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Post by Charlie S on May 8, 2016 12:50:59 GMT -7
For the first time in my life (ever), I have finally felt like an athlete over the last year or so.
And with that (usually around peak performance season), comes a feeling of chronic fatigue. Is this just normal? Did I spend too many of my early years being a lazy bum which never got sore or tired? After all, I am "only" 28.
Average weekly workout caloric burn is between 3000-4000 calories. Average sleep is 7.5 hours...though I sleep really light (and this could be a main reason, come to think of it). Work's kind of stressful but it's not physical. Eat a balanced diet, lot of vegetables, some meat. Beer 1-2 times a week. Sometimes none at all.
Definitely don't have the exuberant "psych" that so many other climbers have. While excited, it's usually contained (maybe the curse of being an engineer?) The rest day is now mandatory, not optional.
However, the climbing performance HAS improved, and continues to be on the upswing. Just wondering if there are any tricks to help the energy level also go on the upswing.
My wonderful wife, who was a competitive rower in college, has said as much as "we were always tired and sore in college. That's just what it is."
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Post by alexandra on May 8, 2016 15:40:39 GMT -7
It is normal for me. Even though I am not nor have I ever been an athlete, I have been training like one for a few years now, and you just get used to being sore and tired all the time. After a while, you don't notice it even, it just becomes the norm. i do remember when i started intense training though, about 6 years ago, I was wrecked the whole time. I could barely walk up the stairs at work and I felt like I needed to sleep all day long. That lasted a bit less than a year till my body adjusted to high intensity and volume. Since then, I can handle all the training with pretty minimal effects to the rest of my life, other than the fact that i still sleep a bunch (but mostly overnight).
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Post by Chris W on May 8, 2016 20:41:04 GMT -7
When I was younger, I was a sprint kayaker, and was tired and sore all the time from overtraining. When I quit that in the middle of college, I did a ton of trail running and some lifting to stay strong and felt amazing. I also slept 9-10 hours per day and ate like a horse. In med school I was still working out but was tired all the time from stress and not getting enough sleep. Same for residency.
Now, I train with intelligent design. If I knew then what I know now, I'd be crushing coal into diamonds in the clefts between my rock solid six pack abs. As it stands, I have a lot of ground to make up in terms of finger strength. I DO consider myself an athlete and train HARD and with a purpose. I'm psyched but not stupid about it like a border collie in a ball pit. I'm improving. Perhaps not as quickly as I would like, but I'm definitely improving.
I often feel fatigued. I currently attribute this to hard training combined with less than adequate sleep (wife and three kids under the age of 5) and a stressful job (mentally, not necessarily physically, though on my feet all day). I feel like a certain level of underlying fatigue is normal when training like an athlete, but not if it's debilitating. You shouldn't underestimate the energy a mentally taxing job takes. I've worked plenty of blue collar, hard physical labor jobs, and I feel more fatigued after my workday now than I did digging sewer lines.
I think it's important to recognize that your climbing is improving. You're obviously doing something right. Judging by your posts, it seems you're keeping logs of your training. I'll bet that with further training experience and the opportunity to scrutinize your training logs, you'll find a way to maximize your improvement and minimize your feeling of chronic fatigue.
I find it's helpful to take my recovery as serious as my training activities. If I'm tired, I need to be disciplined about eating well and sleeping well.
BTW, I'm 33 now and getting a little bit older every day. I'm not planning on slowing down.
