maybe their training is kind of baseline training like they're they're not doing anything crazy i'm not requesting you know major workouts or incredible long runs i'm and the feedback i'm getting is that they're tired

that becomes a conversation about like hey what else is going on to make sure that we're balancing that that training stress versus their life stress and i've had to bring athletes like down from that too where like their training stress is really high for a week and we weren't planning to maybe take a lower week that week but it becomes one because i know that combined with that life stress like an athlete bought a house really positive life stress yeah but it's a you know it's still stress yeah and so it doesn't make sense for them to go do a four-hour long run like you've got to balance those puzzle pieces and that's really hard as a coach and that's where just like that like i didn't have communication when i was super overtrained i didn't have that line to my coaches where we trusted each other i think and or that's the place we'd gotten to and i think that's what's what i try to foster with my athletes is to have that clear line of communication where i know they're going to tell me how they're actually feeling and they trust me to make the right changes to their training so that you know we we keep them from only crossing that line and we plan for them to cross that line but fundamentally you're combining two variables you're combining the workout variables right so how how are they performing day to day yeah and then you're combining the the whole host of subjective feedback that they're giving you yeah i'm tired i'm sleeping i feel great i'm motivated i'm buying a house and things like that you're combining those into like the ultimate corinne malcolm algorithm to say yeah we're going to push on the throttle you like that

you're going to go trademark that after this you're combining you're combining those into some algorithm actually isn't a very good description of it because it very is it there's it's not there's a lot of variation and therefore it wouldn't fit like it's it's not a it's not a mathematical model right which i that's one of the issues that i have with a lot of right that's one of the issues that i think all of us reasonable coaches have with these stoplight systems that are intended to tell us if our athletes are stepping into some sort of overtraining state is that it can't those algorithms can't eloquently combine all of the subjective parts and all of the sociological parts and things like that but ultimately that's what you're doing is you're taking training you're taking what the feedback that the athlete's giving you which is so important which is that's the most important metric in my mind which is huge and you're fusing those into an answer that will tell you yes they can continue to train or no they can't and that's a in in the challenges and for a lot of people listening that either coach themselves or even coaches out there that are listening and they're trying to find an answer the problem with that is that isn't an answer it's just a philosophy or strategy right to look at it and it's easy i think it's right as we talked about earlier like when you're oftentimes athletes who are non-functionally overreached are like i'm just out of shape i should train more like right how do you read that how do you decide if that's a you know the stopping or backing off is the appropriate response and i think there's an i you know this ideal or this idea as

well where you're you know especially if you're self-coached i think primarily like i think it's one like i have a coach because i need to like put my trust in someone else to like help guide me because then i'm not the one making the decision of saying you know do i not want to train today because it's rainy or do i not want to like what's my motivation to not train today type of deal i think that's really hard to navigate on your own because we i think it's really easy to pride yourself on like doing every workout and showing up every day and i think those are positive attributes and they make really good they make really talented athletes um who generally meet their goals but that's also that same skill or attribute can be an athlete's you know downfall but that's why you need both sides of the coin because if you do have an athlete that is constantly motivated and and is always going to tell you i'm good coach put me in you know there's nothing going on like i'm going to talk through you need the data to balance it off and and also on the other on the other side of that equation or the other side of the track since we're using a train analogy on the other side of the tracks are the athletes that you actually need to get the fire poker out you know you need to like motivate them along less carrot more stick yeah exactly a little exactly more stick and and they're telling you i can't do this i can't do this and you look back at the data and you say yeah you actually can like you're you're capable of this you're better than you think you are and you can do more than you think you can as you know ken clover would say um so i i i completely concur with you that whenever you're evaluating an athlete and and i don't want people to get the wrong picture we're

not always looking at training through the lens of is the athlete oh is the athlete in an overtrained state or not that's not the sole lens to look through it's how do we create better stronger faster athletes i mean hopeful ideally in a perfect coaching world we don't have to worry potentially about our athlete being like is this athlete ever trained or not because hopefully like the training is is periodized in such a way and you're like the data and the athlete's feedback and all this stuff is is helping to steer this ship where it's not crossing a line over and over and over again and that's that's hard to balance it's hard in trail running because the one side of the component the data component is fuzzy the data is fuzzy on the trail just because of how you know what the train does to running what the elements do to running it was really muddy so all of a sudden you're yeah you know your easy pace goes way down yeah and so then you have to rely more on the subjective feedback part of it and it's just that's a sociological there's a sociological component of that it's just harder to tease that out yeah i would say as an individual if you're like am i overtrained or am i non-functionally overreached it's it's it's looking at the how many how many days in your training journal have you said meh like that didn't feel great and if if that is a trend if that is more than a couple days if that's a week if that's two weeks that's when resting becomes like oh that's not i'm you're probably not out of shape that's the why don't why don't i try to take two or three days off and see how i feel after that and that doesn't work maybe it's why don't i take a week

