On a hot fall day after school junior Simrik Mahata is at cross county practice running mile repeats on the track, and she starts to notice a relentless pain in her shins.
Athletes can obtain injuries when they are overtrained by themselves or coaches during sports practice or conditioning due to too much repeated stress being put on their bodies.
Overtraining happens more often than people would think, and there are common symptoms of an athlete to prove that they are overtrained. “You may experience symptoms of overtraining that are directly related to exercise, including: increased muscle soreness that gets worse the more you train, a plateau or decline in athletic performance, inability to train at the level you usually do, excessive sweating and overheating, feeling like your muscles are heavy or stiff, especially your legs, injuries that keep coming back, like muscle sprains, stress fractures and joint pain, loss of enthusiasm for exercise, or feeling like you want to skip your workouts altogether,” according to WebMD.
Overtraining can pose life threatening health issues that need immediate medical care. An example of this was shown by Tufts University’s men’s lacrosse team who participated in a workout that was guided by an alumni who was enrolled in the university’s BUD/S Navy SEAL training program. “About 50 players participated in the workout, and nine were hospitalized with rhabdomyolysis, also known as rhabdo, a condition in which muscles break down and leak their components into the bloodstream. In serious cases, it can cause damage to the kidneys and other organs,” according to CNN.
Rhabdomyolysis is a rare condition to occur in athletes, and it affected nine out of 50 of the athletes on Tufts lacrosse team. “It’s unusual but not unheard-of for multiple members of a team to get rhabdomyolysis at the same time. Clusters of cases among athletes have been observed among college football players in Iowa in 2011 and swimmers in South Carolina in 2007,” according to CNN.
A majority of athletes all believe “no pain, no gain,” but athletes do not know when to stop because the pain has increased to an injury sustaining level. “You can reach the point of overtraining by exercising too much without enough recovery time between workouts. You can also reach this limit by not properly fueling your body with the calories and nutrients it needs,” according to WebMD.
High school athletes have determination and grit that can easily make severe injuries from overtraining their muscles overlooked as solely soreness in the body. “I got shin splints when being on the cross country team last year,” Mahata said.
These injuries can affect people’s daily lives, limit the amount of exercise, and change the intensity of workouts that athletes could possibly participate in. “I couldn’t run at practice at all for a couple of weeks. My shins were always in pain, even when I was walking,” Mahata said.
It is important to take the right steps to recovery, so athletes can get back in the game as soon as possible while being assured their health is in a good state. Student athletes can visit the school’s athletic trainer to get more information on their road to recovery or if they suspect an injury was sustained. “I took a complete break from running and I did lots of stretching during the time I was injured. That time off really helped me and I felt so much better once I began running again,” Mahata said.