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Post by MarkAnderson on May 9, 2016 8:45:46 GMT -7
a border collie in a ball pit. Great image! (wife...under the age of 5) ...Not so much Anyway, Chris hits on some great points. The age thing is interesting--I would say that generally I feel more energetic now, at 39, then I did in my 20s. I think there are two big factors behind this: 1) Throughout my 20s and largely during my early 30's I was obsessed with exercising aerobically on every climbing "rest" day. This was in the form of running until 2007, then cycling after that. I'm the sort of person that when I'm running or biking, I'm going all out every day. My body got used to that to some extent, but in retrospect I'm sure it was too much volume. 2) Diet and nutrition. Back in those days I ate tons of carbs. At that time I still thought of pasta and bread as healthy food, and believed in nonsense like "carb loading". I didn't know anything about the glycemic response. I also ate tons of cookies, pizza, soda, etc. I still eat some of that stuff but in much smaller quantities and rarely when I'm in or approaching a performance phase (and when I do, I expect to feel like crap afterwards). Despite much lower calorie intake, I generally feel much better, more energetic and snappy when I'm on a diet (as opposed to off-season, when I'm periodically spiking and crashing with donuts, cookies, etc). It's worth noting that I almost never drink alcohol. I'm really boring at parties. A big night for me is one beer, or maybe two glasses of wine, and those nights are few and far between. I will not drink at all during my season. Are you doing anything aerobic? It sounds like general nutrition is not a problem. How much protein are you getting on training days? Over the last few years I was noticing I felt totally wrecked after hard training days (sometimes even the day after too). I started supplementing with protein shakes and it made a noticeable difference in my feeling of fatigue. Also, it can help to look at your Macro schedule as well. I find I need to take an entire season off (or take it way down on the intensity) ever year or two. If you've been hitting it hard for many consecutive seasons you may just need an extended break. Summer is great for that since it's too hot to do anything hard anyway.
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Post by alexandra on May 9, 2016 9:17:38 GMT -7
On the topic of diet and nutrition which I forgot to mention in my previous answer. Perhaps since most climbers are trying to lose weight and thus are trying to eat less carbs, you might not think of carb supplementing. On really intense training days (which happen fairly often for me), I drink a protein shake to which I add a carb supplement. At 120 lbs bodyweight, I would have something like 21-28 grams of protein and 20-40 grams of carbs from a carb supplement like maltodextrin (you can buy that for cheat at a liquor store, it comes as a white powder or you can pay more money and buy it at a GNC, where it comes as a fancy container with the same white powder in it), depending on how intense my workout was. Getting a significantly higher carb content within 15-20 minutes post workout makes all the difference regarding recovery and performance for me. You need some source of carbs that are immediately absorbed (so no fruit or complex carbs, but pure sugar or honey would do just fine as well). Also throughout the day, I try to get something like 20/20/60 percent of my calories from protein, carbs and fat respectively. I have found that the higher fat helps me a lot with recovery as well. However, try not to have any fat within an hour of your workout since the fat slows down the absorption of the post-workout carbs.
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Post by Lundy on May 9, 2016 11:22:23 GMT -7
So I'm far from an expert in this, but I think there's something interesting to explore here. I was an elite distance swimmer in my previous life, and yes, constant, mounting fatigue that built over the season was just a fact of life. I got to the point where I would wear myself down so hard during the weeks over a season that by January/February I would just spend the entire Sunday in bed or eating. However, as you taper in an endurance sport like this, you're energy comes back about 100-fold, to the point of being unable to control it as a teenager bouncing off the walls.
So while I think the sense that athletes are constantly tired is probably true from the perspective of an endurance athlete, I'm not totally convinced this should also hold for strength athletes. My understanding (very limited) of how you build strength is by getting those periods of super-compensation after every workout, not necessarily (or not exclusively) over the course of a training cycle, as is the case with endurance sports. All that to say, I wonder if you need to build more regular rest into your training plan. I don't disagree with the comments above about life stress, sleep, etc., but I'm also not sure the way to build strength is to go into complete body fatigue.
Having said all that, I'm also experimenting on myself right now, as I've put myself into the same exhausted state over the past few training cycles. There is another thread somewhere around here that talks about how a bunch of us, myself included, are now putting deloading weeks in between phases, roughly every 3-4 weeks. The theory being you can't really lose gains in just a week, but you can take that time to battle any mounting fatigue to ensure you're getting the most out of your next phase.
Of course, this is all speculation and I have no idea if it's going to work, but I think we should be cautious about the casual reference to "I'm an athlete so I should be tired." My guess is that an athlete like Usain Bolt probably doesn't suffer from this in any way similar to an endurance athlete, or he'd be losing the ability to make gains in a more linear way. Anyway, just some thoughts to chew on.
