The posts before have shown the dramatic outcomes of too much exercise and training. In between, I would like to take another perspective on the whole topic to encourage your efforts, and perhaps give you more cues at hand to make the detrimental results of too much training and racing more understandable.

Modern exercise physiology and biology put a lot of work into studying the healthy body. That has not been the case for many decades where scientists only looked at sick bodies. Exercise physiology gives an amazing insight into the body’s “normal” way of functioning.

Inflammation is a phenomenon of the healthy body

You are probably used to the view/fact that inflammation is only present in cases of disease such as infections or chronic non communicable diseases (atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes-type-2, multiple sclerosis, bowel diseases etc.). Since very recent, scientific data talk a different language. Inflammation is a condition of the healthy body, it is a contained process essential for being healthy, a process that keeps our body with all its diverse functions going. Along all the mucosal linings (bronchi, guts, urinary bladder etc.) that connect us with the outside world, minor inflammatory or immune responses respectively take place… always and throughout our whole life. These borders colonized with its very own microflora are areas where controlled inflammatory processes secure the borders and guarantee our survival, where the communication with the environment takes place, often termed as friends (nutrients, bacteria, virus, macromolecules) and foes (e.g nutrients, viruses, bacteria, macromolecules). (more…)

There are only 9 weeks left until Kona. The IRONMAN world championship on the Big Island, Hawaii is for many an athlete the highlight of his or her career that one should enjoy. I am not talking about pro athletes, for them it is an obligation and in many ways not a question of joy. But for the many age groupers racing there should be joy. Be it as it may, it is hard work to get to Hawaii and it is hard work to finish there. Many currently linger along this very thin red line between overreaching and overtraining, and try to solve the riddle how to achieve peaking on time.

Working with biestmilch and being a physician I am confronted with a lot of health issues of athletes and it is exactly now, that I receive these posts and comments talking about the discrepancy, the lacking proportionality between training efforts and performance. You may feel in top form, you worked hard for many weeks, and then when the day comes, you feel sluggish in the swim or toasted on the bike already. Maybe you overlooked the discrete signs that guide you along the path of productive and unproductive workouts. In this post I would like to start writing about the various symptoms that may give you a frame of reference and standpoint of where you are with your training, symptoms that may help you to assess your very personal body condition.

Sebastian Kienle told me before Challenge Roth: “Well, I don’t feel really perfectly prepared, but you know it, if you feel perfectly prepared, then it may as well be the case that you did too much.” You may know that Sebastian got 2nd in his 1st long-distance race and that he raced under 8 hours. To remember his sentence could help in situations of doubts.

To fall prey to overtraining can happen to everybody who loves his or her sport, because sport can actually become an addiction which has nothing to do with being overzealous or doped. The feeling of whole body fatigue as well as the feeling of being able to deliver peak performance are rewarding and seducing. Both extremes can lure us to do more to get more! One day “the more” turns into “too-much” and can bring about overtraining, a sneaky process that may overrun you! A complex phenomenon that needs elucidation still. (more…)

In my last post I was reflecting on body sense awareness, a complex topic that seems to me very essential, if you want to be able to retrieve peak performance at a given time. In sports it became normal routine to measure various parameters like heart rate, oxygen uptake, lactate, urea etc. Moreover you have devices like power meters that give you control of your watts output on the bike. The various devices used got integrated programs that pretend to give you more detailed information of your body’s condition (lactate threshold, energy and calorie consumption, basal metabolic rate etc.). Did it ever occur to you that the data you receive are based on algorithms that are referring back to the mean of a sample and not to your individual body condition?

In my opinion, the world of parameters in sports and exercise science often simplifies the problem of interpreting data and drawing the correct conclusions concerning your body’s state at a given time. If you are an individual that does not find oneself within the limits of the variance of the mean then the conclusions made from the measurements taken can be wrong and misleading.
Therefore my plea: not forget about your body sense, to train your body sense and not to rely on devices only, or let devices overrule your body sense.

The problem of interpreting parameters may be compared with knowing nothing else than the height of a mountain and from that trying to draw relevant information for climbing this mountain … impossible! Do you agree?

The height of a mountain does not tell us anything about the mountain in specific

What does the height of a mountain tell you about its form, its structures, its geological formation, its history … ? I think not very much, it may eventually tell you whether you can climb it with or without oxygen, but not very much more. To be able to assess a mountain you need many more details. The height is only the peak of the iceberg. The same applies to your body. The measured parameters don’t give you any insight into the processes that make these parameters emerge, and our conclusions drawn from such a parameter measured may be so wrong as the argument that mountains higher than 2000 m are made out of limestone, and you need to have a rope for climbing them. The 2000 meters then would be a marker like e.g. the lactate threshold. Does this make sense to you?
Body sense awareness I think is fundamental to successful training and performance and should to be an integral part of training and exercise, … or life even?

November is probably the only time of the year where athletes have got the mental strength to read a book that is not only entertaining but instructive. Triathlon is a very consuming sport, it takes a lot of energy also from the brain, not only as a pro, but as an age grouper with ambition too. Because job and family come on top of training.

On the Blog of the British Journal of Medicine I found this a book reviewed, I shall definitely read. Perhaps you would like to do so as well. It is “the triathlete’s training bible” by Joel Friel, 3rd edition.

Ross Tucker whom I appreciate a lot wrote the book review: He says, that this book has become an indispensable tool for triathletes of all levels wishing to improve their performance using evidence-based methods and principles. Of most credit to the book is that it is very obviously a sound theoretical treatise, heavily based on scientific truths, as well as Friel’s own experience of having worked with triathletes for many years. Yet it does not overplay its hand, forcing technical scientific information on the reader and aspirant improver. Rather, it guides decision-making for all situations, covering topics ranging from motivation (the art) to metabolism (the science), always in a very clear, concise and practical manner. As for scientists who work with athletes, the value is in appreciating how Friel balances the complexity of the science of performance, with the requirement to give athletes tangible, easily implementable advice, and this is something all sports scientists can borrow from.