Overtraining and nutrition are two rarely associated terms. And yet ... overtraining is by definition the translation of a progressive maladjustment of the organism in the face of physiological solicitations. But what can be the role of nutrition in this maladjustment?
From adaptation to overtraining
The phrase "when it hurts is that it feels good" is well known to the sports squad when one evokes the notion of training. Would the sportsman then be a perpetually dissatisfied masochist ...? Having no claim to be able to answer this question from the secondary register, and although it is said, physiological solicitation remains necessary to allow any athlete to see his performance improve. Indeed, performance can be defined by "the optimization of all the physiological functions that responded favorably to the adaptations expected of the training". Clearly, the organism must be sought outside its comfort zone to enable it to become more efficient, more enduring, more resistant or even more powerful. The difficulty then lies in quantifying the fatigue required to improve performance and in determining the appropriate recovery periods accordingly. Indeed, if the physical capacities can grow rapidly and significantly in a casual athlete, the optimization of the performance of a high-level athlete requires a considerable investment for a quantitatively small result. This determination is characteristic of a large number of sportsmen. How could it be otherwise, when the time between the qualifying times for the Olympic Games and the world records is on average only 4 to 5% of the total time? Or when a place on the podium in the same event is played on barely 0.1% of the race time (ie 0.1 sec on a 100m sprint)? The motivations of 30 to 100% of athletes (according to the sport under consideration) claim to suffer from intense fatigue a few weeks or even days before their objective.