One of the key reasons for planning a training year is to ensure you are planning to avoid overtraining. Overtraining leads to poor performance and leads to injuries, particularly overuse injuries (At this point it may prove useful to review classifications of injuries: overuse injuries, and overuse injuries in children and young athletes in Sports Medicine).

Overtraining is when an athlete does high intensity training, in high volumes. Often this comes in the athlete training too often and not including enough rest between sessions of high intensity. This affects their recovery and prevents physiological adaptations from occurring. 

Planning to avoid overtraining will help to improve performance as the athlete is able to recover from training sessions, and avoid injury. Athlete’s who suffer from overtraining become fatigued, tired, and lethargic. This feeling becomes to a lack of motivation in the athlete, and can also lead to injury through poor technique and overuse.

Students learn about:

• planning to avoid overtraining
  • amount and intensity of training
  • physiological considerations, eg lethargy, injury
  • psychological considerations, eg loss of motivation.

Students learn to:

• analyse overtraining by considering questions such as:
  • how much training is too much?
  • how do you identify an overtrained athlete?
  • what do you do if you identify an overtrained athlete?
  • how can overtraining be avoided?