overtraining
Dec 2 2019
Overtraining: what is it and how do I fix it?

Overtraining is an issue that’s been increasingly peaking my interest the more involved I get with sport psychology applied to CrossFit. The sport has experienced an exponential growth in the past years; now everyone wants a piece of the CrossFit Games’ cake.

Economic compensation is at an all-time high and the scenario for the sport is as international as it could be. All this makes for a very attractive goal: making it to the Games. Thing is, as more and more individuals strive for making it to Madison, athletes need to assume bigger sacrifices (in training and in life). This got me thinking: has the prevalence of overtraining also increased in CrossFit?

What is overtraining?

First, we need to conceptualize overtraining because it’s often mistaken with a usual practice in sports: functional overtraining. Progressive increase in the intensity and amount of work in training sessions leads to supercompensation, which ultimately increases performance levels. This is the goal at certain stages during the competitive season.

Non-functional overtraining, however, is a syndrome that appears when the intensity, duration and frequency of training sessions surpass the ability of the athlete to adapt. The overt consequence is a considerable decrease in athletic performance.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg… the overtraining process begins way before that and in a very sneaky way since the symptomatology is quite diverse. The athlete suddenly seems more irritable, feels less motivated towards training, isn’t well rested and is more fatigued with submaximal efforts.

“If I train more than ever, why am I unable to perform?”

This is the initial point of a cycle that can have negative consequences (both physical and psychological) for the athlete if it isn’t managed in due time. In the most extreme cases, the athlete can end up abandoning the sport and retiring. That’s why our efforts must focus on preventing overtraining syndrome in high-level CrossFit athletes.

How to identify a case of overtraining

To learn how to identify an overtraining process we need to look at the first definition provided by McKenzie (1923) who described it as a “poisoning of the nervous system”. Since then, and thanks to a great number of studies (Hanne-Paparo, 1984; Pancorbo, 2003; Subiela & Subiela, 2011), we’re looking at this group of symptoms:

  • Disturbances in the nervous system: restless sleep, loss of appetite, decrease in energy levels, attentional capacity and coordination, gastrointestinal disorders, changes in menstrual cycle, decreased testosterone levels, increased cortisol levels, elevation in resting heart rate and higher blood pressure.
  • Disturbances in physical condition: decrease in VO2max, higher vulnerability for injuries affecting musculoskeletal system due to deterioration of the healing processes (repairing and regenerating muscle tissue).
  • Psychological disturbances: decrease in self-esteem and self-confidence, emotional imbalance, boredom, unusual irritability or apathy

Overtraining encompasses a great variety of symptoms that, even if we’re able to correctly identify, can still be explained by other causes. Very few manage to diagnose an early stage of overtraining syndrome.

What seems to set the alarms is the physical consequences, which is obvious considering we’re moving in the context of sport performance; but it’s the psychological consequences that can confirm the presence of an overtraining syndrome. Evaluation of these consequences usually involves three areas (Suay, Ricarte and Salvador, 1998):

  • Subjective aspects: athletes who are overtrained tend to perceive their efforts as something harder to endure even at intensity levels that are lower than they’re used to.
  • Emotional consequences: sadness, recurring thoughts of helplessness, guilt, etc. related to their performance in training and competition.
  • Behavioral consequences: apathy or even aversion towards training, which can lead to absence from training sessions and competitive events.

How to prevent overtraining in athletes

If we focus only on the physical aspect, a well-dosed training program that allows the athlete to fully recover would suffice. But we’re looking for a more permanent solution to the problem…and for that we need to work on the mind.

Improve stress management

Several authors compare overtraining syndrome with Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (Viru, 1984; Selye, 1957), which leads to believe there’s an intricate relationship between overtraining and chronic stress. That’s why we must provide the athlete with proper stress management tools.

High-performance athletes face a large list of stressors. Inadequate coping strategies and impaired emotional management will only make it worse. Training these psychological skills play a pivotal role in prevention of overtraining.

Program stimulating training sessions

In the long run, monotony in training can become a stressor for the athlete (Márquez, 2006), which is why the athlete needs a diverse and stimulating program. This doesn’t mean we should eliminate boring monostructural conditioning sessions altogether and do cool metcons forever; it’s a matter of having the athlete face new stimuli each day to allow them to explore their potential and relieve some pressure.

Many athletes adore the “unknown and unknowable” aspect in CrossFit because when faced with something new, they don’t know what to expect and, in the absence of self-generated expectations, they really shine. May they never lose the opportunity to surprise themselves.

Correct irrational beliefs

Although I left it for last, this is the priority. High-level athletes usually come with a great deal of sport-related irrational beliefs: “rest day? How do you train that muscle”, “more is better”, “if I stop, I’ll be left behind”. At the core, all these beliefs share a common thread: fear.

Fear to fall behind, fear that we won’t peak in time for competition, fear of letting down our friends and family… If we don’t work on that fear, no matter how stimulating and well-dosed our training program, we’ll end up with the same result.

