You are taking rest days but still feel tired and can't hit your targets.
- Emma O'Toole
- Aug 2
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 3
Taking regular rest days but still feeling exhausted can be frustrating for runners and cyclists. In many cases, the problem is not a loss of fitness but accumulated fatigue or non-functional overreaching, where your total training and life stress exceed your ability to recover. This article explains the difference between normal training fatigue and non-functional overreaching, the warning signs to look for, and when reducing your training load may help you recover and perform at your best again.
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TRAINING BREAKDOWN
"You start questioning whether you need a week off, whether you've "lost it", or whether you're overtraining."
By Emma O'Toole
I received this as a DM in my messenger inbox 2 weeks ago and I know that Dave is certainly not alone in feeling like this, heck I know I’ve felt like it in the past! It’s demotivating and you start questioning whether you need a week off, whether you've "lost it", or whether you're overtraining.
In reality, what many runners and cyclists call 'overtraining' is often accumulated fatigue or what's known as non-functional overreaching and it’s a tough spot to be in! If you continue pushing through excessive fatigue and accumulating more stress than you're recovering from, you're at greater risk of illness, injury and impaired recovery, with hormonal disruption occurring in some cases if the imbalance persists. However, if you pull back too much when you are just tired, you’ll lose fitness you did not need to lose.
So today I want to give you a few things to think about to help you tell the difference!
The first thing I asked Dave about was what a typical training week looked like for him around his other commitments. Not just what sessions he does, but how he fits them into a typical week.
Dave drafted out what a typical week looks like for him, although hastened to add that is isn’t fixed every week because he has kids and well, kids are kids!
Then I asked about his life outside of training and his usual commitments over the past six weeks and this is where it gets interesting.
The last five weeks had been really busy. He’d had children's parties most weekends, his youngest had started rugby club Saturday mornings, work had gotten unpredictably busier for him and of course the heatwave that stormed through the UK and Europe, which if you have been training through it you will know is a whole extra layer of physiological stress on top of everything else that also impacted his sleep.
None of these things felt hugely significant in isolation, except arguably the weather, but Dave was used to training first thing in the morning so he avoided peak heat. However, all of these on top of Dave’s training block where he was building towards a road race certainly added up.
This is something I come back to a lot: training does not happen in a vacuum! The stress from your sessions does not exist in isolation from everything else going on in your life. Work pressure, poor sleep, busy weekends, emotional load, heat, all of these draw from the same recovery resource pool as your training. When life gets busier, the training load your body could previously handle comfortably can suddenly become too much, even if the training itself has not changed.
Remember, training provides the stimulus, but the adaptations you want happen during your recovery. If your recovery is consistently compromised, you're still accumulating fatigue but you're no longer getting the full benefit of the time and effort that you're putting in.
Dave has been working with a sports dietician for the past 6 months so is well-supported here. However, when he reached out he felt like he was running on empty because the total load on his system, training plus life, had outpaced what his body could recover from and adapt to. Not only that but he admitted that he'd started dreading opening TrainingPeaks because he already felt as though he'd failed before he’d even got his bike out the garage.
Next up, I looked at the data.
Dave's resting heart rate had been elevated compared with his normal baseline for several weeks. His HRV had also become more variable, with some larger drops that we could pinpoint to a (few) pints supporting England in the World Cup, but overall the trend was gradually lower than his normal baseline.
When Dave was out on the bike, his heart rate was not responding to effort the way it normally would. The sessions felt genuinely hard, his perceived effort was high, but his heart rate and power did not reflect that.
For endurance athletes, this pattern, high perceived effort with a blunted cardiovascular and performance response, can be a sign that something more than normal tiredness is going on.
I then asked when Dave last had a deload week and Dave said he didn’t really know. He felt as if he didn’t really “deserve” one because he hadn’t been “working hard” and hitting the targets in not only his key sessions, but in the vast majority of his sessions.
This is where I want to pause, and explain quickly, as this is a whole entire newsletter on its own, that your FTP or your threshold pace for runners, whilst a valuable metric to base your sessions on, is not the bee-all and end-all. If that FTP and threshold pace got set months ago or even recently but in a period where your life looked pretty different to what it looks like now, eg. more time to train, less general life stress, those numbers may no longer reflect what your body is capable of producing on that particular day, which is why you need to take a more balanced approach to the metrics you use.
For Dave, the answer was clear once we looked at it together: he needed a recovery week and then a progressive build back into training.
Worth highlighting: a recovery week doesn’t have to be a complete week off! It is, however, a substantial planned reduction in volume and intensity that gives your body and mind the opportunity to recover for you to come back stronger. This is different to a deload week, and if you’d like to learn more about those head over to my free community.
Dave took the recovery week and focused on “no targets rides” where he just enjoyed being out on the bike again for a couple of hours and from there we introduced a 10 day rolling training plan instead of his typical 7 day plan to give him a bit of breathing space whilst his life outside of training was busy. Within circa twelve days he was back hitting his numbers and feeling like himself again!
Dave could have spent the next four weeks pushing through, only to become increasingly frustrated as his training continued to suffer and he dug himself even deeper into a hole. Instead, he’s taken the recovery week, been open minded to a more
flexible 10 day training plan and he’s feeling more like himself again.
If you’re unsure if how your feeling is normal tiredness or non-functional overreaching. Here is a (non-exhaustive) simple self assessment. Make sure you’re honest with yourself when you go through it!
Am I just tired? Tick what applies:
☐ I feel tired but can still complete my sessions at an appropriate effort level.
☐ My resting heart rate is within my normal range.
☐ On well-rested days, I can still achieve my usual training paces, powers or effort levels.
☐ My mood is generally stable even if I feel a bit flat.
☐ I'm generally sleeping well and waking feeling reasonably refreshed.
☐ My heart rate variability is largely steady.
☐ My motivation to train is a little lower than usual but it is still there.
If most of these apply, you are probably just tired. A good sleep, a deload week and appropriate nutrition will go a long way!
Am I non-functional overreaching? Tick what applies:
☐ During sessions, the effort feels much harder than it normally would for the pace, power or heart rate I'm producing.
☐ My resting heart rate has been persistently elevated compared with my normal baseline for several consecutive weeks, not just one or two readings after a hard session.
☐ My performance has been declining despite consistent training and I don’t see an improvement even when I feel reasonably rested.
☐ My sleep is disturbed or unrefreshing even when I have the opportunity to rest properly.
☐ My mood has shifted, I feel irritable, flat, or low in a way that feels different to normal tiredness.
☐ I have lost my enjoyment of training, not just motivation but the actual pleasure of being out on the road, trail, or track.
☐ I am picking up minor illnesses or infections more frequently than usual.
☐ My heart rate variability has generally been lower than my normal baseline.
☐ My usual rest days or easier days no longer leave me feeling recovered.
☐ My muscles feel persistently heavy or sore in a way that is not resolving with rest days.
If you are ticking several of these, that is feedback worth listening to.
None of these signs on their own diagnose non-functional overreaching or overtraining syndrome, but when several occur together and persist, they're worth paying attention to and discussing with your coach or healthcare professional.
I hope this blog post has been helpful, for years the message in the endurance world was “shut up legs”, “do more”, “train harder”. Sometimes the best thing that you can do for your performance is to take a step back so you can come back even stronger.
If you need help with your training, please reply to this email or head over to my free coaching community for advice.
Happy running and riding!
Emma x
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Pretty much exactly how I've been feeling lately