Pushin too hard?

Happy New Year one and all. 2K9 was rife with mostly good stuff and just enough not so good stuff to make me really appreciate the good stuff.  Here I am going into a new year, hopefully armed with the knowledge gained from mistakes of last year.

There are some things I can do nothing about so, a pox on those things. But there are some things I can control. My fitness is one of those things. Although I am still, "faster than some and slower than most" becoming slower than everyone is not a goal I hope to achieve. After reading a list of over training indicators it became apparent that over training is an issue I need to tackle in 2010.
Here are some notable red flags :

• Plateaus within your workouts and race results
• Inability to sleep even though you are physically and mentally fatigued
• Not able to wake up without the assistance of an alarm
• Feeling heavy and lethargic when you wake up
• Decreased desire to train at any level of intensity
• High resting heart rate in the morning even after a day of low intensity workload
• Inability to finish an easy workout without feeling like the effort was hard
• High heart rate while exercising at a low intensity
• Appetite and other natural desires are reduced
• Increased desire for simple sugar
• Loss of more than 5 pounds of body weight within a week
• You get angry easily over even small issues

If you are experiencing more than three of these issues, welcome to the world of over training. You may be on course for experiencing some long term effects of over training fatigue.
If this sounds like you, you can either ignore the signs and wear yourself down further or you can evaluate your program and make some changes to get back on a productive course.
Here are a few things you can do to reverse this trend:

• Create and follow a periodized training program
• Maintain a detailed workout journal
• Maintain a detailed food journal
• Maintain a body analysis spreadsheet

Train smart, work hard and recover harder. Have a successful 2010.