TO: You’ve probably been told countless times that exercise is good for your health and fitness, and it’s tempting to assume that more is automatically better. But like so many other good things in life, there comes a point where the returns diminish and you may overdo it.
However, exactly what constitutes too much physical activity will depend on your individual situation.
The first thing to ask yourself if you’re wondering if you’ve exercised too much is, “Why do you exercise?”
said Dr. Benjamin Levine, professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at Texas Health Dallas.
If your goal is to improve your health and reduce your risk of a variety of conditions, from diabetes to heart disease to cancer, then 2 1/2 to three hours of moderate to vigorous exercise per week gives you the vast majority of benefits.Levine said. “Once you get past five hours a week or so, you’re not exercising for health, you’re exercising for performance.”
And when you exercise to improve performance, whether it’s getting stronger in the gym, running a marathon, or improving your tennis game, it’s possible to stress your body beyond what it can recover from. said Kristen Dieffenbach, an exercise scientist and director of the Center for Sport Science and Applied Training at West Virginia University.
For athletes, the purpose of training is to induce the so-called training response, he said. You exercise and your body responds by getting fitter, stronger and faster. These improvements do not occur during the training itself, but rather during the recovery period. That’s when your body repairs damage from intense exercise, like microtears in muscle fibers, and makes adaptations, like increasing the energy-producing mitochondria in your cells.
As long as your body can keep up with this repair work, your workouts will continue to help your performance, Dieffenbach said. But when the stress of your workouts builds up beyond your ability to recover, you’ve entered the zone of excess, known in the sports community as overtraining.
What complicates matters is that the line between training hard and overtraining is blurred. There’s no formula or number that can tell you what’s too much, Dieffenbach said. Instead, what matters is how your body responds to the exercise you’re doing. Dieffenbach suggested thinking about exercise and the physical and emotional resources it requires like asking for money at a bank. You have a limit on your budget, and if you try to overspend, you will end up worn out or injured, and probably cranky.
Over time, your exercise budget may change. As you age, your body requires more time to recover, so you may need to rest more between intense workouts. It is also limited by other things that happen in your life. Spending long hours at work or traveling, or dealing with stressful situations at home, can eat into your energy budget and decrease your ability to recover from exercise, Dieffenbach said. A 2016 study of 101 college football players, for example, found that their risk of injury nearly doubled during times of academic stress (such as during midterm and final exam weeks).
The most reliable signs that you’re exercising too much come from your subjective feelings of well-being, Dieffenbach said. If you suddenly feel tired all the time, or workouts that used to seem easy are becoming difficult, or your performance has dropped unexpectedly (for example, your run times are unexplainedly slower, or your daily walk takes longer than usual), it might be time to come down and rest, Dieffenbach said. Other classic signs of overtraining include trouble sleeping, feeling exhausted, and being unable to shake off minor colds and other respiratory infections. “Sometimes you have to go back to go forward,” Dieffenbach said.
If you find that you have to push yourself to do exercises you used to enjoy, or feel guilty about not getting enough exercise, those are other signs that you’ve overdone it. This is especially true if the feelings persist for more than a few days, Dieffenbach said. (Of course, these can also be signs of other health problems, like depression, so it’s important to keep that in mind, too.)
On the other hand, if you find that your love of exercise is turning into an unhealthy obsession, that’s also something to pay attention to, said Szabó Attila, a health psychologist who studies exercise addiction at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary. An exercise addiction can occur when someone feels compelled to be physically active, even if they are in pain or injured. There’s no specific number of hours of exercise per week that correlates with exercise addiction, one of Attila’s 2019 studies found, but “it becomes problematic when it harms other aspects of life,” he said. If he’s put exercise ahead of his relationships, work and everything else, Attila said, that’s a sign he’s gotten too much.
One of Attila’s colleagues, Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at Nottingham Trent University in Britain, has developed six criteria for health professionals to use when evaluating patients for exercise addiction:
1. Exercise is the most important thing in my life.
2. Conflicts have arisen between me and my family and/or my partner about the amount of exercise I get.
3. I use exercise as a way to change my mood (for example, to get nervous, to escape, etc.).
4. Over time I have increased the amount of exercise I get in a day.
5. If I have to miss an exercise session, I feel cranky and irritable.
6. If I cut back on the amount of exercise I do and then start over, I always end up exercising as often as before.
To classify as an addiction, a person would need to meet all six criteria, and that’s rare, Griffiths said. But many people report problematic exercise that doesn’t rise to the level of an addiction, she added. For example, those who go to work and function normally, but then return home and neglect their family so they can go to the gym and exercise, that’s still a problem.
Which brings us to the ultimate answer to our question: yes, it is possible to exercise too much. And you’ll know you’re doing it when it’s breaking down your body, making you sick or injured, or negatively affecting the rest of your life. When it stops making you feel good and enriching your life, it’s time to cut back.
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