off and see how i feel after that am i hungry to train again do my legs feel okay is my heart rate normal what are the other kind of factors i think that's kind of the the next step for someone who's like on this train and they're not sure if they're at the final you know at the terminus of it um kind of trying to figure out where they are i think that's one of the best ways to to go about doing it i'm gonna i'm gonna come back to that a little bit but what's the what's the other side of that on the on the training component like you mentioned okay if there's a week of meh yeah in their training log that would be a flag for you to say okay we need to we need to deploy some rest here what's the analogy to that or the analog to that on the training side of it i think if they're using heart rate that's a really easy thing to look at right because it's gonna you know their heart rate's really elevated and they're feeling meh or they did they did an interval set like we've talked about a bunch and their heart rate's way lower than normal or they're just like they're not hitting you know the you've evaluated that the train is normal that they're running on they're running on the on the same track they always run on it's not muddy and the vat like they're moving you know just like much slower than they normally they normally are um i think those that's how you look at it from a data perspective much much slower is it 10 is it 15 is it 40 i don't know there's like a like a great answer for that i think but here's where it gets i'm gonna sorry interrupt sorry to interrupt you but here's

here's where it gets interesting if everything is going in a idealistic picture perfect way throughout a training block there should be a small amount of performance decline from when that training block started to the end because that that is a component of training is you have to induce fatigue and so let's just say they're doing just to keep everything simple one mile repeats at six minute pace they're doing one mile repeats at six minute pace on week one week two they're doing one mile repeats at 602 pace or 605 pace or something like that week three they're doing one mile repeats at six 10 pace or something like that because there's there's this accumulated amount of fatigue they certainly shouldn't be getting faster they've had a rest day or recovery run but they haven't had exactly they should they certainly shouldn't be getting faster because adaptations don't take that they they take longer than that to actually sink in no magic bullet there's no magic bullet right it's not one day to the next it's weeks and weeks and weeks but there is a tipping point of that performance decline that you don't want to see within a particular training block and i think what a lot of athletes and coaches that are doing that even the coaches that are doing it right struggle with is how much of that performance decline is acceptable so let's just say we've got this perfect pure situation and i think this helps contextualize it for trail runners we have this perfect pure situation where we can track performance day to day yeah what would that performance decline potentially look like that would be in the quote-unquote acceptable range that would either produce a

training effect or a functional overreach so given like that example i think that declines normal 10 seconds over 16 over over a six minute mile yeah i think that's normal i'd be much more concerned if all of a sudden they were working as hard as they possibly could and they were struggling to maintain it a 6 30 or 6 45 right or they couldn't complete the workout that's like a oh okay we found we found the breaking point and over how many workouts one workout well i think if you have a workout or two like that that's when all of a sudden you're like they need rest they need they need about a recovery at that point in time i'd say it'd be irresponsible as a coach and maybe i don't know i don't want to call it like blind faith as an athlete but um you know we you're running with data i mean almost every single runner i know is running with a gps watch you'd have to be ignoring all of it to go out and do a workout like over and over again and or you know week after week after week or twice a week or whatever it is and keep missing it and not and like think that doing it again is going to make it better yeah and so i think say over you know maybe they're doing a four-week block or a three-week block or a five-week block and some amount of decline is going to be normal but i think if you all of a sudden have weeks in a row or workouts number of like a set of workouts in a row even so that maybe they're doing that twice a week or something similar yeah twice a week

