We’ve all had that moment when you realize you’ve pushed too far.
Maybe it’s a nagging pain. Maybe you’re snapping at everyone around you. Maybe you’re mentally drained, or worse, sidelined with a full-blown injury.
This is called the breakpoint and this week we dive into how you can
Identify your breakpoint
Interpret what it means
Engineer a program with less disruption due to injury, illness or burnout
Understanding loads
Ideally, you will never get to find out where your breakpoint is. If your training program is perfect, you should be able to rock on without any worry of what is too much.
I say this tongue in cheek because too often as a coach, rehab professional, and athlete myself, I find that the training goes awry.
It should not be the goal to find the breakpoint, but if it happens, and it often does, we can use it to better inform future training decisions. There is information in your mistakes that can help you leap forward.
When it comes to overload, you can overdo it in three ways:
Intensity: Going too hard, too often.
Volume: Piling on too many miles or hours.
Both at once: The ultimate recipe for disaster.
Your body doesn’t have infinite capacity, especially if training isn’t your entire life. Work, travel, family, and other stressors sneak in, turning a training week that worked fine before into a breaking point now.
The purpose of your training isn’t to do as much as humanly possible or to crush yourself every session. It’s to do just enough to nudge you toward improvement. Progress, not punishment, is the goal.
What is my breakpoint telling me?
As mentioned above, you can break yourself with three types of training errors—
Excessive intensity
Excessive volume
Increasing both volume and intensity at the same time
Your friend might thrive on two track sessions and a monster long run each week, but if you’re limping away from the same plan, it’s not for you. Here’s how to break it down and learn from it.
If intensity is the culprit…
Look at the density of your intensity days
If two hard sessions in a week brought you to ruin, maybe one is best. There is also no harm with abandoning the 7-day model and looking at a 10 or 14 day cycle. You simply might need more space between the hard days or the dosing needs to be dialed down if you opt for more frequent hard days.
Pay attention to how you feel in the days following your intensity days
Hardly being able to get out of bed after a hard workout is different than feeling a little sluggish on an easy run. Know this difference and make adjustments as needed. You may get tired from training, but it is not the goal.
Look back at your training consistency across 6-weeks
How many days did you miss or change plans due to excess fatigue or signs of injury? Often, the body whispers before it starts to yell at you. This is especially true when you are burning it too hot in the workouts.
If Volume Is the Culprit…
Analyze your 3-, 5-, and 10-day totals
Piling too much work into a short window can overwhelm your system. Look at your training log. Are you cramming excessive volume into a few days? Spreading it out more evenly might help.
Check your calories
Higher volume means higher energy demands. If you’re not eating enough to match your output, you’re running on fumes, which can lead to fatigue, poor recovery, or injury. A small caloric deficit can add up.
Evaluate your recovery habits
Volume isn’t just about training hours—it’s about what you do when you’re not training. Are you sleeping enough? Managing stress? Skimping on recovery can make a sustainable volume feel crushing.
The crux of the matter in all of this is you are going above your capacity. The cool part with that is you can change it, but it does not happen overnight. We can visualize this idea with Dye’s Envelope of Function idea (pictured below)1.
When you suffer an injury in training, you have hit the zone of structural failure. You want to be operating at a slight overload, but not extreme. This is how the body adapts and increases capacity. This is also the middle ground we see in the chart where load and frequency are sufficient for driving improvement but not injury or illness.
Let’s look at what you can do to push that capacity upward.
Trending upward
Keeping a training log is the easiest way to start building a program that does not break you. With a bit of detail, you can harken back and spot errors or do the math that doesn’t add up.
With this information, you can treat your breakpoint as a guide to help build what is known as a Basic Week.
Your Basic Week is going to include an amount of volume and intensity that you have proven you can handle. Your training log will tell you what this is. Somewhere between this safe training load and your breakpoint load is where you want to operate.
An example would be to look at this on a 6-week time horizon. I find that nothing groundbreaking in training happens faster than 6-weeks at a time anyway.
At the end of each week, an honest self assessment of where you are can help guide your next week of training. Sometimes, the best option is to repeat a week a few times to see if it is manageable.
This will result in overload (good!), but not too much (really good!) because at the end of 6, 12, 20 weeks of successful training you will have outpaced the program that required you to sit on the sidelines due to injury or illness disruption. The gains are add up over months, not days, of work.
Other ways to address capacity limitations may be to zoom in and look at your body structures. Perhaps there are some underlying strength or mobility issues that would make your body more receptive to training. You can read more about how to craft a strength program as an endurance athlete in the article below.
Sensible Strength
Have you, an endurance athlete, heard that weight training can be a helpful performance supplement?
Finally, you cannot neglect that your life outside of training matters too. If this is chaotic, you must acknowledge that. This is simple to say but not easy to do, especially when motivated to improve. Maybe you’ll need some more rest before that track workout. Maybe you need a full day off. You get to decide how you play your cards.
If you have found yourself beyond your breakpoint, there is no need to panic. It is information that can help you if you use it as such. There is an element of risk when training for big goals, so do the math and make sure it is a calculated risk.
https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/when-symmetry-matters-a-look-at-instances-in-where-indexes-matter-after-injury/
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