5 Ways to Recover From Overtraining—Without Losing All Your Fitness

If you’ve been running long enough, you’ve quite likely experienced it: Things have been progressing beautifully for months, then suddenly you have a bad race or bad workout. No big deal, you think. Bad days happen. Maybe I’ve been slacking. Maybe I need to train a bit harder. Then it happens again, only this time it’s worse. Then again, worse yet.

There are a number of possible reasons for this, but one possibility is that you’ve reached a point where training is actually bad for you. It’s called overtraining, and as a club coach, I’ve seen all levels of athletes deal with it. It can range from mild to severe. If done repeatedly over years, it can even lead to potentially dangerous disruptions of heart function, according to John Mandrola, a Louisville, Kentucky, cardiologist and coauthor of The Haywire Heart: How too much exercise can kill you and what you can do to protect your heart.

Overtraining is also extremely common. According to one 2015 study, nearly one-third of recreationally competitive runners will become significantly overtrained at least once in their lives. (For elite runners, the figure is more like 60 percent.) Even overtraining syndrome (OTS)—a condition marked by prolonged performance decline, injury, and fatigue—was once considered rare, but a 2025 study suggests it may be prevalent yet underreported. So if you’re here, wondering if a slump in your training might be due to overtraining, it very well may be. It can be difficult to get back on track, but with understanding, acceptance, and some strategy, you can rest your way back into feeling better and running well.

The Training Overload Spectrum

The mildest form is called overreaching and is sometimes done deliberately to produce a bounce-back called overcompensation, which, perfectly timed, can lead to a breakthrough. It takes advantage of the fact that training works via a cyclical process of stress and adaptation in which the body responds to stress by building back better, so long as the stress isn’t too great, and the recovery is not too short. It’s a delicate balance, but it’s common to many training programs.

When done accidentally, or too aggressively, it’s called non-functional overreaching, and instead of overcompensation, it produces overtraining. Norwegian marathon great Grete Waitz (nine-time winner of the New York City Marathon) called this condition “the plods.”

Initially, it’s minor—nothing a few days’ rest can’t cure. But the plods can quickly accelerate not only into “super” plods, but also to injuries, up to and including stress fractures and full-blown OTS. Allowed to persist, it can take months to resolve.

What Overtraining Does to Your Body

Overtraining isn’t the same as running long or hard and waking up with tired legs and sore muscles. That’s normal. It’s a cumulation of too much stress with too little recovery, says Jenn Randall, a physical therapist and 4:28 miler from Eugene, Oregon. She explains that it becomes serious when you’ve “been in that zone long enough you can’t come out of it.”

Physiologically, the causes are not fully understood. In part, of course, the body is repeatedly being broken down faster than it can rebuild. This is why weekly rest and recovery days are built into training programs.

Mild overtraining is probably nothing more complex than cumulative fatigue. More severe overtraining, however, may be due to muscle-cell damage that releases inflammatory agents called cytokines. These affect not only the overtrained muscles, researchers have suggested, but also the brain, liver, and immune system, which explains why the super plods can involve not only fatigue, but depression, susceptibility to infection, poor appetite, inability to concentrate, and even low iron.

Overtraining also appears to over-stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. That’s the part of the involuntary nervous system that slows the pulse, dilates blood vessels, and stimulates the GI tract, says Kelly Scott, an internal medicine doctor in Portland, Oregon.

“[Basically], it counteracts the sympathetic nervous system, which is driven by adrenaline,” she says. This can produce fatigue, depression, low heart rate, loss of motivation, weight loss, poor concentration, anxiety, and something one study described as “awakening unrefreshed.” In other words, the exact opposite of too much adrenaline.

How to Dig Yourself Out of an Overtraining Hole

The first step is to accept that it can indeed happen to you. In my coaching career, I have seen runners go into denial if I even remotely suggest they might be overtraining. But if your workouts stink, you’re feeling exhausted all the time, and you have no other health conditions, the answer is likely obvious. Once you’ve accepted what you’re dealing with, fixing it gets complex—but it is possible.

1. Realize that the only way out of the hole is to quit digging.

Yes, that’s a cliché, but it’s what far too many runners fail to do. Instead, when they have a bad performance, they often double down on working harder. When that produces an even poorer performance, they work harder yet, in an ever-descending spiral.

Jeff Simons, a sports psychologist at California State University, East Bay, suggests three reasons why runners tend to do this: (a) self-punishment, (b) trying to prove that their bad performance isn’t due to lack of effort, and (c) “the widely held belief that when outcomes are not good enough, the answer is always ‘more work [is] needed.’”

Randall suggests that the reflexive “work harder” reaction might be a bleed-over from other sports, like basketball, in which the proper response to something like poor free-throw shooting might be to practice thousands of free throws. In a skill sport, that makes sense, but in running, it’s counterproductive because running is a sport in which rest and recovery are particularly important.

2. Treat it like an injury.

My own immediate reaction to any signs of overtraining is to recommend three days off. You won’t get out of shape that quickly, and you might stave off a much longer layoff in the future. If that doesn’t work, you have no choice but to be patient. Perhaps you can still do reduced training, but the only cure for overtraining is rest and recovery (which, by the way, does not include super intense cross training).

Don’t just take it from me. Researchers from Mass General Brigham Hospital and the Mayo Clinic designed a return-to-run protocol in their 2025 study on overtraining syndrome. You’ll notice that a runner dealing with true OTS will have to take a full 12 weeks of total rest. While your best bet is to get a diagnosis or advice from a medical professional, this plan is a great blueprint to reboot your activity following a bout of overtraining. Even if you’re dealing with mild overtraining, using the phase 2 routine after a few days of rest is a safe way to ease back into training.

3. Keep the easy days truly easy.

When you climb out of the overtraining hole, it’s crucial to train smart to avoid digging yourself a new one. Randall calls this one of the things runners know but tend to forget. “They’re just so excited about [their goals] and want so badly to prove themselves that they forget to go easy on easy days.”

Monitoring yourself is key here, since many runners are prone to speeding through easy runs. Heart rate is an excellent tool to keep yourself in check.

4. Realize that overtraining isn’t just about too much running.

Running too much is only half the story. “It’s multifaceted,” Eugene, Oregon coach Bob Williams says. He explains that poor nutrition can play into it as can lack of sleep. “That’s one of the things that takes a back seat in the discussion,” Randall says, “but there’s really good research that getting adequate sleep really helps.”

Other factors that can tip you over the edge might be such otherwise happy events as marriage, the birth of a child, or buying your first house. Something I repeatedly tell my runners is “stress is stress.” At a deep level, the body doesn’t know the difference between too much running and a colicky child.

5. Develop a program for monitoring your fatigue.

The classic way is to record your resting heart rate before getting out of bed each morning. If it’s higher than normal, you are fatigued and may need more recovery. Another method is to chart your energy levels each day in your running log with emojis, numbers, words, or colors—anything that allows you to track the pattern of your fatigue versus recovery.