If you overtrain long enough, will you eventually adapt?

The metaphor is, if you want to get yourself out of a hole, then stop digging.

Yes. You'll adapt to being injured and not running.

At that point, you'll come to letsrun and encorage others to overtrain in h-streets and lie about there times and accuse others of taking drugs when they are succesful.

short answer: no

slightly longer answer: No with the exception of a few supremely talented individuals whose bodies just adapt faster than most of ours do.

Train( stress)- get worse( rest)- super compensate( get better)- Train... Get Worse- TRAIN- GET EVEN WORSE+ LOW MOTIVATION- TRAIN- CHANGE YOUR TRAINING- NO IMPROVEMENT- SWEAT ALLOT AND FEEL LAZY AND UNDER MOTIVATED- TRAIN MORE-COME TO LET"S RUN TO GET THE ANSWER YOU DESIRE.

ANSWER:

3 months- Easy man, stay off the hard or even moderate training until the fire in your belly comes back. Not only will your nervous system not adapt, but your muscles will continue to stay damaged. You are chronically out of balance. Restore your health and take it easy. Cross train, walk, swim, take off as you feel. When you come back, your question will be answered.

you're training beyond your physical ability and your intelligence.

Overtrain a couple days a week and undertrain the others. This causes adaptation. If you overtrain too many days in a certain week then the next week you will need to undertrain to get the adaption. If you do not then the stress/fatigue builds up until something bad happens-injury, sickness, cronic fatigue etc.

So a good week would be OUOUUOU with the O's meaning overtraining sessions (workouts) and the U's being easy, recovery days. Feeling tired when training hard is normal. You are probably doing oOoOoOo, meaning you are overtraining a lot on your hard days and overtraining slightly on the days that are meant to be easy. There is no point in overtraining slightly-it just adds fatigue with no real stimulus. This also means that what would normally be a moderate workout becomes a difficult workout due to accumulated fatigue. This could be a special session once every training cycle-two back to back workouts on consecutive days or the same day in doubles.

Examples

Hill workout/Sprint session-sprinting with muscle fatigue; the hills break down the muscles/provide stimulus then the sprint session 'wires' the nervous/muscular system to build up in a way not just appliable to hills but to flat ground

Long run/sprint session-Makes running fast more oxidative in nature

Weights (core work)/Long run- weights push core to failure then long run makes it relevent to running-specific strength and specific endurance

Plyometrics/Hills-Plyos trigger nervous system then hills stress the muscles as well

Long Run/Drills-Long run breaks the muscles down then the drills teach good mechanics when tired.

of course, there are hundreds of options....Hills/Sprints/Long Run/Plyos/Tempos/Core work/leg work/drills

But these should only be once a week at most, ideally once every 10 days. Doing this week after week is what causes burnout. Of course, it is possible that the body will adapt to a training load with oooooooooooooooooooooooo type training, but easy/hard is a much quicker and much more enjoyable way of training.

Noakes is the best at describing overtraining.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=wAa9qq9kbncC&printsec=frontcover&dq=noakes&sig=y9zsQ1ttCLh52ipyzGl1uMXydoU#PPA93,M1

My coach told me increasing the intensity would help me in the long run... apparently that's not true?

If you could adapt to it, it wouldn't be overtraining.

Overtraining is a myth!

When your body feels weak and tired it means your muscles are fatigued and lacking of energy. When this happens your form goes to hell (think of it as your body being in a constant state of how you run at the end of a race). When your form goes you get injured.

When people say "I just adapted to the higher intensity" it usually means they slowly worked their way into it. When your body wants to rest let it rest. You can't get faster if you don't allow your muscles to heal. Does that make sense? In order to have a good race your muscles have to be in peak condition and full of energy. Think of it like a race car: the only way to fill the tank is to come in for a pit stop (cheesy, yes, but it should drive home the point).

What are your racing results?

not not malmo wrote:

Overtraining is a myth!

Then why aren't we all running thousands of miles a week?

No, you will not adapt. You will eventually become, like others have said, undermotivated, chronically sore, and generally lazy. In high school and college, I trained hard pretty much every day. Hammered everthing. I was decent, then shit hit the fan. Rested, felt slightly better, went back to hammering, cycle repeated. I am a stubburn SOB and was tough as nails so the cycle kept repeating. Biggest regret ever. Hate to have regrets, but I wish I would have listened to those around me who warned me it would happen. Just relax and train to race, not the other way around. My best advice:

Severe overtraining is something you never think can happen to you when your feeling great. Then it suddenly creeps up on you and before you know it, your effed.

Harry Kooter wrote:

not not malmo wrote:

Overtraining is a myth!

Then why aren't we all running thousands of miles a week?

I think what he was getting at is that there is no such thing as a magical "overtraining monster" that is gonna jump out and get you if you run 140 miles a week or run really hard a lot. This board has been saying "recovery is underrated! run 7 min pace all day!" so much that recovery has become overrated. Run hard, run a lot, most importantly, find out what YOU can do.

think please wrote:

Harry Kooter wrote:

Then why aren't we all running thousands of miles a week?

I think what he was getting at is that there is no such thing as a magical "overtraining monster" that is gonna jump out and get you if you run 140 miles a week or run really hard a lot. This board has been saying "recovery is underrated! run 7 min pace all day!" so much that recovery has become overrated. Run hard, run a lot, most importantly, find out what YOU can do.

Also, don't stop running just cause you feel stale. Maybe take a few easy days. You WILL recover.

Hammering everyday is foolish. Your body needs recovery. Your body needs certain workouts. Your body needs INTELLIGENT training, which right now, it's not getting. This very site (under Wejo, or Rojo or JK or somebody) puts it best, saying something along the lines of- 'everyday has it's purpose'.

Adjust your training and you may salvage your season

The OP said he's been hammering for 3 months. If he hasn't seen significant positive results by now, it's time to back off.

Anyone remember the quote that went something like, "it's better to be 10% undertrained than 1% overtrained?" Most runners (and coaches) tend to think it's the other way around. If training properly, you should hardly ever feel like crap. I always had my best seasons when I consistently felt good. The goal isn't to run yourself into the ground for a month and then try and recover the week of the big race. You should workout, recover, workout, recover, etc. If you ever start to feel sluggish during workouts or races, you didn't recover enough and you're doing more harm than good.

Train smarter, not harder.

overtraining is not mythical it leads to burnout and injury. Just take it back a few notches for a couple weeks, find some new runs do some new workouts.

My logic:

No such thing as overtraining - it's underrecovering.

You only adapt to training stresses when you recover from them.

Therefore if you are constantly underrecovered you will fail to get the adaptive benefits of the training stresses and performances will suffer, as opposed to improve, until you recover sufficiently and begin training more appropriately.