Managing Fatigue
One of the factors most thought about when it comes to planning an athlete’s training is how are they managing fatigue. Coaches and sports scientists are constantly assessing somebody’s fatigue based on how they’re performing, how future sessions will impact them, their lifestyle choices, work commitments and feedback. Managing fatigue is a fundamental element when it comes to getting fitter and performing better. To get better, the systems, mind and body, have to be placed under stress so that they can learn to adapt to greater levels of strain. The balancing act comes from the principle that there’s an optimal amount of stress required to improve. If there’s too much fatigue/stress, and an athlete starts overreaching, training will become non-functional and burnout will ensue. So, you can see the dilemma, how do you get the right amount of stress to progress, but not do too much so what you’re doing becomes counter-productive and detrimental to your goals and wellbeing.
The answer is learning to understand how to manage fatigue effectively and looking at the big picture. The training an athlete undertakes is one element of their life. Even if someone trains 24hours a week, that’s only 1 day out of the entire week. Granted it doesn’t quite work like that, but you get my drift? Usually what an athlete does outside their training will have a much greater effect on their energy levels, performance, state of stress and overall mood, to a much greater extent than the training itself. I’m a firm believer that under-resting is a much more apparent phenomenon than over-training. The purpose of this article is to help you understand how to manage fatigue levels better, how you should perceive fatigue, when you should and shouldn’t train, what you can do to improve your overall energy levels and how can you work with your coach in the best way possible to get the most from your training.
Orientation of sessions is key:
So, let’s start with how you’re training is planned. When I construct an athlete’s plan, each week, I start by assessing the previous week’s training and looking through feedback to ascertain how they’ve performed and what their energy levels are like. Basically, looking at what fatigue levels are from multiple angles. This provides the basis for what the following week’s training is going to entail, eg is it going to be a similar week, can we progress the training or does more recovery time need put in place. From there, it’s a case of plotting out the week with hard training sessions that will stress the athlete, aerobic training that will build overall fitness and recovery sessions that will facilitate progression. These sessions are all carefully plotted in the calendar and every session has a purpose. The goal is to create fatigue in the harder sessions and then create recovery time in-between them.
This usually means that an athlete should actually feel most fatigued during recovery sessions or easier training.
Mindset is an important factor to consider when managing fatigue. Athletes commonly look at easy sessions and think, “that’s an easy session so I’ll feel good for that”. This is the wrong approach, as the easy session has been placed there because the coach knows that the athlete will feel tired and will only be capable of an easy session. If an athlete goes into this sort of session thinking it’ll be easy, because it’s a low intensity session, there’s the potential for them to misinterpret their feelings, question their fitness, fatigue and so on. Understanding when it’s good to feel tired and when you shouldn’t be, is half the battle. The success or ability to complete a session, shouldn’t be defined by how you feel going into it.
When should you miss a session or carry on with the plan?
This leads me on to the next part of fatigue management, when should you miss a session or change up the plan. We’ve just discussed that easy training will be placed on days when fatigue levels will be high. Not only will the coach have thought about fatigue from training, they’ll have also thought about the fatigue that’s come from other factors in your life. So, should you miss a low intensity training session because you’re tired, stressed or generally feeling a bit down? In 99% of the situations the answer is no. Easy training is normally planned when your coach thinks you’ll be tired based on the stresses of life and the impact of training. Aerobic, or low intensity training is not only important for improving your fitness and facilitating recovery, it’s essential for your overall health. This type of training stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system and counteracts any negative feelings you may have. In reality, we need to train aerobically every day to stay healthy and maintain a good lifestyle. In addition to this, the decline in physiological markers, such as plasma volume, from not doing any training for a couple of days can be significant. For many athletes, learning to understand that it’s ok to feel tired before, or even during training, is ok. If we only trained when we felt good, we’d probably never train. You won’t wake up feeling motivated, you normally have to go an find it.
So, what about the times when you should change up the plan or miss a session? I would personally only miss an easy session if I was seriously unwell or a muscle or tendon was so tight that I might tear it. I will never miss one from fatigue, lack of motivation or low mood levels as I know I’ll always feel better for it in the long run and pay the price if I don’t do it. This isn’t a compulsive need to train, it’s understanding the simple fact that aerobic exercise will improve my quality of well-being. What I am flexible with is when I’ll do a hard session. As already mentioned, training only works if it’s functional and you can recover from it.
“You only get fitter from the sessions you recover from.”
