There’s three major ways that people get overtrained and three different ways that you should respond to it.

Warning

Please don’t let this be a substitute for the advice of a physician.

The Single Difficult Workout

This kind of overtraining happens under two circumstances.

The first circumstance is the planned circumstance. You know that you are going to push your body beyond what it has done before or what it has done in a long time. Hopefully, you will succeed in reaching the level of exertion that you desire.

The second circumstance is when you are undertrained due to a lack of exercise, and you workout again for the first time after a long time, and you find yourself sore after the workout.

In either case, you should only need a short rest. If you had planned the event, then you will probably want to take it easy after your next workout. If you haven’t worked out for awhile, then you may want to back off and you certainly don’t want to push yourself harder.

Joint Pain

Temporary muscle soreness usually isn’t a big deal, but joint pain is usually a bad sign. If you’re feeling joint pain when you’re working out (or after), you should consider that you may be doing something wrong. It may be that you are not performing an exercise properly, or it may be that you have an injury that needs rest or treatment. You should avoid exercises that cause joint pain and speak to your physician to find out what is wrong

Chronic Pain

Chronic pain in joints or muscles should always be a concern. If you feel pain all the time, and you constantly find yourself reaching for NSAIDs, then you should probably consider stopping all exercise until you can talk to a doctor.

Conclusion

If you want to get in shape, then you can’t be a wimp. But once you’re in shape, you need to realize that nothing lasts forever. Working out to set personal records is for the young. Working out to maintain health is for the old. Age comes early for the aggressive athlete. And part of the challenge of working out when your old is having enough sense not to overextend yourself.

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If you live someplace with a climate that is warm all year, then you probably won’t want to bother reading this.

But if you live someplace where snow has begun falling on the ground, and you don’t want to deal with another winter of trying to figure out how to keep all the conditioning that you have built up through the fall months then keep reading.

If you are normally someone who embraces the outdoors and strives to improve their endurance, then consider a period where you try to develop your anaerobic abilities. Unless you’re training for the Boston Marathon, rather than beating yourself up by trudging through snow; on days that snow begins to fall, start trying some indoor workouts.

I’m not expecting you to hang up your running shoes, but if you want to minimize your risk for injury and avoid overuse injuries, then winter is the time to work on athletic abilities that you’ve been ignoring.

You don’t have to head indoors right away. You can wait for nature to tell you what to do. Wait for the first day that it snows or it is just really cold, and instead of doing your normal cardio routine, try some calisthenics.

As you find it’s more difficult to spend time outdoors, you can keep doing more indoor workouts as a substitute for your cardio routines. When it gets really bad, you may want to just head out once a week or even once every other week for a long walk. Try hiking through areas where the extra snow provides unique challenges.

You can progress through your indoor routine by either adding reps to your calisthenics or if you have weights, you can use fewer reps and add weight.

When it gets warmer out, although you may find that your endurance has depreciated, you might also find that the change in routine has healed injuries and perhaps even prevented injuries that you may have incurred had you not changed to an indoor routine.

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