Burnout

Burnout is when you get tired of doing the same thing and lose interest in it. It is something anyone who trains regularly has to face periodically. Even if it doing something you enjoy doing, doing the same thing day-after-day gets boring after a while. Burnout is something you try to avoid, but, when it occurs, you have to work through it. If not, you are done.

Symptoms of overtraining may be physical fatigue, mental fatigue, recurring muscle strains, weight loss, increase in blood pressure, frustration, depression, or a marked lack of progress in spite of constant, hard training. Often, if students do not recognize these as symptoms of overtraining, they will increase their training to reverse the symptoms, which increases the deleterious effects.

Evidence of the results of burnout may be seen by looking at the number of students at each rank in a school. The higher the rank, the fewer the students. Students drop out of class for many reasons; burnout is one of them. After many years of training, burnout sets in and students move on to other things.