We need to know where this fear comes from and have the athlete look it in the eye. Athletes will generate these thoughts sooner or later and they must be ready to beat them to the dirt as soon as they show up. Deliberately choosing our thought content is the most efficient prevention method.

overtraining
Sara Sigmundsdottir at the CrossFit Filthy 150 sanctional. Source: CrossFit Filthy 150

“I can’t do well if I’m not enjoying what I’m doing”

Sara Sigmundsdottir

At the 2016 CrossFit Games Sara Sigmundsdottir showed an uncharacteristic apathy that caught us all by surprise (and she still managed to pull-off a third-place finish overall). She said it herself: “what I think I did wrong last year [CrossFit Games 2016] was stop enjoying myself”.

If you want to progress in CrossFit (or in any sport for that matter) and you’re ready to make the necessary sacrifices to do so, don’t forget to enjoy the process! The joy of qualifying for a sanctional or winning a competition comes and goes in the blink of an eye; what’ll stay forever is the long, grueling training sessions you had during the entire year. If you don’t enjoy those days, you won’t last too long.  

Desiree Mejia-Naranjo 0 Comments
improve your performance
Oct 9 2019
How memory can improve your performance

Sounds like crazy talk, right? But the truth is that basic cognitive processes such as attention and memory are key to keeping the brain fit in high-tension moments as we saw in another article. Basically, when all is said and done the main perpetrator of our victories in sport and in life is our brain so we have to figure out how to help it improve your performance.

In this article I’ll be focusing on two basic notions regarding memory. I could say a whole lot about this process but I decided to focus on two due to their application to sport performance (I’ll talk more about it soon enough).

Why do we remember bad times better than the good times?

To answer this we need to go way back and revisit the adventures our hominid ancestors went through.

When a situation causes us a negative affective response, primary fight/flight actions are activated due to a basic instinct of pain avoidance. The first men faced wild animals and lived under adverse circumstance. The things they considered as aversive were truly life-threatening events. That’s why the brain started taking note of these situations quite seriously. Why? To anticipate and prepare adequate responses if any similar event showed up in the future.

Fast forward to the present day. Our negative situations don’t usually involve any risks to our physical well-being but our brain does its job anyways. The brain is still determined to pick up any little detail from the event and our response to it in order to provide enough information should they appear once more. So, it’s not our physical survival that’s endangered but our emotional survival.

Isn’t it funny that the very thing trying to save us from despair is the one that actually causes the pain? It’s like our brain is saying: hey, remember that thing that broke your heart? Yeah, well don’t you ever forget it (just in case).

Is our memory that reliable?

Those who believe their memory is flawless (guilty), couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s a very interesting TED talk on the matter that basically comes to prove that our memory is highly unreliable and changes day to day, from one person to the next, and that’s that.

Why is that so? Well, cause we’re not robots. We register information in a rather active fashion meaning we sugarcoat it with our own experiences, emotions, principles and values. Not only when we take it all in but also when it’s already stored; it starts to interact with other memory pathways causing even more confusion and disparity.

That’s why two individuals don’t remember the same situation the same way. Which makes for interesting and absurd arguments because, if memory is unreliable, how can we be so stubborn (or stupid) to assume we’re 100% right?

How can this improve your performance?

When it comes to our attachment to negative memories, I cannot stress enough how helpful it can actually be if you wish to improve your performance.

Not too long ago, Mat Fraser said he hated his silver medal from the 2015 CrossFit Games because he didn’t do things right and it costed him his first big W. However and to this day, he likes reminiscing about that outcome because it helped him detect his failures as an athlete and allowed him to “quit cutting corners”. Ultimately, this transformed him into the 4x CrossFit Games champion we know now. Remembering something awful doesn’t need to be all that bad if we learn something from it.

improve your performance
Jeff Evans speaking to judge Carson at the Atlantic Regionals in 2016. Source: The Barbell Spin

Regarding memory’s so-called reliability… let’s reel it in and keep it humble. For many reasons. In competition and training even more so because we’re heavily influenced by our body’s activation so memory’s already biased.

A good example of how to do this the right why is Jeff Evans response to a gnarly no-rep at the 2016 Atlantic Regionals that kept him from getting back to the Games. Truth be told it was perfectly reasonable for Evans to lose his marbles and let out his fury against the judge, but that was not the case. He showed a top-notch emotional maturity by focusing only on previous execution errors in the weekend that had brought him to such a precarious situation going into the last event.

Any other athlete with poor emotional management would have sunk in the misery, going over and over the situation: the judge calling the no-rep, the feeling of devastation performing another rope climb knowing it didn’t matter anymore… but that was not the most adequate thing to do.

That’s why it’s so important to maintain a positive outlook on your memories so that you feel energized during the downfalls to improve your performance in the long run. Some athletes benefit from visualizing past mistakes to remember they don’t want to feel that way ever again; others may need to resort to past success stories. However it may be, memory can contribute to keeping the fire going but always with your two feet on the ground.

