Why Overtraining for me was the best thing I ever did

Training
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So some of you might already remember, i recent posted the results of some crazy training. I took my CTL up to about 140, with 16,000+ KJ per week. Here is what I learned about overtraining:

The biggest lesson is that I was not actually tolerating the workload as well as I thought I was.

I could still ride. I could still hit decent numbers. I could still get through the sessions. That made it easy to convince myself that I was handling the training.

But my sleep started degrading.

That was probably the clearest warning sign.

Instead of recovering normally, I started waking repeatedly through the night. The training itself was still possible, but the recovery system underneath it was clearly starting to fail.

That changed how I think about “overtraining.”

But the silver lining is, now i know exactly what it looks like. I see how it destroys sleep. And how fragmented, destroyed continuous sleep due to over-training plants the seeds of a vicious loop.

So overtraining and understanding what it looks like, from my own point of view, has been one of the best tools I ever had. I know exactly what it looks like for me. Before this, it was all guess work. But I now I know exactly what overtraining looks like by surveying my own sleep, energy, and mood patterns over a 7-10 day period.

So what’s the next step? Next i’m looking for what I think of as “cruising altitude” as in what’s the range, below recovery deterioration that i can still load my body progressively while recovery sustainably.

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Interesting experience, Steve. I think one of the most useful things you’ve learned is that being able to complete the sessions doesn’t necessarily mean you’re absorbing the load well.

The sleep deterioration is probably the clearest signal in your case. I’d be more interested now in finding the highest workload you can sustain while keeping sleep, recovery and performance stable, rather than trying to maintain a specific CTL number.

It would also be interesting to see what happens if you back off slightly for a few weeks and then rebuild from there. That might give you a much better idea of where your actual sustainable ceiling is.

Best,
Sergi

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At 16k kJ a week, check the fueling side before you blame the load. Broken sleep is a classic sign of low energy availability, and it often shows up before power drops. Get a small food scale and weigh everything for a week. When I did that during my bigger blocks, I was surprised how far short of my calories I was.

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I’ve mentioned this before… Guys I know that ramp volume above 12 hours/week cut the endurance power to some really low numbers. Two guys in their twenties, four in their thirties, and a handful in forties. I’m talking some with 350W ftps and doing majority of endurance under 150W (43% ftp) which many would consider junk miles. Some were coached, and some just followed the guys with a coach. Despite training “junk miles” they would go out twice a week and hammer at the front. FWIW.

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Interesting observations. I generally get really grouchy and have a hard time dragging myself over the saddle when overtrained. I’ve been using a big brother strap to track sleep and that’s been really helpful to understand my sleep patterns generally. I definitely suck at sleeping after a really hard ride! Too sore to get comfortable.

That said, 140 CTL is amazing! Very impressive.

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I’ve explored the other solution space and this is all that’s left for me. I have a national hill climb coming up in a few months and I’m going to do a big fatmax block.

Currently will try and ramp up 150-160w work. The issue is that to do the same Kj, I’ll need like 40 hours a week, which I won’t be doing. So the absolute load will be less. But we’ll see if it works!

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I’m interested in your views on rest days.

e.g. 140 CTL can be achieved by 6 days per week of ~163 TSS with the 7th day as 0

Do you think that including a 0 TSS rest day every week would make much difference?

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What I think you have found here is actually more useful than a CTL ceiling. You have found the way your body tells you that the relationship between training load and recovery has started to break down.

There is an important difference.

CTL 140 was the external load. The repeated waking, changes in energy, mood, and eventually how the training felt were the internal response. That relationship is probably more valuable to you going forward than the CTL number itself.

I would also be a little careful about thinking of cruising altitude as one fixed number. I doubt you have a CTL of, say, 115 that is sustainable and 125 that is not. That boundary is going to move depending on how the load was created, how much intensity is in it, fueling, life stress, heat, sleep going into the block, and how many weeks you have already been carrying fatigue.

Two weeks at the same CTL can be physiologically very different.

The other thing I would pay close attention to at 16000 kJ a week is fueling. At that level of energy turnover, nutrition becomes part of the training load itself. You can finish the week in reasonable energy balance and still spend large portions of each day deeply underfueled. There is good evidence in male endurance athletes that this can alter the hormonal environment and suppress recovery even when total daily intake does not look obviously inadequate.

So if I were trying to find your cruising altitude, I would not immediately start climbing back toward 140.

I would first get sleep, mood, energy and normal ride sensations completely back to baseline. Then I would build again in small steps and hold each level long enough to see whether it is actually being absorbed.

The question I would keep asking is not, “Can I complete this training?”

It would be, “Is this same training still costing me the same amount?”

If your normal endurance power suddenly needs more concentration, RPE starts creeping up, heart rate behaviour changes, sleep starts fragmenting, motivation becomes less spontaneous, or you stop feeling normal between sessions, the internal cost is rising even if the power numbers still look fine.

That is usually the part athletes miss because performance can stay surprisingly intact for a while.

And your observation about sleep creating a loop is important. Once sleep starts deteriorating, the load that was marginally sustainable yesterday may no longer be sustainable tomorrow. Poor recovery lowers your capacity to absorb the next dose, which worsens recovery again. So by the time sleep has been bad for a week, the sensible response probably is not simply to find a slightly lower CTL. It is to restore the system first.

One other terminology point. If you came back reasonably quickly once you reduced the load, I would probably describe what happened as overreaching rather than true overtraining syndrome. True overtraining syndrome is the ugly end of the spectrum and can involve a prolonged performance decline lasting months.

But that does not make what you found any less useful.

If anything, you may now have something better than a target CTL. You have an early warning signature that is specific to you.

The trick now is learning how close you can operate to that boundary without repeatedly crossing it.

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Your 6×163 + a 0 day and a flat 7×140 land on the same CTL. It’s a ~42-day weighted average, so it can’t tell those two weeks apart.

The difference is what the number can’t see: one full recovery window a week vs. seven days that each carry a slightly bigger dose.

Easy to test, especially if sleep is your early warning: run 3–4 weeks with a fixed day off, then compare sleep the night after the rest day and how hard the next session feels at the same power. If both improve, keep the day off.

Side benefit: a fixed rest day is also your buffer. When life takes a session, you move it there instead of stacking load.

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Yeah i just use the words “over training” to mean just training too much. I still hit some power records.

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Exactly what I was going to say. At the systemic level where you’re tracking long term recovery or lack there of, the body doesn’t care too much about how the load is distributed throughout the week.

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I asked about your thoughts on the effect of a rest day after reading this piece on roadman cycling, featuring quotes (sometimes quotes aren’t in context of course) from Friel and Lorang.

Friel: Progressive overload and progressive recovery are not separate concepts — they are the same adaptation cycle. A training plan without explicitly designed recovery days is not a training plan; it is an accumulation schedule.

Lorang: Elite riders have more rest days than most amateurs assume. Blank days on the training plan are not accidents — they are the structural mechanism that allows the next hard session to actually be hard.

Maybe the approach to rest days differs at different stages of the base / build / specialty training cycle?

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Good luck with the HC event. Let us know how everything turns out.