Overtraining syndrome is one of the greatmysteries of modern sports science. No one is exactly sure what goes wrong or how to fix it. But there’s a general consensus about what causes it: too much training, not enough recovery. It’s basically a math problem, and if the dawning age of sports technology ever delivers a perfect way of measuring training load and recovery status, we’ll one day be able to balance the books and eliminate overtraining for good.
At least, that’s the theory. But sports psychologists have been studying a parallel condition they call athlete burnout since at least the 1980s, which carries some different assumptions. In this view, burnout is influenced not just by the physical stress of training and competition, but by the athlete’s