Overtraining Syndrome Underlying causes of repetitive injury Dr. Scott Howitt graduated from the CMCC and subsequently the two-year post-graduate residency in sports sciences. Most recently he completed his three-year post-graduate fellowship in Reha- bilitative Sciences. Apart from his clinical work at Sports Performance Centres, and the Gorman Shore clinic at York University, Dr. Howitt is an assistant professor in the Clini- cal Sciences department of CMCC, as the Clinician for the St. John’s Rehab Hospital chiropractic clinic. he bottom line in sports conditioning and fi tness training is adaptive body stress. Athletes must put their bodies under a certain amount of stress to increase physi- cal capabilities. Where the stress loads are appropriate, then the athlete’s body adapts to the demands placed upon it. The adaptation to maximal loading of the car- diovascular and muscular systems is accomplished by improving effi ciency of the heart, increasing capillaries in the muscles and increasing glycogen stores and mitochondrial enzyme systems within the muscle cells. In reality, hard training breaks athletes down and making them temporarily weaker, while it is rest that makes them stronger. Physi- ologic improvement in sports actually occurs during the rest period following hard train- ing. During recovery periods, the cardiovascular and muscular systems build to greater levels to compensate, or rather overcompensate, for the stress applied during training. Overcompensation is the process that actually makes one a better athlete. During over- compensation, muscles stockpile higher-than-normal amounts of glycogen, synthesize greater-than-usual quantities of aerobic enzymes, add new proteins to muscles to make them stronger, etc. In other words, training stimulates rebound to a higher physiological state and the result is a higher level of performance. T CONSEQUENCES OF OVERTRAINING? Overtraining can best be defi ned as the state where an athlete has been repeatedly stressed by training to the point where rest is no longer adequate to allow for recovery. If suffi cient rest is not included in a training program, then regeneration cannot oc- cur and performance will actually plateau. If this imbalance between excess training and inadequate rest persists, then performance may even decline. The phenomenon is generally viewed on a continuum with overreaching at the lower end and overtraining syndrome at the more severe end of the fatigue scale. 38 • CANADIAN CHIROPRACTOR | APRIL 2008 www.canadianchiropractor.ca Scott Howitt, DC, FCCSS(C), FCCRS(C) feature
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