if they you know they had they had a workout didn't go great maybe there's some other factors involved they've got a recovery run like easy running the next day and they come back out for another workout you know two days later two or three days later and they're once again missing stuff like that like as a coach that'd be like okay like let's like we're gonna ease we're gonna ease off the gas a little bit because i want decline but i don't want them having a major decline over and over again i've kind of used this like 10 stick as that that's the barrier meaning if i see like five percent four percent from one week to the next like i'm okay with that like yeah okay yeah you're just tired like we'll just we'll just kind of keep working but you get into like eight ten certainly twelve percent or something like that then the the alarm bells start going off and we need to kind of recalibrate and then you combine it with the areas of the training log right the subjective feedback that the athlete's giving you i feel great i feel tired kind of whatever it is that either adds fuel to like the data argument that you're making or could actually come into conflict with it yeah and i'm not i'm not saying that that person is like oh no they've crossed some major line they are toast they become toast by continuing to beat their head against the wall and do the same thing over and over again but a good coach or a smart athlete they see that and they say okay i'm gonna take i'm gonna only do one workout next week or i'm gonna i'm i'm just good i'm gonna like i'm gonna give myself a couple more easy days in a row or i'm gonna take two days off just because i need to freshen up a little bit i think that like

you can make little changes like that and that's part of the like that difference between like properly functionally overreaching i think and and going beyond that because to go beyond that means you're doing something chronically wrong right right chronic chronic being the key word there yeah um i i got i have two points to that one is i i've since the training tools have gotten better to to just track training the gps watches are better the power meters and cycling are better and things like that i've actually found that i build out training like not as far into the future so i don't yeah it probably drives my athletes crazy yeah we were talking about this on our continue the other day like i might only build out two weeks that's the maximum at the most and that's just because you get that constant source of feedback and the feedback is relatively good that you can start to micro adjust but the other thing that i'll point out in terms of is it is it appropriate to apply apply rest or do you want to keep the foot on the gas and continue to train i think everybody should be mindful to remember is is that your body can only handle so much stress over long periods of time and long periods of time being three or four months and so if you underdo it for whatever reason right let's just say that you knew you underdo it you you know two weeks hard and you thought that that was the right time to apply rest and you end up applying rest and let's just say that was the wrong call that just gives you the opportunity two weeks down the line three weeks down the line four weeks down the line to apply a little bit more stress and it all evens out as long as you're watching

things correctly so it's not like a lot of times uh what what in my opinion what gets athletes into trouble and gets and coaches into trouble they think that they have a finite amount of time to produce the improvements that they actually need to need to make so they've got this prototypical four-week block and you need to jam everything that they can in that four-week block well you can only handle so much stress over long periods of time and so if that four-week block ends up becoming three weeks it just gives the opportunity several weeks down the line to maybe do a little bit more because your body will just recalibrate yeah so it's not that rigid i guess is what i'm yeah there's a lot of flexibility in it based on the athlete based on the time available to them based on whatever else is going on in their life i think that there is no like perfect like oh yes you must do three big weeks and then a rest week right or you must that's lazy coaching yeah to have that repetitive pattern right but and there are athletes who like that's what they need and we like we're learning more about like women's specific physiology and how like that's a whole nother thing when it comes to like period like literally periodized period training i know i've been working on it but i think that that is you know it's important to know that you can apply stress and apply rest in kind of a very like in various ways and make positive adaptation and not go too far and not do too little so let's kind of bring it back to the functional piece okay we've got these two stops yeah we're so we've got the functional overreaching stop on the on the train tracks the difference between that and the

non-functional overreach part which you don't want to get into is essentially identifying some component of underperformance and we'll tag that as a few days or a few workouts of over five percent yeah combined with all of the other workout variable or all the other feedback variables of i'm tired i'm not sleeping i don't want to get out and run i'm not motivated the combination of those two things should tell an athlete or coach let's stop and let's get off the train right here and apply rest and hopefully an overreach or a functional part of that overreach is what's going to be the outcome of that yeah yeah i mean i i'd agree with that statement i think that that's kind of the goal is to apply like you can have some failure and still apply rest and have it be functional as opposed to like it being a waste i think that's like the biggest concern for athletes right is it like did they waste their time training yeah exactly like was it was it wasted work and it's not if we if you can catch it early enough to bring them like to to apply rest adequately you like it still is functional training it's when you get into a point where not only are your workouts falling off but you like have all the other like all the other symptoms going on for an extended period of time that that's you you need a rest to save your season or to save your career or to save your exercise future