Desiree Mejia-Naranjo 0 Comments
emotions
Jul 10 2019
Dealing with emotions


Emotions are an inextricable part of life. All life events would pretty much lose their power if they were emotionally detached. It seems, also, that emotion has a great influence on our behavior when responding to these life events (Smith & Lazarus, 1990).

Emotion comes from latin word emovere which means something like external movement. So we could say that emotion is a force that moves us to behaving in a certain way.

What we also know is that emotion follows a sequential process (Gross & Thompson, 2007): we perceive a stimulus, we appraise this stimulus and we respond to it.

Example: You receive a snatch out of position causing you to tear your bicep (stimulus). This injury will limit you in training and you won’t be able to compete in the Open (appraisal). You’ll be deprived of completing these goals which will make you sad and have you look for support in friends and family, quit going to the gym for a few day, etc. (response).

Don’t you love lists? They make everything so much easier but the truth is that there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to emotional processing. Especially considering that intermediate step: appraisal.

Theory of emotions

Lazarus and Folkman (1984) came up with a Appraisal Theory which was subdivided into two processes:

  • Primary appraisal: we look for answers to the question “does this affect me personally?” To answer this question we consider the potential impact an event has on our personal goals and concerns (motivational relevance). Then, we proceed to evaluate how this event impedes or facilitates reaching our goals (motivational congruence).
  • Secondary appraisal: this allows us to determine our control over the event, if I can change it or improve it according to my personal interest. We ponder 4 dimensions:
    • Accountability: it’s not as simple as picking someone to blame. We take into consideration the intentions of whoever harmed us. If we think their actions were just, un-intentioned or inevitable, we won’t hold them accountable for our emotional reaction.
    • Potential emotion-focused coping strategies: potential ability to readjust our emotional reaction into a more adaptative affective state that doesn’t interfere with out wellbeing in a significant way.
    • Potential problem-focused coping strategies: what can I do to extinguish the source of the problem or alleviate its consequences.
    • Future expectancy: which changes can occur for me on a psychological level to consider this life event as facilitating for reaching my goals.

Let’s see all this with an example from real life (my life).

I had a friend of mine record 16.1 Open workout for me and after 20 tough minutes, I found out my friend shut down the camera by mistake in the middle of it and didn’t dare tell me about it until the end.

Primary appraisal

Motivational relevance: my goal was to complete my first Open and load the scores onto the leaderboard. Back in 2016 I was affiliated in a box that had no judges to validate your scores so all I could do was load the video on YouTube. Verdict: yes, this affects my personal goals.

Motivational congruence: my first attempt going up in flames due to technical difficulties made it impossible to load that score onto the leaderboard.

Secondary appraisal

Accountability: technically my friend was to blame for the whole situation but it was completely un-intentioned. Known for being a bit clumsy but with the biggest Universe, I knew she would take it back if she could… and that’s why I couldn’t be mad at her. My emotions were a reaction to the situation, not to her wrong-doing.

Potential problem-focused coping strategies: the video had to be filmed from wire to wire, otherwise it wouldn’t count. So all I could do to fix it was re-do it.

Potential emotion-focused coping strategies: it’s obviously messed up to have to go through 20 minutes of lunges, burpees and pull-ups but I had plenty of days to re-do it and meet the deadline.

Future expectancy: in a second attempt I could try reducing transition times, breaking up the pull-ups… maybe I’d even get a better score than the first go-round (it wasn’t the case).

All this probably helped me deal with the situation in a way that didn’t harm my relationship with my friend or with the rest of the Open. I could have just gone crazy and threw the biggest fit ever, leading me to argue and badmouth my friend, blame that
situation for my poor results in 16.1 and just lose my mind. But I didn’t. Hence the importance of proper emotional regulation.

Applying this to the sport of Fitness

emotions
Annie Thorisdottir is the smile in CrossFit. Source: CrossFit Games.

Is this even real life? It’s a legit question because it seems rather cost-worthy to go through all that processing for every life event. Every author comes up with their models and love to think that’s the real deal right there. But the truth is we’re still talking about something inmaterial as is human behavior.

I chose this model because it’s proven to be useful to train regulation of your emotions. Although you don’t see it through to the very end (it’s a pretty long exercise) it allows us to reflect upon the impact certain events may have in our day-to-day life and help us manage our consequential behavior. Sports ridden with success and failure stories so we must learn to modulate our emotional response to these.

No, it’s not about suppressing your emotions. There’s times to where you’re allowed to feel angry, afraid, sad… thing is: use that emotion in a conscientious and adaptive manner. If you’re gonna wreck it all, run away from life and hide in a cave, that’s bad business. If you’re sad due to something that’s out of anyone’s control, re-write the way you look at it.

Froning’s epic fail in the 2010 CrossFit Games helped him find deeper and more powerful motivation. Tia-Clair Toomey‘s success in 2017 gave her reason to believe she could trust her ability as an top-notch athlete. Your emotional state gives you valuable information; use your emotions to learn more about yourself as both an athlete and a person. Don’t forget emotions are the consequence of thousands of years of evolution. It’s a biological gift we must learn to use.

Desiree Mejia-Naranjo 0 Comments