Avoid Fitness Plateaus, Overtraining & Mis-Timed Performance Peaks

**Andy Galpin** (0:00)
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life.
Welcome to Perform.
Hello again, friends. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin, and I'm a professor of kinesiology in the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton. What we're gonna talk about today is an interesting conundrum that many of you have found yourself in, and I certainly know I have found myself in as well. And that is regarding rest, or taking a day off, or backing off of your workout.
You see, we have two conflicting streams of interest here. On one side of the equation, we're either being told, or our body is trying to tell us to be smart, right? Take a day off, back off. Don't be overly aggressive with your training. Listen to what your body's telling you.
On the other end of the equation, we're being told, hey, don't be mentally weak, and you gotta grind through things, and stick to the plan, and don't listen to your short-term immediate emotions, and get through the training.
And the answer is both of these are true. So how do you actually balance them? How do you train smart, but then also push through when you really don't wanna train, but you actually probably should? How should I understand? What do I need to know about my body and my physiology based on my goals to learn? What do I need to pay attention to? What should I measure? What should I monitor? What should I ignore? What is noise? What is actually signal? Now I would love to tell you, I have a complete and clear answer for all of you in all of your situations and goals, and I'll unveil to you those in our discussion today, but honestly, that's not gonna happen. What we can do though is learn a lot about these topics. We can learn a lot more about the physiology of plateauing, peaking and overtraining. We can learn in fact what these things actually are. What are some of the best in the people in the world doing to measure and monitor and intervene on these? And what are other tools and tactics that are scientifically supported that all of us can use? So within that, I want to talk about trying to optimize for muscle strength. We also want to talk about just general exercise, fitness and endurance and as many different areas of human performance as we possibly can. We're going to cover in this plateauing, peaking and overtraining. Within each one of these categories, I will talk about what these things are scientifically, what the physiology is behind them. Along the way, I will do my best to cover our three eyes. So we'll talk about how do we investigate and how do we measure. In other words, one example would be what actually is clinically officially overtraining versus maybe I'm a little bit tired and should back off a little bit. What is a deload versus what's a taper? Why do these things matter?
How should I measure these things? How should I identify if these situations are actually happening?
We'll of course cover the second eye, which is then how do I interpret these? What is actionable? What is not? Where these data matter? When they don't, when do they just noise? And then finally, of course, intervene. And by that, I mean specifically two areas, one being how do I prevent these things from happening in the first place? And then second, if it's already occurred, what strategies do I have to walk myself back to recover to fix these particular issue? So we'll cover as many of these topics as we can. We'll start off getting into plateauing. So we'll talk about why that occurs, again, physiologically, and what you can do about it. We'll then roll into peaking and making sure, in this particular case, what we're talking about is that you perform on your best on the given day. As you'll hear me say later, there's nothing worse than feeling fantastic prior to competition, and then a couple of days later showing up and feeling flat or slow. Or the opposite, you felt terrible in your race and two or three or four or five days later, you feel the best you've ever felt. So not only do we want you to compete well, but we want you to do that on the exact right day. And then finally, our third major category is going to be overtraining. What is it exactly? How do we predict, prevent, and then return back to performance if at all possible. So those are our three big areas today, and I'm excited to jump in. Now, before we go too much further, I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors because they make this show possible. Not only are they on this list because they offer great products and services, but because I actually personally love them and use them myself. Today's episode is brought to you by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink mix that has an ideal ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium, but has no sugar. Electrolytes are critical to proper hydration, which I've been harping on for years, but you can't do that by only drinking water. In fact, many of you will probably remember that I featured Element in my YouTube series on optimizing hydration all the way back in 2020, which is obviously long before this podcast even existed. So I've been a fan of Element for a long time. In fact, as Stuart listeners will also realize these hydration videos were the genesis of the Galpin hydration equation, named not by me, but by the legendary neuroscientist, Dr. Andrew Huberman. I featured Element in these videos because their blend of a thousand milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams potassium, and 60 milligrams magnesium really is different than any other electrolyte on the market and has great scientific support. However, I want to be ultra clear. 1000 milligrams of sodium is a lot, and not everyone needs that much. In fact, that may be way too much if you don't exercise or sweat much, already eat a lot of salt in your diet, say from a lot of processed foods, or otherwise have sodium-related medical concerns. I personally use the citrus and watermelon flavors, a ton, to pre-hydrate before heading out on a full day of training or a long hike or a hunt, since I know I'll be losing a bunch of fluids and won't have many opportunities to take things with me. Element has also just released a new line of canned sparkling element, which I am all about. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drinklmnt.com/perform to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/perform to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought to you by AG1. AG1 is a foundational nutrition greens supplement. What's that mean? It means that AG1 provides a comprehensive variety of vitamins, minerals, probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens in an easy to drink greens powder. Getting your nutritional right is hard for many people. I certainly know that I have clients who really struggle for whatever reason to get the proper nutrients from whole food sources. Now, AG1 is not a replacement for eating high quality whole foods, but it is a great foundational supplement for filling in the gaps where needed. I've also personally found that with many of my clients, AG1 helps move them just in the right direction for eating more high quality foods because it helps them with cravings, digestion and many other benefits. I especially personally like taking AG1 when I'm on vacation or traveling because it helps me just sort of stay on track with my nutrition. I know that missing a few days of getting the proper vitamins and minerals and other micronutrients is not a big deal at all. That's not really how those things work. But for me, again, I just like knowing that I'm kind of staying somewhat on track when I'm definitely not making the best nutrition and food choices of my life. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com forward slash perform to receive five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 plus K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com/perform to receive five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 plus K2. Okay, so let's jump right in. Now you might be thinking to yourself, why is he trying to cover plateaus, peaking and overtraining in one episode? And the reality of it is, it's because actually I can kind of consider them to be first cousins. They're not the exact same thing, and we do need to differentiate them. But the global physiology is actually very, very similar. You really can't understand one without understanding the other one. So we felt like it was best to cover them at a bit of a high level in one continuous episode. Now it's important to understand there is, when we hear stress, we tend to think of what I call active stress. But it's really important that we understand it's any change in stress that causes adaptation.