Your legs are heavy, your easy sessions feel hard, and you are not improving despite training consistently. If you immediately thought overtraining, you are right. That is also the exact symptom list for under-fuelling.

Researchers went looking for every training overload study that also measured what athletes were eating. 21 studies made the cut, and in 18 of them, 86%, the athletes were under-fuelled. So the majority of athletes diagnosed as overtrained in the research were in fact not eating enough. Which raises a fairly uncomfortable question about that extra session you are thinking of adding to your training schedule right now.

In this episode, I show you how to tell whether you are overtrained or under-fuelled, why adding volume to an under-fuelled athlete makes everything worse, and the 3 signals plus 3 fixes to run through before you touch your training program.

WHAT YOU WILL TAKE AWAY

• Why overtraining and under-fuelling start in exactly the same place in your brain, and why that changes the fix
• What energy availability actually is, and why it is not the same thing as calories in versus calories out
• The maths run on a 75 kg age-grouper training 12 hours a week, and what his number actually comes out at
• Why overtraining is a diagnosis of exclusion, and what the professionals rule out first
• The 3 signals that tell you under-fuelling is on the table at all
• The 3 things to fix today, before you add another hour of training

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 The symptom list you are about to recognise
00:54 The number that should stop you adding a session
01:57 Same origin, same dials, different fix
02:20 You do not get fitter during your sessions
03:37 Inside the research: 18 out of 21 studies
04:17 Why overtraining is a diagnosis of exclusion
05:26 Energy availability, in plain English
07:15 Running the numbers on a 75 kg male age-grouper
09:35 The same maths for a female athlete
10:31 Why your own numbers will be different
11:37 What happens when training goes up and food does not
13:05 But I just need to train more, right?
14:55 Signal 1: your appetite has gone the wrong way
16:05 The feather, the brick and the truck
16:30 Signal 2: the scales are not behaving
17:36 Signal 3: easy is fine, your top end has gone
18:31 The fourth sign: illness and niggles that outstay their welcome
19:35 Fix 1: what you do during training
20:31 Fix 2: recovery nutrition and the 4 Rs
21:19 Fix 3: does your food move when your training moves
22:08 An important note if this episode touched a nerve
23:01 The recap
24:21 Run the sums before you add the session

STUDIES MENTIONED

• Meeusen, R., Duclos, M., Foster, C., Fry, A., Gleeson, M., Nieman, D., Raglin, J., Rietjens, G., Steinacker, J., & Urhausen, A. (2013). Prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of the overtraining syndrome: Joint consensus statement of the European College of Sport Science and the American College of Sports Medicine. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 45(1), 186-205. [https://doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0b013e318279a10a](https://doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0b013e318279a10a)
• Melin, A. K., Areta, J. L., Heikura, I. A., Stellingwerff, T., Torstveit, M. K., & Hackney, A. C. (2024). Direct and indirect impact of low energy availability on sports performance. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 34(1), e14327. [https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.14327](https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.14327)
• Stellingwerff, T., Heikura, I. A., Meeusen, R., Bermon, S., Seiler, S., Mountjoy, M. L., & Burke, L. M. (2021). Overtraining syndrome (OTS) and relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S): Shared pathways, symptoms and complexities. Sports Medicine, 51(11), 2251-2280. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01491-0](https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01491-0)

READY TO STOP GUESSING?

Your day to day nutrition is the single most valuable thing I help my athletes with inside the Triathlon Nutrition Academy. I teach you how to fuel for training, racing and life, so you are not asking the internet random questions at 9pm every time your program changes or you see something shiny. Get your name on the list for our next cohort at [dietitianapproved.com/academy](https://www.dietitianapproved.com/academy).

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