Athletes Showing ‘Overtraining’ Symptoms Often Perform Better—When to Push Through Fatigue (and When to Pull Back) (Dan Plews #31)

**John Paton** (0:00)
Okay, Dan, welcome back to the show. Let's talk about your training. So I know you've been recovering from an injury. How's the recovery been going?

**Dan Plews** (0:08)
Oh, we're going to start off with my training. I was hoping we're going to talk about your training first, John, to be honest, but that's all right. That's okay. One of these times I'm going to introduce the show and start it that way. Yeah, but it's been going well, actually. Obviously, I had my double toe operation three weeks yesterday, actually, three weeks yesterday, it was. And I took, so I had it on the Wednesday and I took four days of absolutely nothing. And then I had a rule, and you know, as I talked about something is better than nothing, I had a rule that for that period, I was obviously pretty mobile because I had these surgical shoes on that I couldn't really do very much in. I had a rule that I would just go into the gym every day and do it and be in there for an hour, and it didn't matter what I did, I just need to be in there for an hour and I do what I want. So I took all the pressure off doing anything specific, and I did a bit of ski, did what basically I started with just putting my feet on the pegs of the assault bike, a bit of push press, a bit of bench press, did what I could without trying to get overly sweaty because I had bandages around my feet and stuff. And then just over 10 days later, I had the boots off and then I started moving again properly. And it's actually been remarkable how little fitness I lost. And I swear because I just was doing those small amounts every day, made a massive difference. Something is so much better than nothing. And I said this time and time again is that the difference between doing nothing in 10 minutes is huge. And so yeah, I was very happy. So I did, started with biking. I mean, my biking was good.
I rode for almost three hours the day after I had the boots off. And yesterday I did a three hour, 10 minute ride and averaged 270 watts for three hours. So that's pretty decent with 124 heart rates. And it shows up my aerobic conditioning hasn't really gone down. And then today I ran for the first time for 25 minutes. And what was remarkable is that when I was doing, this is quite a bit of a side story, but when I was doing my, when I was in, when I was kind of immobile, I was doing a bit of bench press.
And the listeners will laugh because my bench press is really bad, but I'm like, it's just my, I just cannot. I mean, bearing in mind that when I first started doing Hyrox, I couldn't do 160 kg bench press for one. Like that's how weak I wasn't the other body from Ironman training. So really weak. But I've always struggled with the bench press and I was doing 10 sets of 10 I was doing 10 sets of 10 with only 45 kilos. So it wasn't really hard, but I went back to doing bench press again, heavier. And usually I'd struggle for sets of eight with 60 kilos. And it was flying, flying up. So 10 sets of 10, German volume training, GVT, get amongst it.

**John Paton** (2:52)
Okay, 10 sets of 10 with 80 kg on the bar. Nice.

**Dan Plews** (2:55)
No, no, no, 45 kg on the bar.

**John Paton** (2:57)
Oh, with 45 kg on the bar.

**Dan Plews** (2:58)
45 kg. Yeah, so not very much. Yeah, but the high volume, German volume training. Adam Story, co-founder of Endurox, talks about it in, I think he talks about it on the RocksLife podcast, old traditional German volume training. And I thought I'd give it a crack, but it seemed to work, so there you go. And what about you, John? Let's get into what the listeners really want to hear. No one wants to hear about my training. Okay.

**John Paton** (3:21)
All right. So, yeah, so on my end, so we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. So my goal has been to simply increase training volume. And this is something you were really clear about. You were like, John, for someone at your level, you're going to see a lot of progress just by increasing hours, even if that's out of relatively low intensity. So that's what I've been focusing on. And if I look back at my last 12 weeks, I'm now up to around 86 hours over the last 12 weeks, which is about seven and a half hours a week. And that's up, I think, around 40% for what it was in the previous 12 weeks. So it's getting there. The volume is coming up.