PR Playbook: Delaying Fatigue

While we can’t completely overcome muscle fatigue, we can certainly delay it. But, sometimes this delay can be the difference between endurance athletes winning or losing in competition. As endurance athletes, when we are aiming to delay fatigue, we need to address fatigue at each of our energy levels.

How Can You Overcome Muscle Fatigue?

There are many strategies we can use to accomplish this goal, but here are a few I’ve found over the years to be particularly effective at increasing our bodies’ output and delaying, or temporarily overcoming, the onset of muscle fatigue.

Diet

First, we must ensure your diet is optimized. Consuming an adequate amount and ratio of carbohydrates, fat, and protein is paramount, especially in the days surrounding a priority training session or a race. Typically, endurance athletes require more carbohydrates during the peak endurance phases of your training and slightly less protein than other athletes. In essence, carbs are to the body like fuel is to a car, they provide the necessary fuel to maintain or sustain energy levels during those challenging workouts.

The goal is to ensure you begin your training session with enough muscle glycogen, and then during your training session that you maintain glycogen levels as much as possible. This means that during those priority training sessions, endurance athletes need to have some carbohydrates on the go. Current research recommends 30–90 total gram of carbohydrates per hour. Smaller athletes will need the lower end larger athletes will need to target the higher end. Diet is also essential in reducing fatigue after training, when a different ratio of nutrients can help your body in recovery from the stress you just put it through — as quickly as possible.

Hydration

A common contributor to fatigue in endurance athletes is not staying hydrated. I am not just talking about drinking when you’re thirsty (as you may know, thirst is a sign your body is already slightly dehydrated). Dehydration can lead to significant performance decrements, not to mention the risk of sickness and, in severe cases, death. Even a three to four percent drop in body water levels (signaled by thirst and fatigue) can decrease your muscular contractions by 10 to 20%.

Hydration is individualized; some athletes may require more or less fluid (and corresponding electrolytes) for hydration based on many factors, such as food intake, exercise frequency, exercise intensity, sweat rate, individual sweat composition, and geographical location or environmental conditions. Not having enough water can impact CNS fatigue, and reduce performance of every energy system. A simple way to monitor and determine your hydration needs is based on urine color and frequency of urination. Urine color should be pale yellow — and as annoying as it can be during a long training run, urinating frequently can be a good marker of hydration status.

Sleep & Recovery

Anyone who has struggled through a morning run after a poor night sleep knows how much more rest can impact fatigue. Inadequate rest between workouts can cause unnecessary fatigue — and make hard workouts feel even harder. A great rule of thumb for resting time is getting 7–9 hours of sleep and alternating high intensity training days (speedwork, hill repeats, long runs) with easy training days. When we don’t get enough sleep, not only does if make our workouts sluggish, it has been shown to impact how our bodies metabolize carbohydrates and synthesis protein. Put another way, if you’re not getting enough sleep, you won’t get all the benefits you’ve made from keeping your diet in check.

Another common and fatal errors I see with endurance athletes, both beginner and advanced alike, is over-training. Trapped by our “more is better” mentality, many of us seem to think if we train longer, harder, and more often, we’ll multiply our results. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, over-training can significantly impede the body’s ability to properly recover and rebuild itself. Only through enough rest and an adequate number of days in between training, will the body be able to recover and rebuild itself. The most common signs of over-training are feeling sluggish, muscle soreness that won’t go away, difficulties sleeping and a decrease in strength. If you sense any of these coming on, talk with your coach, and try taking off a day or two in between training sessions and see how you feel.

Resistance Training

Traditionally, endurance athletes have been reluctant to use resistance training as part of their overall training plan — however this is a key component of managing fatigue. For many endurance athletes, this reluctance has stemmed from the belief that if they “bulk up” it will slow them down. Today’s scientific evidence refutes this belief and offers resistance training is essential to overall development of the endurance athlete. Also — my personal experiences makes this ring true. When the runner yelled at me “hey Boston why are you walking!?” I realized it was because I had mistakenly stopped strength training when I took up endurance sports.

Endurance athletes who are stronger can generally perform at a much higher level without fatigue. Building up your muscles is like giving you a more powerful engine. You’re less apt to stall on a steep hill if you have a higher horsepower engine. Endurance athletes should include strength training in their program 2–3x a week, ideally training muscular strength and power to improve your bodies horsepower and keep you charging up that hill.

Supplements

There are many supplements that can help today’s athlete postpone muscular fatigue. Most focus on preventing the fatigue that comes with inadequate glycogen levels. Endurance athletes may benefit greatly from carbohydrate/electrolyte beverages such as Tailwind, Gatorade, Spring Energy, Scratch Chews. These contain precise ratios of carbohydrates and electrolytes (vital salts and minerals) that can replace those lost during prolonged exercise, as well as enhance the body’s ability to sustain long-term energy.

Nutritional stimulants such as caffeine (or its herbal counterpart guarana) can help also delay fatigue. Not only does it stimulate a cascade of positive hormones that cause a release of free-fatty acids into the bloodstream, most importantly, it directly affects the CNS. It postpones central fatigue and decreasing the perceived difficulty of the exercise. Just one more reason to love a little espresso in the morning.

Knowledge

The final way to delay fatigue is simply through knowledge. Knowledge is power. Knowing that when your racing that the first fatigue you feel is CNS fatigue is very helpful. It’s just your body wanting to be comfortable. The very definition of endurance is the ability or strength to continue despite fatigue, stress, or other adverse conditions. If you want to perform at your highest level, you need to learn ways to push past CNS fatigue on race day and there are a host of sports psychology techniques that can help you do exactly that. You can find many here in our Mental Skills Of Successful Endurance Athletes

Last Words

So there you have it… there’s nothing fancy here… but enough to get you through that next training day or event delaying muscle fatigue, the possibility of hitting the wall and finishing strong! With the information at hand, you’re now armed with practical, safe, scientifically sound methods to overcome muscle fatigue, so you can train harder (possibly even longer) and become stronger, both mentally and physically making every training session that much better.