Why You Should Train Less, According to a Coach

Many athletes believe that the more time they spend in the gym, the fitter and more competitive they’ll be, but that's usually not the case.

“Practice makes perfect” is a dangerous narrative underlying the culture of endurance training. Many athletes believe that the more time they spend in the gym, the fitter and more competitive they’ll be.

It’s an idea that works until it doesn’t.

Skylar Allen, a 28-year-old from Minneapolis, Minnesota, began running in college, after years as a figure skater pushed her toward body dysmorphia and an eating disorder. “I struggled with restriction, which was eventually diagnosed as anorexia, for about eight years.”

Eventually, anorexia morphed into bulimia. But when she started running in 2014, Allen says she wasn’t ready to face those issues yet. Instead, running became another way for her to justify behaviors she knew might not be healthy. “When I was having a terrible day, I’d go to the gym the way an alcoholic goes to the bottle,” she says.

By 2020, in the midst of a graduate program in mathematics, Allen recognized the imbalance in her life and started seeking treatment.

Allen and I met on her path to recovery. As a coach at Treeline Endurance, which I founded in 2018, I help athletes tap into their fitness potential with a heavy focus on long-term sustainability. In that time, I’ve seen athletes like Allen harmed in their quest for success by an implicit message shared by coaches and influencers: if you want to perform better, you need to train more than you are right now.

On one hand, research shows that more time spent practicing our sport is crucial to performing our best. On the other, obsessing over physiology can cause athletes to neglect the things in their lives that keep them grounded, from time with friends to taking care of their mental health.

“I’ve fallen into this trap of ‘more training is always better,’” says another one of my clients, Aidan McCarthy, a 28-year-old trail runner based in Salt Lake City, Utah. “Before I was coached, I would go for way too long without taking a rest week, and I often wouldn’t take one at all until I came down with a cold or my body was so tired it forced me to.”

As a running coach, time and again, I’ve seen the story play out in athletes who ramp up their training time as far as their schedules allow. Once they begin to max out that time, they start repurposing time they used to put elsewhere. First goes strength training. Next, some of their leisure, recovery, or family time. I’ve even seen some pull back from their local running group just to save 30 minutes of commute time to add back into their run.

But more isn’t always better. When athletes cut into the time previously spent on activities that enhance mental and social health, they compromise the quality of their training reduce their ability to adapt to their training, and ultimately make training less fun. Studies have shown that one of the most common outcomes of overtraining is a loss of enjoyment for not just the sport, but life in general.

McCarthy considers the nuance of it. He believes that, generally speaking, volume pays off. “I get better results training for twelve hours a week than for five, but is fifteen better than twelve?” asks McCarthy. “Major signs for me that I am starting to overreach are unexplained irritability and low motivation to train.”

McCarthy completed his hardest event to date last August at the 40-mile Telluride Mountain Run. The notorious mountain race features more than 14,000 feet of vertical ascent and descent. And yet, in a major departure from his running-only training approach of the past, almost a third of his preparation came on the bike in the canyons of the Wasatch Range.

As athletes, we need to reject more-is-better culture. In doing so, we’ll become happier, healthier, and maybe even better at our sport. By choosing to go for a bike ride rather than force another lap on our normal running route—or take on a hard strength session, knowing it’ll take a couple of days to feel ready for another big-volume endurance day—we allow the body to recover in one way, and be pushed in another. We introduce variety mentally and keep our training exciting, rather than allowing it to become just another job.

Today, Allen’s eating disorder is in recovery, and she’s learning to add an element of balance to her training. In addition to her continued growth as an ultrarunner, she’s now an enthusiastic member of her local CrossFit community. “I used to ask myself what I could cut out of my life to give myself a little more time to focus on training,” she says. “At some point, I asked myself what it would be like if I did the opposite. Can I use the same discipline to keep a healthy balance?”

If you are struggling with eating and body image in any way, you do not have to suffer alone. Consider reaching out to the National Eating Disorders Association’s Helpline, which is available via text, phone, or chat.

posted Saturday July 6th
by Outside On Line