Undereating & Overtraining: A Dangerous Duo
Most athletes want to perform at their best. They train hard and fuel and refuel in a manner that supports the physique that’s best for their sport. Despite their best efforts, they sometimes end up disappointed. So they begin to train harder and restrict food to get even leaner.
And that’s where problems often begin. Are they overtraining? Why aren’t they losing weight? Are they eating the wrong combinations of foods at the wrong times? Should they be eating more to support their training? Or eating less to drop a few pounds? How can they lose weight?
At the American College of Sports Medicine’s recent annual meeting, speakers addressed the questions frustrated athletes have about how much to train to achieve maximal performance, lose undesired body fat, and stay healthy.
Some interesting answers and food for thought:
Restricting food intake while training hard might lead to leanness and lightness, but that might not make you a better athlete.
The “lighter is better” mantra that curbs many athletes’ food intake can hurt performance by injuring muscles and tendons and causing crippling fatigue. When the calorie intake needed to support performance is higher than the diet provides, athletes can experience deleterious outcomes. Sometimes, food restriction is purposeful, and other times, athletes struggle to find time to eat enough food to match the demands of their training.
Exercising in energy deficit for prolonged periods often means the body gets deprived of important nutrients—adequate protein to heal niggling injuries, adequate vitamins and minerals to support health, and enough grains and other carbs to resupply depleted glycogen stores.
Trent Stellingwerff, an overtraining researcher at the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific, has found that up to 70 percent of athletes can be underfueled. Many of today’s athletes report undereating carbs (supposedly because they’re fattening). Instead, they focus on eating more than enough protein. Declared Stellingwerff: “Athletes need to rethink that strategy, because the immune system needs adequate carbs and calories to function.”
When food intake is low and exercise volume is high, underfueled athletes may not lose body fat as expected because the body compensates for the imbalance.
Eimear Dolan of the University of São Paulo presented two examples of how the body seeks to conserve energy:
1) Endurance athletes who train six hours a day tend to spend the remaining 18 hours resting, doing sedentary activities, and sleeping. They fidget less. This decreased activity helps the body cope with the high level of training.
2) Male and female athletes experience a drop in reproductive function. With too little energy available to fuel normal physiological functions, females stop having regular menstrual periods and male athletes experience reduced libido, sperm density, and morning erections.
An accumulation of stress related to training (and life) can result in Overtraining Syndrome and a long-term drop in performance.
Overtraining Syndrome can take months or even years to resolve, said Justin Carrard of the University of Basel. He wasn’t talking about what happens at training camps, where athletes overreach typically to improve performance. Instead, he addressed what happens when athletes push too hard for too long and performance drops.
If you feel tired for weeks in a row and experience a drop in performance, consider taking some rest days. Training needs to be balanced with recovery, which allows for improved performance. Get enough sleep, eat enough nourishing food, and spend time having some fun.
The zeal of some athletes outstrips their body’s ability to adapt to the workload.
Exercise physiologist David Nieman of Appalachian State University has studied the effect of exercise on the immune system and illness. His conclusion: The immune system is very responsive to physiological stress.
With moderate activity, the immune system works effectively. With high exercise loads, such as marathons, immune function can decline and then bounce back. But when athletes push too hard for too long, the immune system can break down, and Overtraining Syndrome sets in.
Because doing research that can harm an athlete is unethical, Nieman studies athletes who overtrain on their own. Many of these overtrained athletes report symptoms similar to chronic fatigue or Long Covid: lethargy, muscle/joint pain, easy fatigability, exercise intolerance, brain fog, unrefreshing sleep. Some of these athletes take two to three years to recover. Is this because their immune system got exhausted?
Many ultrarunners competing in the Western States 100-miler managed to stay healthy, Nieman reported, but some generated levels of erosive metabolites (cytokines) that were as high as those in patients dying from Covid. Some athletes have high creatine kinase levels (indicative of high muscle damage); others, not much. Each person’s immune system is unique, so athletes need to find the sweet spot that enhances rather than hurts performance.
To minimize the development of Overtraining Syndrome, the IOC is initiating a surveillance system with guidelines for coaches and athletes. The guidelines encourage sufficient recovery time, sleep, nutrition, and hydration, as well as psychological strategies to manage stress. Most important: Don’t train when you’re sick.
If you exceed what your body can tolerate, you’ll have to climb out of that hole by exercising minimally and keeping other stressors under control. Consuming adequate fuel every day is an investment guaranteed to yield long-term benefits in performance.
That is science about which there’s absolutely no doubt.
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