There are same days where it’s not feasible to push myself hard, as I don’t have the energy or motivation to do it. On these days, I just drop the intensity and do an aerobic based session.
Many athletes feel guilty if they don’t do a hard session or beat themselves up about it. My advice is, take the emotion out of it and look at the big picture. If there’s a genuine reason as to why you can’t do the session because of something outside your control, so be it. Make the most of the situation and just do something easy. If the reason you couldn’t do the session has been within your control, eg you didn’t eat the right nutrition to prepare for the session, learn from it and change it. We all make mistakes and we’ll place excess fatigue on ourselves unnecessarily through errors in judgement all the time. There’s nothing wrong with this, but if you’re committing to a goal, take the time to learn how you can move forward and make the most from your efforts.
Train hard, rest harder:
Most of us know that stress is necessary to stimulate adaptations and that acute stress is good. Our capacity as human beings to cope with new challenges is immense. However, there is an optimum level of pressure required to consistently progress. Hard training is effectively pointless without adequate recovery.
The single most important factor in determining whether or not an athlete will progress is their ability to absorb the load they’re placed under.
This brings us to the notion of train hard, but recover harder. A fairly profound concept for many to think about is you’ll only get benefits from the sessions that you recover from. Treating recovery like training is one of the fundamental principles of fatigue management. Everything you do in between training sessions will affect how well your recover from the previous bout of exercise and your readiness to perform in the next.
When it comes to optimising recovery, there are many factors out with our control but there are many that are within our realm of influence. Sleep, nutrition, stretching, time away from screens and active recovery are all essential mechanisms when it comes to recovery. The main takeaway is that there’s no magic pill, no wonder diet or recovery supplement. It’s a case of starting with all the basics of best practice recovery and employing them on a daily basis. For those who consistently struggle with high levels of fatigue, it’s usually a case of looking at what you’re doing in your daily life and what can you change that’s in your control. Stress will be a part of your life, trying to eliminate isn’t always the way forward. Cancelling out the ‘noise’ and learning to perceive stress in a positive light can be a big step for many.
If you have a coach, work with them to find out how you can optimise your recovery. A very wise man said to me, “it’s much easier to put out a match than a bonfire.”
Many of us struggle on and let stress build and build before eventually becoming overburdened by it. This is both difficult for an athlete and coach to handle as there’s no clear answer as to what is causing the issue. This can lead to irrational and emotional decisions which won’t solve problems. As a coach, high quality athlete feedback is an essential tool for establishing fatigue levels. When I say high quality feedback, I mean informed and concise information that provides a picture of how intensities felt and what the state of mind was like. Doing this consistently enables a coach to help an athlete find solutions to problems and ways of handling fatigue better.
Main Takeaways:
Everyone faces ebbs and flows in energy and no one is immune from having to deal with stress, anxiety and fatigue. The defining factors that separate us are how we deal with those pressures, how we interpret information and what mechanisms we put in place to develop good habits.
Not only is fatigue management essential to progressing in sport, it’s essential to achieving in life. I see so many people undertake goals or challenges that either don’t achieve what they’ve set out to do or don’t enjoy what they’re doing. The result is burnout, anxiety, stress and a total loss of motivation. Learning how to deal with fatigue, acknowledging that stress is good and maximising recovery time are all mechanisms to enhancing your quality of life and sporting endeavours.
· Prioritise aerobic training: we need to do aerobic training every day to facilitate recovery, improve cognitive function, maintain good metabolic health, improve endurance and enhance our mental wellbeing. Understanding that it’s ok to feel tired on easy days is an important switch to flick, manage your perception of fatigue.
· Every session has a purpose and consistently missing certain sessions, and prioritising some, will reduce the chances of attaining goals.
· There is no wonder trick to preventing fatigue. We have to look at all elements and focus on getting the basics right in order to feel better.
· Use your support system in the right way. Don’t let stress build up and then overflow. Create a continuous flow of feedback that enables you to find solutions to problems in a rational way.
· Treat recovery like a training session; it requires planning, attention to detail and key actions until it becomes automatic and you don’t have to think about it anymore.
· The basics are key: improve nutrition/sleep/exercise
· Cancel out the noise in your life: reduce your time in front of screens, stop sending messages/emails and doing work late at night.
I hope this helps you look at fatigue in a new perspective. We need stress and pressure to improve, but we also need to know when to stop and how to give our body and mind the rest bite needed to move forward.