Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2852: The Overtraining Signs Fitness Fanatics Always Miss

Episode Date: May 7, 2026

The guys break down six weird signs you're overtraining — the ones most people miss until it's too late. Beyond the obvious soreness and fatigue, they cover broken sleep, increased cravings for comfort foods, irritability, low libido, low mood, and repeated injury. Sal shares how he experienced overtraining firsthand during a double-split routine in his 20s — with zero soreness — and why that made it so hard to catch. They also cover why fitness fanatics are actually more at risk than beginners, how hormones like testosterone drop when you push too hard, and why a scheduled week off can produce 29% better strength gains than training straight through. Download the free 7 Day Overtraining Rescue Guide at ⁠https://www.mindpumpmedia.com/overtraining-rescue-guide⁠⁠. 0:00 - Intro & sponsors  1:53 - What overtraining actually means (and why it sneaks up on you)  3:08 - Sign #1: Broken sleep — waking up at 3am every night  7:27 - Sign #2: Increased cravings for comfort & junk food  8:51 - Sign #3: Irritability & short temper  9:41 - Sign #4: Low libido  12:26 - Sign #5: Low mood & lost motivation for the gym  13:03 - Testosterone drops, hormonal imbalance & overtraining on HRT  15:03 - Why NOT getting sore can mean you're the most overtrained  16:57 - Sal's double-split overtraining story  19:26 - Sign #6: Repeated injuries  20:31 - Study: Taking a week off every month = same results as training straight through  21:38 - Study: Scheduled deload weeks produce 29% better strength gains  23:09 - Bonus sign: Getting sick repeatedly  23:44 - Free 7 Day Overtraining Rescue Guide — ⁠https://www.mindpumpmedia.com/overtraining-rescue-guide⁠⁠ SPONSOR Kion — ⁠https://getkion.com/mindpump⁠ 20% off automatically applied at checkout — no code needed MAPS 15 BOGO — ⁠⁠https://maps15bogo.com⁠⁠ Buy 1 get 1 FREE — limited time 20+ Free Guides — ⁠https://mindpumpfree.com⁠ 7 Day Overtraining Rescue Guide — ⁠https://www.mindpumpmedia.com/overtraining-rescue-guide⁠ Mind Pump Store — ⁠https://mindpumpstore.com⁠ Instagram — @mindpumpmedia

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump. Mind Pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded Fitness, Health, and Entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode. We got six signs, six weird signs that you're overtraining.

By the way, we have a free seven-day overtraining rescue guide. It's free. every single day for the next seven days, there's stuff in there that helps you, guide you to amplifying and accelerating recovery so you can hit the gym again the following week, feeling fresh and strong. You can find it at mindpfrey.com.

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head on over to mindpumpstor.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. Overtraining, it gets in the way. No gains, no progress. You're doing too much. And everybody knows some of the common signs of overtraining, but there's some weird signs of overtraining that a lot of people miss.

In fact, some of these signs come before you hit those hard plateaus before you start to go backwards in your progress. So today we're going to talk about the six weird signs you're overtraining. Let's get weird. Do you think it's common that you would see just one of these or do they almost always come in like pairs or threes? Like, do you find that? Typically it's more than one, but some of these happen before the other ones.

Like there's one. I'll cover the first one. It's actually a very common sign of going too hard that people just don't realize. They just don't realize that this oftentimes means they need to back off. By the way, overtraining can be defined as doing more than is necessary for what you're looking to achieve. And if you continue down this path, then it starts to get real obvious. So overtraining is just doing too much, okay? but oftentimes people don't realize they're overtrained until the signs get so loud that they are faced with the reality of like, I think I'm burnt out.

Your body just wants to shut down and stop you. That's right. So the first one is broken sleep. So this looks different than insomnia. So insomnia, although this could be classified as insomnia. Insomnia, people typically think of that as like I can't fall asleep or I'm just having a really bad time. So this is like when you're waking up multiple times the middle of the night? Yes, it's like restless.

And I've experienced this. It's like you go to bed, you're tired, you're exhausted. You go to bed and then you wake up at like 2 a.m. or 3am. And then you're... 3.33 every night, dude. I don't know. For you too. It's creepy.