you know your your running future whatever it might be and so it doesn't matter if that training was wasted or not because we're just trying to get you back to baseline right correct correct right looking at the spilled milk looking at the spilled milk side of the equation isn't going to do you any good at that point yeah and so i think that's like that's a difference as well when we look at the functional stuff like it's a little bit of fatigue it's you know sometimes we can push that even a little bit far but it's different than like the we need just to make you healthy again and that's kind of where that like that's where you're bridging the difference between functional and non-functional overreach yeah that's such a good point we need to make you healthy again before you can think about being an athlete again yeah 100 have you ever worked with an athlete that's been like truly at the end of the terminus of the route no i have talked with a lot of athletes it's really hard to get there it is like i said it's really hard i like i'd not to applaud it but it's like it's it takes a certain level of like i don't know what it is stick to itiveness well you have to royally fuck it up yeah you do i will own up to both myself and like and coaches royally getting into that mess well i was talking to um lindsey lindsey high or lindsey gollich now um over at the olympic training center who runs their high altitude and environmental physiology lab yeah so so brilliant so she sees the whole run a show of olympians yeah so people who you know make their they make their living at the sport that they're doing across a wide variety of sports from the endurance sports to the combat sports to the

you you name it and i asked her that very question i was like how many athletes do you see every year that are truly over training she's like maybe one like maybe yeah maybe in an olympic cycle two so that's one every other year and these are people that have all of the opportunity in the world you would think to overdo it they have unlimited amount of time they're at the very top of the genetic pyramid in terms of how much training volume and everything that they can handle and still it's almost impossible for them to kind of like screw it up that that much so that so that the cases of doing that are really rare yeah and i think you know and i would say oh maybe we'd see it more commonly in people who are juggling more things and i think there's some truth right maybe but um that's actually sometimes i think what we've seen in a number of ultra endurance athletes is that they had a career and the career kind of kept them balanced in a way maybe their career like maybe their career wasn't a stressful part of their life but it limited how much they could train and or do other stuff it was kind of forced rest and sometimes when those athletes step away from that other job to focus solely on their sport we've seen probably some more like non-functional overreach in some of those athletes um maybe maybe end of the end of the you know terminus end of the train type of stuff um and that in part is because their job is applying forced rest to them in a way and as long i think it's i think that honestly like the general population might be at more risk for having issues with this just because they not to say that they're gonna right because it's not about training right training

like i think it'd be really easy to say i work 30 to 40 hours a week at this other job i can't physically overtrain what's incorrect with that statement is that you're you might even be at more risk in that sense just because if you say you work at like your 40 hours of work a week is also really stressful and you've got a family and you've got other things to juggle the training part isn't what pushes you into non-functional overreach it's that population who's going to not balance the other stressors in their life and they're going to cut sleep to get that extra long run right and they're you know whatever it might be so it's over fatigue or overstress versus overtrain yeah which is a semantics it's just that overtraining sounds sexy in the articles that get written like oh wow you mean you can do too much running i did i am so badass because i did too much exercise yeah no it's more likely that i'm under recovered and that i don't have a good handle on how stressful the rest of my life like i think that's like more like which is not a sexy title to you know that chapter of someone's life yeah no it's definitely not sexy and it's not going to make the it's not a good book title it's not but that's also what makes it confusing for people because they're looking at so back to it we brought this conversation now back full circle is they're thinking about this whole overtraining proposition strictly from the the very strict vocabulary sense and i am the training that i'm applying is too much the training specifically not everything else yeah yeah i agree yeah i've spoken to i've gotten

since kind of going on some podcasts to talk about this and writing articles about it i've gotten a lot of like cold emails and messages from people you know both sharing their experience like a couple of athletes and generally it was like high level athletes where the coach was i don't want to say the coach was lazy but like the coach was like oblivious to you know it was kind of like my way or the highway style coaching so high end rowers high end skiers high end runners where the coach was oblivious to to individual need i've i've been approached by those athletes um so lack of individualization on the training lack of individualization super stressful environment um you know you're trying to make an olympic team type of situation i've also been approached by a number of just like really busy individuals who you know their doctor says i think this might be overtraining syndrome and then i get to talk to them about like what is what is your job like what does your life actually look like like what what do you actually do what does a normal week look like for you like what have you actually been feeling and then i you know then i can say like okay we're gonna try this like let's try this for the next two to four weeks and let's see how you feel after that and if that doesn't make you feel better like yeah maybe maybe you are like over like you've at you're at the end of the line then it's like you know this is a person who likes exercising who likes training it makes them feel good um you know the last thing you want to do is say well you know you're you're looking at a like a true step away from from exercising more than like the acsm like you're gonna go walk your dog

