The Difference Between Overreaching, Overtraining, and Burnout

Overreaching, Overtraining, and Burnout are three conditions that have distinct definitions, and knowing each can help you train smarter.

Many athletes and even coaches get something wrong when it comes to physiology: there is an important distinction to be made between the three conditions known as overtraining syndrome, non-functional overreaching, and burnout.

Often these terms are used synonymously, but there are many nuances, scenarios, and circumstances that lead to each of these conditions. That can have important consequences, since each condition also has unique treatments.

Most of us have likely experienced burnout at some point in our athletic life. It’s a feeling of apathy toward our preferred sport. The motivation to ride or run or swim just isn’t there anymore. We’ve overdone it. Is burnout an inevitable part of being an endurance athlete?

Sometimes people will call this overtraining; but the chances are slim that’s what’s really going on. Research on overtraining syndrome is relatively new, so scientists are still learning about what leads to this potentially debilitating condition. What we do know is that there are complex hormonal and physiological complications that can take athletes well over the edge. We’ll dive deeper into this in a moment.

On the other hand, overreaching is a training method with a long history. There are the two forms—functional and non-functional overreaching—and there are, again, significant differences between the two.

Okay, so which is which and what is what? Let’s take a closer look.

Functional overreaching versus non-functional overreaching

We’ve all had the experience of doing a workout and feeling tired—maybe the fatigue lasts for hours or, if it’s a big workout or ride, maybe it lasts a day or two. That’s normal; that’s the training process in action. We call that adaptation.

When we want to take that training to the next level, we start to string together rides and workouts, building what many people call “training blocks.”

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Athletes use these blocks, or camps, in preparation for big events. The intention is to dig ourselves into a bit of a hole. Performance declines slightly. But then with rest and recovery, we come back stronger. This is called supercompensation.

And in the grand scheme of training, this method for eliciting super-compensation is known as functional overreaching.

“You’re pushing the volume, you’re pushing the training load, and then you let up on the gas pedal, you give your body some recovery time in a taper, and you get maybe a 3% overshoot,” says preeminent physiologist Dr. Stephen Seiler, who has popularized the polarized training method.

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It’s important to note that it may take days, up to maybe two weeks, to come all the way back and get the desired overshoot in fitness gains.

Contrast this with non-functional overreaching. As the name implies, this is taking your training a little too far, to the point that the returns don’t come.

Dr. Seiler likes to use the analogy of stretching the rubber band until it starts to lose its elasticity. Ultimately, the athlete doesn’t achieve the overshoot of fitness they were looking for and there is a delayed recovery.

“You’re starting down that pathway towards a more profound and more long-term deficit functionally,” Seiler says.

This can take several weeks up to two months to come back from. What’s challenging is that it’s hard to tell when it will abate. What’s key to understand is that the difference is in the resulting function from the training. If the super-compensation goes as planned, that’s the good stuff—functional overreaching. If you end up limping back to normalcy after weeks of not feeling normal, that’s a typical non-functional overreaching situation.

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What continues to be tricky is the terminology, in some ways. You could say many age-group athletes are chronically overreached. They have stagnated, plateaued, and they are not ever benefiting from super-compensation. This sounds like nonfunctional overreaching. The question becomes: is it truly nonfunctional overreaching or is it simply a product of poor training?

In the end, maybe it’s one and the same; and maybe it doesn’t matter, since it all amounts to worse fitness.

Overtraining versus burnout

The scientific community has had a difficult time defining overtraining. That has to do with the nature of the syndrome. In fact, the reason it is called a syndrome is that there are several ways to end up in an overtraining state.

“There’s a set of symptomologies that may happen because of several different mechanisms, and that’s why they end up calling it a syndrome,” Seiler says. “You can see overtraining because of viruses, because of infections, where you have a highly trained athlete that is on the razor’s edge, but then a virus drags them down and they keep training. It’s the combination that puts them into this overtraining state.”

More typical is that an athlete pushes over the long-term; for whatever reason, they haven’t seen the response they want so they double down on training load. They continue to bury themselves in this way, past the point of no return, and never recover.

In this scenario, the only process that will allow the athlete to return to a normal, healthy place is significant rest—sometimes many months or even up to a year. Yes, it’s that profound.

Overtraining is generally considered a physical issue, with the potential for obvious psychological consequences. Contrast this to burnout, which most would agree is a psychological and emotional state, brought about by monotony or mental stress, that can sometimes have physical repercussions.

“There’s just a certain point where you get tired of the training, where mentally it just gets tougher and tougher,” says Trevor Connor, a physiologist and founder of Fast Talk Labs. “You hit that point where you just don’t want to keep doing it. You just can’t keep pushing yourself.”

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That’s why it’s not out of the ordinary for many athletes to reach burnout towards the end of a racing season. It’s time to be done. It’s time to take time off.

In fact, each of these conditions will only improve with time away from the sport. The amount of rest necessary is hard to determine, especially given the individuality of recovery and conditioning.

In other words, each of these conditions is as much an “under-recovery” condition as it is a “too-much-training” condition. Which is a good reminder for every athlete: the two components of adaptation are training and rest.