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Post by Chris W on May 21, 2016 15:37:31 GMT -7
Charlie, I'm in the middle of a forced rest following a surgery. For the first 3-4 days, the most strenuous thing I did was move from the couch to the bathroom. No work either. Within those 3-4 days, any and all cumulative or chronic fatigue I had was gone. I also continued to eat well and slept for 8-10 hours per night.
No more fatigue... just going nuts
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Post by Charlie S on May 21, 2016 17:23:58 GMT -7
Great points, all! (Chris, hope your surgery healing is going well.)
I'm a big-time carb fan but I'd like to think I'm actually balanced (on the week as a whole). When I go off of carbs for a long time, everything goes poorly.
In recent weeks, a few things have come to light. 1, I don't get enough sleep. While I may aim for a 9PM-6AM schedule, I sleep super light which often means it's more like 11PM-5AM... 2, stress surrounding work can't be ignored. Unfortunately and fortunately, much of it is self imposed. So if I can learn to control that, maybe easier sleeping will be a natural by-product.
On a side note, I've kicked up my cardio training for a rather absurd 4th/5th class scramble here locally (Wasatch Ultimate Ridge Linkup: 30ish miles and 14,000ft elevation gain). Secretly I'm hoping we have terrible weather that weekend and have to cancel the hike. No doubt this has contributed as well. Though if this fall is as wet as this spring, I won't even be able to get outside. (Can't I be a 5.13 alpine climber some day!?)
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Post by jetjackson on May 22, 2016 11:14:33 GMT -7
I think sleep could be key - 7.5 hours sounds a bit light.
I trained Martial Arts in China for 8 hours a day for a couple of months back in 2011, I was 27 at the time. It was gruelling, and the first time I think I had ever truly 'overtrained'. I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I was in a black hole, and I would feel emotionally and mentally exhausted, and had symptoms similar to the flu. In the end, the only way I got through was to sleep for 10-11 hours a day, and supplement the schools spartan diet with stewed duck hearts at the local restaurant. I would have an hour long nap at lunch between the morning and afternoon training sessions, and I would sleep 9-10 hours at night.
So yeah, more sleep.. and stewed duck hearts.
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Post by climbnkev on Jun 4, 2016 7:24:24 GMT -7
I read an interesting study on Hypertrophy which studied the response time and effects of a single workout in 50 strength athletes. The response from one workout widely varied with the least responsive subject gaining a single pound and the highest gains made at 15 pounds(if memory serves, it's been a few years but it was a staggering amount). The supercompensation also varied from one day to 10 days(subjects bodies continuing to adapt to the load I.e. Gain mass).
While I couldn't give a damn about Hypertrophy, what was so enlightening to me is the huge range of effects and the time to adapt from one workout. This at it's core is the problem with following anyone else's training program. If your body is hyper-responsive to stress you are going to recover exceptionally quickly and need more stimulus to see gains. Contrarily if you are a slow responder you are going to spend most of your time in an over-trained state. You will still be adapting to workouts you had a week ago while additional stress has been added to the plate taking you into an over-trained state.
Some people may say this is jumping to conclusions, and that neurological adaptation might not follow the same "rules" as muscular ones. I found that is answered a lot of questions for me. I used to do less frequent more intense sessions and often felt overstrained. Now I train with shorter more frequent sessions and have seen great gains in both strength and climbing performance.
This is also at it's core the challenge with a linear periodization program without a coach to modify the training stimulus to the athletes response to previous workouts. But that is a discussion for another day.
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Post by jetjackson on Jun 4, 2016 7:27:59 GMT -7
Would be interested to see the study?
Was it just a single workout? I would think there is a possibility that individuals response to a workout could change each time. There are also external variables related to rest - did the study control for those? Ergo. were all the subjects on the same diet and sleep schedule etc.?
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Post by climbnkev on Jun 4, 2016 7:45:06 GMT -7
I was looking for it this morning and couldn't find it but will search some more. Yes it was a single workout, and all subjects were trained athletes. I do not remember diet/sleep being monitored. Obviously that would have an effect. What was most interesting is that there was not a linear correlation between gains and time. Some responded very well very quickly. Others had a very low response that took a very long time.
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