When Everything Adds Up and the Athlete Breaks: Burnout and RED-S in High Performance Environments

Performance decline is rarely the result of a single factor, but the cumulative and chronic effect of training, life stress, and recovery imbalance—what sports science describes as allostatic load.

There's a lot of talk a lot about 'REDS'—a syndrome—and 'Burnout', a functional outcome of chronic stress and allostatic load. It's important that we don't minimize REDS or burnout to only under fueling/mismatched energy or overtraining. Both are better understood in the context of total load, versus a single variable.

Imagine you have a back pack on. Your backpack represents everything you’re carrying.

Some days the backpack feels manageable and other days, nothing obvious has changed—yet it suddenly feels heavier. Maybe you're not feeling as resilient emotionally on this day and what wouldn't have stressed you out yesterday, has your mind spinning with anxiety. Certain factors or circumstances are 'costing' your body more today than yesterday energy wise. The stress on your body is higher. All else being well and balanced, that's OK. Your pack won't necessarily feel the same day to day. That's a natural part of life.

But what if it's not only now and again that your back pack feels heavier?

Training is one weight in your pack, so are sleep debt, work and/or school stress, emotional load, travel, under fueling, illness, social media, relationships and life transitions—and each carries a different “weight" at different times.

What's important overall is that YOU CAN MANAGE each element in your back pack. And that together, it's not too heavy.

How do you manage it?

Your physiology

Your psychology

Your nutrition

Your life scheduling

Your coping skillsets

If you're managing well, at the end of the day you feel healthy and energized. Sure, you can and will be tired from training or working, but that's a different fatigue then always feeling like you're DRAGGING. You shouldn't feel like you're carrying a heavy bag of boulders everywhere you go.

It's not so much what’s in the pack, but how heavy it feels to the YOU.

Your perception of stress matters; of the cumulative load of training and of life stress..

Your individual resilience matters; Are you one strong gust of wind away from collapsing into tears? Or do you have the emotional capacity to have stress thrown at you, pause and take a breath, and respond vs react?

These factors all influence how your body adapts—or struggles to adapt.

Two athletes can have a very different experience of the same situation: For example, one person may not be stressed by travel for racing, and may love it! While another struggles immensely with the lack of control, the long lines, and the lack of routine they're accustomed to (including the foods they eat, the bed they sleep in etc.). These are very different experiences for the body and mind based on individual perspective. How can the second athlete lighten the weight of travel on their system? Are there coping mechanisms? Could learning skills to cope lighten this load? That's what we're after.

How YOU perceive a certain situation significantly impacts whether it adds to your stress load or not.

Today's post is a reminder to take inventory of what’s in your backpack, how well you’re managing it, what supports you have in place, and where you may need more support to lighten the load.

Sometimes the question isn’t “Am I training too much?” It’s “What am I carrying, how heavy does it feel, how well supported am I right now and do I need to ask for help?”

Don't wait until your back pack rips and the bottom falls out. Take inventory, get support to lighten the load if needed and take a few things out more often if they're weighing you down.

It's the chronic load that will wear you down bit by bit. Taking regular inventory is key to preventing burnout or REDS.

The backpack acts as a simplified analogy for allostatic load. The reality is this chronic stress load can lead to maladaptation of body systems and communication between systems over time, resulting in impaired performance, recovery and health. Some of these stresses are challenging to measure and this is precisely why regular inventory of all aspects of stress, beyond only nutrition and training, are important for high performance and health.

Follow for more on training, fueling, and managing total stress load in sport and other high-performance environments.

Contact me today if you're looking for support with high performance mindset in sport or in business. Whether you're struggling to feel confident about your sports nutrition, finding more clients as an entrepreneur or feeling stress about posting on social media, let's connect and make sure you're managing your load so you can go the distance.

Cheers,

Anne (Psst! You can find me on IG at @guzmananne!)