you're gonna go walk your dog for 30 minutes every day or whatever it is it's i think that that's really hard to digest for a number of reasons for people who are who are like reaching that state but it's it's been really interesting to talk to a number of different folks kind of about their their experience and and why they are where they are and kind of help them navigate through that like to the best of our ability so i'm going to highlight the key takeaway points yes that we just discussed on our train journey the last we just we honestly just came up with that analogy on the fly but i kind of like it we should write an article about it so the the i'll start with the last one first which you just mentioned individualized training huge component the the the more tailored the training can be towards an individual's strengths and weaknesses tendencies time of day all those things with their life not against their life exactly working with their life and not against their life that is going to be a key element in avoiding any sort of non-functional overreaching or beyond avoiding yeah yeah yes exactly that's the first thing i stopped myself from saying anything inappropriate okay you could do that we'd always edit it out it wasn't going to add anything to the conversation all right so that's the first thing individualize training second thing is it's okay to get worse to a certain extent and that certain extent is five percent for a few days maybe eight percent for a few days anything more than that you need to start

thinking about applying rest combined with i'm grumpy i'm not motivated maybe my appetite suppressed maybe my heart rate is you know elevated at rest or during easy runs easy rides and things like that those two things are the kind of the first indicators that you need to apply some sort of rest yeah and then the last thing is is that overtraining syndrome is a bad way to describe this whole host of things that actually happens to athletes that screws them up and that whole host of things can we could go on for forever with all those are but the point the the point that i always try to make is that it's not just training yep no it's it's everything else that's going on in an athlete's life everything period period period we'll put a pin in there corinne thanks that was fun where um where where can people learn more about the corinne malcolm train tracks oh man um i write for i run far we do a running on science column every month which are awesome um so i'm gonna be writing a lot of those so you can find me there what's next um i don't even know what we're writing next i am writing next month we're doing a fact or fiction piece though like which is really cool because we're going to talk about myths and

bust them i love that style which is really really exciting i love that style um and then we're kind of moving into probably some women's focused topics which will be really really cool and both the women that are columnists for that are both of the women both the writers that are columnists for that are women and our editor yeah so we're a three-woman team it's awesome um myself um tracy hoag who's an md PhD so i'm like the very underqualified one in that group and then megan um hicks from iron fire is our editor who's phenomenal um and then you can find me writing for um our train right blog for cts and the training peaks blog as well um and then i'm on all of the platforms just as corinne malcolm you're lucky because you have a relatively unique name and you don't have to convolute it yeah no it's very easy to find me all right corinne thanks for being on and just as we started the podcast we're going to end the podcast with construction in corinne's apartment that's what everybody's here is right now is there a hot water heater i don't know anyway it worked out fine thank you corinne that was awesome we had a lot of fun thank you holy cow that was a hoot i always love getting together with corinne and uh discussing anything about coaching and training as you guys can tell uh we had a lot of fun with it um i do think that

athletes are well served to understand this topic a whole lot better than we do right now because there's just a lot of confusion and i think that the the main part of that confusion as we discussed in the podcast was just simply that we use bad vocabulary with this and i'm not going to sit here and offer anything better because i think we're stuck with with with where we're at but it is confusing that this thing that we call overtraining or overtraining syndrome in many cases almost all cases has very very little to do with the training itself being over too much too much training almost impossible to have too much training to cause all these symptoms that uh corinne and i went through during the actual podcast um thanks a lot to corinne um like i said earlier i always love speaking to her about these types of things she's a good sport about it and we definitely did have a lot of fun with it thank you corinne i've always appreciated your counsel and uh your take on a lot of these topics thank you guys uh for listening i hope you got a lot out of it as always you can hit me up on social media at Jason Koop is the instagram handle also the twitter handle and you can go and check me out at a lot of the races that um that are starting to come around this early or late winter february march april i'm probably going to be a black canyons in the uh KoopCast mobile recording studios this big

brown van that i just acquired that i'm just really stoked to really stoked to to take out and and kind of put it through the paces uh so feel free to hit me up on social media or if you see me at a race um you know grab my elbow bend my ear a little bit i'd love to chat with you about anything related to coaching training nutrition whatever i always love talking about it uh thanks again thanks again you guys for listening and i will see you out on the trails you