Oh, you get the weird number one? It's weird. And you're lying in bed and you just feel like I can't, like, what's going on? I can't go back to sleep. I remember when Mike Matthews communicated this to me. he was talking about how he just thought he had crappy sleep for the longest time. Couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it out, cut his volume down considerably. And lo and behold, he was able to get a really, really good sleep.

And this is a common early sign. And the reason why this one can be difficult to identify is because, number one, it's common. But number two, you tend to fall asleep okay. So it's not like you don't fall asleep. It's just you wake up for some reason. And this has to do with things like hormones and. I was just going to ask you, would you attribute this more to just the body being inflamed and overtrained and sore and trying to recover or cortisol levels being off? Like, what would you attribute the main reason for this?

Probably hormonal. So melatonin production starts to drop off. Cortisol spikes too early. Yeah, like inverted where it's high at night versus. Well, that's when you're overtrain. That's when you're really pushing overtrain. Okay. But early over training, you might have higher spikes of cortisol just to get you moving.

And it might happen earlier. I wonder too, because initially I bet after like a good hard training session, you have great sleep. Like it knocks you out. So there might be that association initially. And then the more frequently you do that now, you know, you're getting this like interrupted sleep. I wonder if they think it's something else. Yeah, no. And, you know, again, this is like a really, because bad, poor sleep.

or broken sleep can mean a lot of different things. But for hard training athletes or people are really consistent with their workouts, if you normally don't have issues with sleep, if you normally sleep pretty well, and you know you've been kind of training consistently, like you've been doing well in terms of not skipping. And then suddenly this becomes an issue. Again, it's not hard to parse this out.

It's like, all right, well, I'm going to take, I'm going to do a delode week and see what happens. We had a caller. Remember we had a caller once? who couldn't figure this out? And it turned out to be that he was just working out too much. It's not hard to parse out and figure out if that's the reason. But I think it's not the first place people look because there tends to be the spectrum. And at both ends equates to poor sleep.

Oh, not active. So not active, right? Which I've talked and communicated about. I've definitely figured out if I'm below a certain step account and I don't work out, impact sleep. If I get a great workout, get a certain amount of steps, great sleep. But then the other end of that spectrum is overtraining and pushing too hard too much will also disrupt sleep. And so I think a lot of people have probably made that correlation of, oh, I sleep better when I work out. And so they assume that any workout at any time is going to be a positive impact on sleep when in reality you could be tipping over on the other end of the spectrum.

Again, this is really, this is, if you're someone, who's consistent. Like you don't miss your workouts. You've been doing it for a while. And then this suddenly starts to become an issue. And you're trying to fix it with like supplements and sleep routines and like, what's going on? Why am I waking up at 3 o'clock in the morning every day?

And it's tough to go back to sleep. Like, what's going on? It's an easy, again, just cut your volume and your intensity down for a week or two. And if that was the case, you'll sleep better. You'll know right out the gates. Next up, increased cravings. especially for hyper palatable, like comfort producing foods. This one I notice for myself,

if I start pushing it too hard too often, I want more sweets and I want more. Especially at nighttime. Yeah, dude. Savory snacks. I mean, I've definitely connected this to bad sleep. So again,

this is me asking you about, like, do you think they come in pairs? And it's like, I definitely see if I'm overtrained and that causes bad sleep and then the bad sleep thing causes the cravings like crazy. independent of just over training and not bad sleep. I don't know if I've noticed the correlation to the...

So this looks different than appetite because good strength training will typically spike your appetite a little bit. Right. So if you're lifting weights and you're doing a good job and your body's like, it wants to build muscle and strength, an increase in appetite is actually a good sign. When my clients would tell me that they're hungrier, then I knew, and I would look at a combination of things, if their strength was also going up.

You feel more anabolic? Yeah, then I'm like, okay, we're moving the right direction. This looks more like cravings. Totally. And there's an easy way to tell the difference. It's like when I, when my metabolism is ramping up and I'm building muscle and I have an increased appetite, my, you know, ground beef and rice sounds great. Yeah. You know?

But when I'm poor sleep and dragon ass and cravings are bad, that doesn't sound good. It's like fast food. Yeah, I want something. Yeah, I want something greasy. Yeah. Yeah. The gas station, all of a sudden, like, Reese sounds good. Why?

