While it is often cited, overtraining syndrome is one of the least rigorously defined concepts in training and sports medicine. In resistance training populations, there is little evidence that overtraining syndrome can be reliably produced — even under extreme conditions. If ignored for too long, chronic overtraining can lead to long-term endocrine dysfunction. One of the simplest ways to avoid overtraining is to implement intensity variation. The absence of consistent morning wood is often the body’s way of signaling that testosterone is not in optimal range. But if you keep hitting it with the same stimulus over and over again without time for your body to recover, it soon tanks. When you create a stimulus, the body uses ‘adaptive energy’ to help the body adapt. In other words, you can expect to get jacked from strength training… but not from a 20 minute session on the recumbent bike. So, if you lift weights your body adapts by growing new protein cells and getting jacked. But based around a model called specific adaptation to imposed demands (SAID), your body ONLY adapts in a way that’s specific to that stimulus. This could be from weight training, cardio, agility training or flexibility for example. HRV does not reliably map to OTS, and its use in strength athletes is poorly studied. This disconnect has also been shown in resistance training. Much of the reason this metric has failed is because both T and C are noisy in response to training. LEA, sleep restriction, and excessive training load for the available resources. Because not all individuals with EHMC have symptoms, it can be challenging to diagnose athletes, much less treat them. Many men report increased anxiety, depression, and brain fog during prolonged training phases without proper deloads. These nutrients are also critical for testosterone synthesis. Training hard while eating a low-fat or nutrient-deficient diet only accelerates hormonal burnout. This creates a self-destructive loop that can only be broken by rest and recovery strategies. You train too much, sleep poorly, testosterone drops, and you wake up feeling worse — so you try to train harder to compensate. Hormonal alterations may be therefore only seen in acute responses to functional tests, but not in basal and in resting levels, as observed in relative adrenal insufficiency, GH deficiency and pre-diabetes and initial diabetes. Herein, 24 studies employed this method, and normal levels were seen in all parameters, except for T/C ratio, which was successful to show altered ratios compared to healthy athletes in 50.0% of the studies (40.0% showed reduced ratios and 10.0% showed increased ratios), while normal findings were observed in 50.0%. Therefore, none of the evaluated basal hormone levels, nor the hormone-related parameters, appear to be good predictors of OT/OR. Regarding endurance exercises, despite the potentially high prevalence of OTS/NFOR/FOR among triathlon athletes, only six studies performed tests in this population, whereas other sports which OTS/NFOR/FOR has been less described have been perhaps disproportionately studies. When analyzed together, basal and resting hormones were mostly normal, once none of the parameters were shown to be altered in more than 50.0% of the selected articles, whenever three or more studies were found for the analyzed marker. Therefore, regardless of the normal range, whenever athletes with OTS/NFOR/FOR presented significantly different hormone levels than healthy athletes, basal hormones would be able to be good markers or predictors of OTS/NFOR/FOR, and therefore cutoffs could be established using specific statistics mechanisms. For analysis purposes, we considered only hormones that have been performed by more than one study While 14 out of 16 hormones (87.5%) were mostly normal in FOR-induced athletes, five from 12 hormones (41.7%) disclosed mostly normal levels and responses when OTS-affected athletes were analyzed. Therefore, when analyzed together, basal hormones of previously affected athletes and resting hormones of NFOR/FOR induced subjects displayed normal findings in all parameters, as observed in Table 5. Among the 38 selected studies, 24 (63.2%) evaluated resting hormone levels after an induced NFOR/FOR state, 17 (44.7%) tested basal hormone levels and 16 (42.1%) evaluated acute hormone responses to stimulation tests.
