Q - Power
Indoor Rowing Team
Fatigue (4b)
A good illustration of overtraining can be seen below. Hopefully, having been caught reasonably early, recovery should be fairly swift with a minimal disruption to performance development.
The light blue line shows daily RMSSD data. It moves around quite a lot from day to day which is to be expected. The 30 day averge (the thicker blue line) shows a mild downward trend throughout what was a heavy summer of distance training (as part of the indoor rowing season which is offset from the on-water season). However despite the gentle trend, the athlete regular records good daily figures from time to time, and performance during this period was good.
However there is a marked change which occurs on 18th August. RMSSD figures plummet, but more concerningly they are not able to return to an above-average reading for an increasing number of consecutive days.
Intervention occurred after about 5 days with a significant reduction in training volume, a slight reduction in general intensity, and the removal of all time trials from the schedule. After a week there was still no sign of a rebound, resulting in a 100% increase in rest days and yet further reductions to about 25-30% of standard training volume. In the last 48 hours of the recorded data one can make out what is hopefully the beginnings of recovery.
One can see a fairly similar pattern from the total power data (in green) which is derived from a frequency domain analysis of the data collected from the HRV protocol.
It is interesting to consider what happens to heart rate (in red) at the onset of overtraining. In the first week that signs of overtraining were present (18th-25th Aug) we see a substantial collapse in RMSSD data. However over that first week there is no significant change in heart rate. It is only in the second week that heart rate shows a marked increase from around 58bpm to 68bpm. Thus an alteration to the training schedule was made 2 days before there was any evidence that the athlete was struggling from heart rate data alone.
Notwithstanding the reduction in training, in the second and third weeks the athlete reported a reduction in both motivation and quality of sleep.
After consultation with the athlete, the most likely cause of the additional stress which tipped the athlete over the edge was a sustained increase in ambient temperature and humidity which was not factored into the athlete's training to an adequate degree. Hopefully a reasonably rapid response to the circumstances will minimise the impact on the athlete's progress.
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