Yeah. Totally. Totally. Next up, irritability. If you're finding yourself short and irritable, if your partner is letting you know that you might be a little short and irritable. By the way, you'll see this with, so you know who overtrains relatively frequently are hard training athletes in season. It's actually common. for hard training athletes to be pushing it a little too hard.

And especially as you get deep into the season, especially if competition starts ramping up. And you notice you're just not in a good mood. You're just pissed off. And it's because you're just, you're not training. You're redlining. Yeah, you're redlining. That's right.

You're redlining and you're just not feeling good. Low libido is another one. This one's actually quite common. Where you're just not in the mood. Yeah. You know, not wanting to engage in. that way. Good exercise will almost always, or appropriate, I should say exercise, will almost always increase promote. Yeah. Libido. Now, so far the ones that we've covered so far, I know we have more,

but do you think there's an order at which these normally reveal themselves? Or do you think it's just totally dependent upon the individual, like someone might not notice one or the other? Or do you think it's pretty common? It's like, this tends to be the first thing that most people notice, then some of these things because when I look at this, I think the broken sleep is one of the first things to notice. It is. And then a lot of times broken sleep to me leads to increased cravings, right? And then the increased cravings, broken sleep, a lot of times leads to irritability, right? And the combination of all those, a lot of times messes with the libido. And so I feel like there seems to be, now, well, some people may not perceive it in that order because they're not aware

of what broken bad sleep looks like. And so maybe they think, Maybe they notice it. And maybe a lot of people aren't in touch enough with appetite and cravings and the difference of that or paying attention to. So they might see it as irritability or low libido as some of the signs. And I think this is why this gets away from a lot of people is just the lack of connection that they have to all these signs. And it's not until kind of all of them are hitting them.

They realize like, man, something is wrong. I've got this, this, this and this and now. Excuse me. I think these were like the less obvious ones, right? because otherwise you would put like excessive soreness or fatiginess, which is kind of like the first indicators. But then, yeah, sleep I would say would be the first real like, you know,

off schedule type of things to notice. Yeah, the thing about fatigue is interesting because initially with broken sleep, you might not even notice too much fatigue. You might actually feel more wired. You get that adrenaline, yeah. So you just kind of go about your day feeling wired, which some people can mistake in his energy.

or maybe they'll just ramp up their stimulant intake. Caffeine goes up, keep going, keep doing the workouts. And they keep waking up again at 3 a.m., which leads to all these other ones. Low libido comes a little later. And that's just, you know, low libido is a sign of a lot of things not going so well. Your body's like you're tipping into unhealthy ranges. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, you guys have known you guys have been hard training seasons where

you're pushing it, libido suffers. It's not like you're feeling great when you're pre-contest or when you're, you know, training your absolute limit. Libido goes out the window. Next is low mood. So low mood is like kind of lack of motivation. So this could feel like typically you're consistent, you're motivated for your workouts, but, you know, and maybe you're so consistent that you'll do them no matter what,

but you just don't look forward to them like you normally did or halfway through. you're like, man, I got more of... Your excitement levels have decreased, like, substantially. Yeah, totally. It takes it out of you. Something you didn't put on this, because it's not like one of those things you feel. This would be something that you have to go get measured,

but I think it's connected to the two of these, libido and, you know, low or irritable mood, is low testosterone. Yeah. And so if you've been, if you've been beating your body up, pour sleep for a long time, I can't tell you how many times I've had a client that before we were, we resorted to

going to HRT, we fixed a lot of this stuff and automatically testosterone levels come up. Testosterone levels come up. All of a sudden, mood gets better. You're less irritable. You're more motivated to go to the gym. You know, like a lot of these things, libido goes up a lot of times. And so sometimes the low test levels, which is part of it, is part of this and connected to these.

And it's obviously, unless you've got the blood work to go do that or see that, you may not know that too. By the way, a man and woman's testosterone will drop. So women need testosterone, just like men do. They just have less of it. But it's just as important for women as it is for men. Women will also have something called estrogen dominance when they're overtrained. So their ratio of estrogen to progestrone and testosterone changes.

Yeah, and it throws off. And they just, you just end up not feel it. It definitely will throw your hormones off. A little, you know, side note, by the way, sometimes people will not fix any of these issues and will go on hormone replacement therapy, which really kicks the can down the road. Because it masks those couple things we talk about. It could all sudden now their libido is up.

