Hi everyone, Graham here coming off the end of volume week of training, and since its the end of a volume week what better topic to talking about then the importance of not over training in the early parts of the pre-season. As many of you know, we the BSF Pro team, will have specific weeks through out our the pre-season that are designated as “volume weeks”, where the intensity of the sessions goes down and the quantity of sessions goes up. For many of us Nordies, this usually means there’s a fun running adventure or nice long roller ski around our hometowns. But for the most part these weeks are will be comprised of two sessions a day for five of the six days of the week with the last day being the big adventure day. While completing the prescribed sessions is good and will help with improve your shape going into the season, its important not to over do it and make yourself too fatigued going into the next week. It’s easy to fall into the trap of being on a roller skiing or run with your teammates and wanting to go with the crew that’s going longer, cause why not; the conversation is good or the jokes are rolling, why would you want to turn back and miss out on all the fun your having. The mean reason, your body might not be able to handle the load from going longer. You might feel a little more tired at the end of the workout but if you continue to “overtrain” in the pre-season, when you get closer to the season starting, your body won’t be able to perform at the level you want because its still trying to absorb the load you placed on it during the pre-season.
In addition to increased fatigue you might feel, you also increase the percentage of incurring some type of injury or becoming sick. The athletes that are most susceptible are those who don’t have the same number of years of training experience as another athlete but still try to do the same hours as the more experience athlete. The result is the less experienced and less trained athlete is at a great risk of hurting themselves or becoming sick as their body simply is unable to absorb the strain put on it. So, it is important for less trained and experienced athletes to know that they might need to end the session earlier then the more experienced athletes, so their body can properly absorbed the training session.
To bring it back to a personal level, this exact problem happened to me my first year on the BSF PRO Team. For most of my college career, I didn’t train more then 550 hours for the four years that I was at Bates College (go Bobcats). But in my first year I jumped up to a plan that had me doing 675 hours. Despite believing that this jump wasn’t gonna cause me any problems and I’d just pluck along and be successful when winter came around. I was wrong, and let me explain why; while the season was fairly successful, spent over 30 days that season being sick or injured. Most of those days came from me overdoing the training during the early season, and as a result I wasn’t able to perform at the level I wanted to when the season came about. Now I know that I’m painting over the topic of overtraining in the pre-season with a broad brush and there are more specific reasons why an athlete can become fatigued or sick during this time. But I hope that this provides and sheds some light on why its important not to over due it in the early season.
Catch y’all later!
Graham
