The Big Difference Between Burnout and Overtraining for Athletes
Burnout and overtraining are two of the biggest reasons why athletes fail to reach their potential. They both lead to dramatic performance declines and they both can lead to injury. In addition, both burnout and overtraining develop because coaches and parents are not paying attention to the physical and mental impacts of an athlete’s schedule.
Correspondingly, it’s the athlete’s schedule that causes both phenomena. Moreover, adjusting the athlete’s schedule is the only way to fix both.
It’s easy to misdiagnose burnout vs. overtraining because they share all the similarities I list above. However, there is a big difference between the two that a parent or coach can use to distinguish between them. Only when a coach or parent is aware of this difference can they make the correct adjustments to an athlete’s schedule.
This difference starts and ends with motivation. An athlete experiencing a performance decline because of burnout has little to no motivation to improve. As their performance declines, their level of motivation may stay the same or decrease, but it never improves. Sometimes taking a long rest break helps with burnout, but most of the time a cognitive intervention or a change in environment is the only thing that will help long-term.
On the other hand, an athlete who is experiencing overtraining gains motivation as their performance declines. These athletes want to improve badly, and they want to keep training so they can realize the improvements they crave. But the problem is that their body just won’t respond to this motivation. No matter how hard they try, the results just don’t follow. Therefore, the best cure for overtraining is rest. Various studies show that athletes won’t lose conditioning, muscle memory, or strength after as much as two weeks of rest. In fact, these studies show that several days of rest after intense training will actually improve performance.
To conclude, burnout is mental, overtraining is physical. Burnout is the result of stress on the mind, while overtraining is the result of stress on the body. While the impact of the two are similar and the solutions can be similar as well, it’s far more difficult to help an athlete with burnout than overtraining because of the mental aspect of burnout.