Yep. Now they have a motivation to go to the gym. Frank goes up in the gym. You're still not getting good sleep. That's right. All these other factors aren't really happens. That's right. And can you overtrain on hormone replacement therapy?

Yeah. Yeah, you can overtrain a lot of steroids even. And you'll see this sometimes with men where they'll go on testosterone and already over-training, they'll get on testosterone, and then they'll increase the volume on top of it and really put themselves in a hole. You know, we mentioned, like, soreness a lot of times,

like, you know, consistent soreness and not recovering as is one of the early indicators sometimes. Sometimes, though, I found that it was my clients that had been beating themselves up for a really long time that weren't getting sore anymore. That's right. And so that's why they thought they weren't overtrained. So sometimes even-

That happens to me. Yes. So a lot of times because you're so adapted, you can handle so much punishment in the gym. I used to think soreness was the best indicator. It can be, but it's not the best. No, I would disagree. I think it's because I think it's more common with someone like you who is so adapted to training so much. And you're normally going like, well, I'm not really that sore. So I'm not, I'm obviously not pushing too crazy. And so you tell yourself that, which allows you to keep ramping up the intensity or ramping up the volume. Yeah, it's one of an acute issue versus a chronic. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's a good gauge to see, like, workout-wise where your intensity you can kind of monitor. But, yeah, I think, like, long-term, for sure, you're going to get adapted, so it'd be hard to measure it by. And a lot of times my clients that were oversore and constantly, it was a lack of protein and nutrients. So a lot of times that was the fix.

Not that they can't, they can't go hand-in-hand or both be in the situation, but I found that the people that complained a lot of times of like, man, I'm just constantly sore. You know, it's like they were inconsistent with hitting their protein or they were low calorie and fixing that a lot of times and or potentially reducing volume when they were overtraining. But I thought the overtraining symptoms were more common than people that didn't think they were overtraining because they weren't sore.

You're right. I'm so glad you said that because I've experienced that. And that's not uncommon with people who work out a lot. They'll actually say, I don't get sore anymore. So I can't be. So I can't be overtraining. I can't be. I remember the first time I experienced this.

The first time I experienced this, I was in my 20s, and I decided that I would try an old-school double-split routine. So double-split routine is like you're working, you're working out twice a day, you're doing these body parts in the AM, these body parts in the PM. You're hitting a whole body three days a week, but with super high volume because you're training twice a day, six days a week.

And I remember I thought it was going great because I had no soreness. In fact, I was sore the first few days I did it. And then the soreness went away and I just kept working out. And I'm like, I'm not sore. But I knew something was wrong because number one, I wasn't progressing. Yeah. I started getting all these other symptoms that were happening. Yeah.

And then my strength started to decline. And that's when I knew, like, I'm not getting sore, but that doesn't mean I'm not overtraining. Yeah. So I'm glad you. Yeah, yeah. Because I was just thinking about like what was the most common is actually a lot of the clients that didn't think that because that's your first.

like kind of the average person with it. Even trainer, I mean, like, because I agree. I have similar stories myself. It's like, oh, I'm not, I can't be overtraining. I'm not even getting sore. You know, I've got room to push it. And so you think that way. And you ask them, you say, oh, how do you feel?

I feel fine. Yeah. Are you sore? No, I don't get sore. And I, and I would say that, you know, over-training is probably more common with the fitness fanatic than it is the average person, although the average person who can overdo it. Can overdo it. But chronic over-training?

Yeah. But chronic is different. Yeah. Yeah. That's the fitness phenomenon. Totally, right? Because their gauges are all off. They're far adapted to all that volume and intensity.

They believe they can tolerate it. And they're not getting super sore so they think, oh, that must not be it when you simply. And I've, this is also on the spectrum. Like, you don't have to be crazy overtrained to still be overtrained enough that less volume will give you better results. And so there's been times where maybe all these, you know, flags weren't going off from me where I'm like, oh, my sleep's bad. It's just like, you know, I'm just, I'm not, I'm not seeing great results or I'm kind of plateaued. I know I've been pushing the weight's pretty good. I wonder if I actually just scale back a little bit, what happens.

And man, I've seen times where it's like I just pull back and, boom. Yeah, over-training can often look like this. Obviously, you can do it by just beating the absolute crap out of yourself. But it can also look like this. You're doing more than what is necessary and you get away with it and you get away with it. But it becomes, it gets cumulative over time. And suddenly the workout that you're getting away with now is starting to be way too much, even though it stayed the same.

