How not to overload (or underload) and keep training?
Find your adaptation zone and keep going!
Understanding where you are with your loading, both currently and in previous weeks and months, will help you to make the right decisions to heal, recover and perform better. Understanding of the loading that you are in at any given moment helps with a lot of aspects of life – how much you can push yourself at work, at the gym, and make sure you don’t get injured or sick - and keep training!
For your body as a whole, as well as for each muscle, bone and any other structure, there are two possible conditions: underload or overload.
Amount of cumulative loading
Underload is when you are not loading your body enough to its capacity, and therefore not creating adaptation.
This may mean that you are using lighter weights, for less repetitions, or running shorter distances while feeling healthy and strong (with good nutrition, good sleep etc). Your body then doesn’t recognise these exercises as something they need to adapt to these exercises - so no need for building, or adjusting the existing tissue to her with these new loads. Of course, sometimes underload is necessary to give the body and tissues the time to heal, or in a state of fatigue.
But increasingly we see the benefit of ‘optimal loading‘ rather than ‘underloading‘ - it will just mean something different in various circumstances (for example, when recovering from a sprained ankle, it’s still good to move it - complete rest is not a good idea). So in general, even when healing from injury, we want to avoid underloading.
Overload is when we give the body and the tissues more load than they are comfortable bearing.
And one of two things can happen – either they adapt and rebuild stronger, or they will break and you will get injured. What is interesting, and very important to remember, is that this ‘comfortable bearing’ zone can be different each day - and can depend of what your body decides it can bear. It depends on your current biochemistry, what you have done a day before etc - so it is more dynamic than we like to think.
And here we arrive to the best part – an initial part of the overload zone is where we still overload the body or tissue to some extent, but our bodies are not breaking – the are ADAPTING. This is the adaptation zone. And this is a place where you want to be if you want to optimise your performance, recover or heal – but your adaptation zone will mean something different depending on whether your healthy or injured, and where on your recovery timeline you are.
Amount of cumulative loading
If you keep training and exercising within your adaptation zone – then you will not get injured. You will get stronger and you will optimise your performance.
But your adaptation zone may be very different from one day to another – and this is where the rigidity with training plans can be an obstacle, as they don’t allow for any other factors than the training itself – so none of the ‘psycho’ and ’social’ parts are accounted for. And they are often key to determining where your adaptation zone is.
How to know where the adaptation zone is? How not to overload or underload?
And that’s the trick – how to know what to do to not underload, or overload your tissues? Frankly, we don’t know the majority of the processes inside our bodies – how much energy we spend on digesting, pumping blood, maybe our immune system is currently fighting off some germs we aren’t even aware of! This all takes energy and determines how much energy left the tissues have to deal with the loading coming from the exercises. But the good news is there are many factors that we can in fact control - that’s why taking care of our sleep, nutrition and mental health is so important when training!
In fact, even if we are not able to control some of the factors that determine our loading, our bodies communicate where we are - with how we feel.
How do you feel? Do you feel well rested or tired? Have you been fatigued recently? Are you feeling energised thinking about your next training, or are you dreading it? Are you worried that you will get injured, or are you excited for your next exercise session? When you look at your training plan, do you feel already tired or excited about the challenge?
These, and many other questions will help you establish how much to push – in injury, to recover better, but also when you’re healthy, as a prevention strategy. The difficulty here is seeing the difference between:
‘I just don’t feel like training today but I should push myself as it is good for me‘
vs
‘I am overloaded and I should rest as it is good for me‘
And there is no good answer here. What is important, is paying attention - these two signals are veered similar, but slightly different. And once you start really looking into how you feel about your training and seeing the consequence - you will learn to see the difference. This is partly because you learn from experience - you feel one way, you go training, and you end up energised. You feel slightly differently, you go training, and you end up in pain and injured. Really the key is getting to know yourself and your body.
And as such, this concept is a no brainer – if you want to get stronger, you need to gradually increase your weights to go up to the desired weight. You wouldn’t just up the weight to the desired one as this would make you injured. But how much and how quickly to up it? There are of course protocols for some exercises, but they’re generic, and will never consider all the factors that will affect your personal capacity to get stronger, run faster or recover.
But they can be a good place to start.
How to find your adaptation zone when you are injured?
Understanding your loading zones is particularly important when you’re injured. There is agreement that the RICE protocol is outdated, some clinician still use the POLICE protocol, but there is increasing evidence that the PEACE & LOVE protocol should in fact be used. What is clear, is that OPTIMAL LOADING as opposed to REST is the best way forward.
And this is where your physio will assist you with the knowledge of the anatomy, physiology (including healing process) and biomechanics is the base for you to start optimally manage your loading. Your physio will know which movements are particularly challenging and should be avoided in certain injuries. But you – the patient – have all the other data, and you should be an equal partner in your recovery process. If you have a set of fairly challenging exercises from your physio, but you are not sleeping well, your stressed out at work and your diet is not great – these exercises may be in the overload zone, prove too difficult for you, and may slow down the recovery process altogether.
What you need to do when injured, is to ensure your ‘system’ is strong enough to optimise your recovery
When recovering from any injury, make sure you optimise all factors that you can, that may affect the recovery. Consider that your body will need more energy to heal the injured tissues and change your lifestyle accordingly. Sleep more, eat better, avoid alcohol, try to manage your mental health. But keep exercising – if you knee is injured, do some upper body exercises. Yes, it will add to your loading (so you will have to manage these too!) but overall effect of exercising will speed up your recovery!