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11 DEC 2025

Learn the signs to avoid costly delays in 2026

In the past decade, endurance athletes began tossing around the term “overtrained” with alarming regularity. “I was overtrained so I had to skip my last race of the year,” or “I’m overtrained so I’m taking a short break from training” are statements I’ve heard more often recently. Don’t get me wrong, I am always happier to hear when athletes are resting, because endurance athletes tend to train too hard, train too much, and not rest enough, so regardless of if “overtraining” is the right term, more rest is often preferable than less.

We’re also at the tail end of the Northern Hemisphere racing season, when athletes feel the push and pull of a year of fatigue contrasted with the excitement of “next season,” when all the training will go to plan and each race will drop neatly into place. Rainbows and unicorns will sprout from your handlebars and arc over the pool. December can be as naïve and hopeful as a Red Sox fan pre-2004, or anyone who ever had to say “El año proximo en Havana.”

But overtraining syndrome (OTS from here on out, please) is an “extremely rare” affliction, even in the world of endurance sports, and it has a little sibling that is more likely what you’ve been dealing with. Does it seem that I’m splitting hairs? Very likely, but the treatments for OTS and its more common relation, “Non-functional Overreaching,” (NFO) are quite different. OTS, as you will see, can require up to a year or more of recovery and in some cases can completely end an athlete’s career. NFO, on the other hand, resolves after a short period of rest.

A short period of rest, you say? Like the one offered by the end of the training season here in our colder Northern Hemisphere? It’s no surprise that I dedicate much ink (ink? Pixels?) this time of year to haranguing my athletes and you, dear reader, to take a significant break to recover from the season just ended. I schedule year-end meetings with athletes to make sure that they are planning to take a break, and I use those meetings to talk them through what a break actually looks like. Today I hope to scare all of you into taking a break yourself, as well as clearing up the difference between healthy training (”functional overreach” or FO), NFO, and OTS.

Ready? Let’s begin.

What are OTS and NFO?

Get ready to be alarmed. “OTS appears to be a maladapted response to excessive exercise without adequate rest, resulting in perturbations of multiple body systems (neurologic, endocrinologic, immunologic) coupled with mood changes…OTS may be caused by systemic inflammation and [has] subsequent effects on the central nervous system including depressed mood, central fatigue, and resultant neurohormonal changes.”

Yowza. I hope you can drag out of that thicket of words that OTS is BAD. Along with those effects on your brain and nervous system, endocrine system, and immune system, OTS comes along, unsurprisingly, with a deep impact on your performance. The scientific literature differentiates OTS from NFO in how long it takes to recover from this performance and physiological abyss, with recovery from OTS taking “months to years.” Yikes. So if you’re claiming you’re overtrained and just need “a little break” then you’re probably not overtrained.

NFO, on the other hand, is bad but not quite as bad. Psychological, neuroendocrinological, and drops in performance also appear, but not to the depth and length of OTS. Unrecognized, however, NFO very likely leads to OTS.

This is why I want you to take a break. Endurance training is hard, and athletes pack a lot of events and training into a single season, regardless of whether they are amateurs or elites. If you take a good, significant break at the end of the season, you set yourself up in a great place to avoid NFO and OTS next season, although it doesn’t insulate you entirely—functional overreaching (a fancy term for “good training”) requires regular periods of recovery to achieve the supercompensation we aim for in endurance training, so you can’t just take a two-week break now and expect to not need to rest for the rest of the season. NFO is synonymous with “long-term overreaching,” which is another fancy term for “bad training.” Say it with me, folks:

In order to actually let the training soak in and change your body, you need to rest.

Symptoms of OTS and Diagnosis

Ok, well, that's terrifying. Obviously ALL of these by themselves can affect your performance (not to mention your LIFE), but if OTS can cause all of these...we need to really keep an eye on it.

Unfortunately, it's hard to diagnose whether you've got NFO or OTS until you take a break. OTS is characterized by no recovery of performance, even after prolonged rest. NFO, on the other hand, seems to resolve within weeks or a month or two of resting. But if we have to wait until you're, well, F-ed to diagnose, that doesn't help us much ahead of time. The only real-time indicator is "the ability to start but not complete a training session, along with the absence of any 'finishing kick' in that session." If you're like me, that could be many sessions I encounter in a year, so although that heuristic can provide a little information, it isn't hugely helpful.

Happily, there IS a tool out there that can help. It’s called the Profile of Mood States (POMS) questionnaire, and in two studies involving swimmers using the questionnaire predicted or identified the warning signs of OTS effectively. The POMS test involves 65 questions where you score how you’re feeling subjectively from 0-4 on a variety of mood indicators (tense, angry, worn out, unhappy, proud, etc…). Once you’re done the test groups those indicators into categories and gives you a score for each category and a total score, which is called Total Mood Disturbance or TMD.

Unlike generalized anxiety test or one that measures depression, there isn’t a standard rubric for letting you know where you are at, so using the test throughout the season is a good way to see how you’re doing. Lower scores are better, so if the number begins creeping up continuously, that’s a sign you might want to back things down a touch. Also, you can have a look at this graph here that shows that higher performers usually have a spike in the center of the graph, where the more desirable mood states live. Less successful performers (the study identified the athletes with the highest TMD, which is undesirable, as athletes at the "club" level, or between recreational/participatory and elite) display a flatter curve.

If you'd like a copy of the questionnaire to use for yourself, you can grab one below:

​Profile_of_Mood_States_POMS_questionnaire.pdf​

As usual, this is starting to go on a bit, but if you've made it to the end, remember that there are two ways I can help you avoid NFO and OTS in 2026: I've got ONE spot left for 2026 coaching before all inquiries go to my waitlist, and attending our Bend Triathlon Training Camp will show what a significant training block with adequate recovery looks like, so you can reprise that knowledge in your own training.

Let's get you fast, happy, and keep you healthy,

Chris

As always, thanks for reading.

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