Or you're kind of hitting that limit and lifestyle changes a little bit. There's more stress at work or diet isn't as good. Now that workout that you were tolerating now becomes far too much and you're just not responding like you used to. Last is repeated injury. This one is funny. I was actually talking to, I had these conversations with my family members. about this one all the time. And I have a family member in particular.

He does jihitsu. He lifts weights. He's got this like the more the better kind of attitude. And I mean, I'm not exaggerating. Probably once a month, he's injured. His low back will get hurt or tweak his neck or his shoulder. He thinks it's just, oh, I do jiu-jitsu. It's like, dude, you get hurt so often.

You're overtrained. Like, if you backed off, you would see. Be more resilient. Yeah, there's two things. will dramatically increase your injury. Two things. Aside from doing terrible form and doing something stupid, right?

Two big things. Lack of sleep and doing way too much. Those are both like, do those long enough and you're guaranteed to hurt yourself. And the studies on that are pretty remarkable. Well, the studies, and we've talked about this study

quite a long time ago that I was super fascinated with when you brought it up. And I don't remember how new that study was when you brought it to the podcast but I found it so interesting when they took those three groups of people that, I think they went 12 weeks,

maybe it was 16, I can't remember how long it was. But basically one group trained every single week for the entire 16 weeks. And then another group took a week off every other week. It was every four weeks. Or every four weeks, a whole week off, right? Yeah. So they took a whole week off of training every month is what it was.

Every month they took a whole week off. So only trained three other four weeks. And they saw the same results as the, the people that trained all the time, which when you think about that, I think it was over the course of three months, if I recall. I think it was at least 12 to 16 weeks. So it was over three or four months. So in other words, they did a whole month. They took a whole month less of training and they got the same results as the people that trained. I just read another study that compared high training athletes and they had one group do a delode week every, I think it was every

six weeks. And the other one just kept going. The group that did the delode week had 29% better strength gains. 29% better strength gains from having a scheduled week where they're going to go much easier. And it's funny because I know we've

we've all experienced this in tell of this. And I still experience this. It's like I'll have times where just get busy and a week go, I just don't make it to the gym for a week. And then I come back and I'm like stronger. Yeah.

And you're always just like, dude, it's so... I was overdoing it. Yes. You know what I'm saying? It's like, it's so wild. And even if I wasn't totally overdoing it, It just shows you how much the recovery part is so important. And one week off, you're not losing gains. No.

You know, and in our head. No, and all the fitness fanatic people get so caught up in this like, no days off and never missing. And it's like, you know, it's wild how much some of those days off would really serve you. And the real key is that you just don't go off the rails on those days. You don't go from, I'm training consistently. So I take a week off. And a week off means I eat terrible. I miss protein.

I stay up late at night. It's structured. Yeah, but if you just literally just, hey, I'm going to stay active. I'm probably going to scale back maybe on my total calorie intake a little bit, still hit my protein intake, still get good night's rest, and take a week off of training. I bet most people would see tremendous results by having that week off. Here's a bonus one, repeated illness.

So that one wasn't on the list, but that's a common one. If you just keep getting sick. Yeah. Like, man, I'm getting sick all the time. You just bogging yourself down. Your immune system gets affected. Oh, so if you are overtrained or if you just trained really, really hard, and you're exposed to someone with the virus,

you are four to five times more likely to become infected. Yeah, he's vulnerable. I just looked that up. Wow. Yeah, and that was for me was common. When I was younger, this is one I knew because I was whole hardheaded with everything else. But getting sick is a nice slap in the face. When I would get sick real often, that's what I knew, like, okay, I'm pushing it too hard.

Yeah, I take some time off. Look, what we have is we have in a seven-day overtraining. rescue guide. Okay. So this guide gives you seven days, which each day is giving you something different to do to amplify, maximize, and accelerate recovery. And so if you haven't taken time off in a while, you want to get better results, don't know what to do with your week off.

This guide is totally free. You can get it at mind pumpfree.com. And every single day gives you something different. And it's designed to maximize and speed up, recovery and adaptation. So when you get back to the gym, you're stronger. and more fit. So again, it's mindpfrey.com to get that free seven-day over-training rescue guide.

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