raj wrote:I've never heard of "overtraining syndrome" before but it sounds interesting (http://www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/overtraining.html) but most of the information out there refers to athletes on regular exercise regimes not recreational cyclists on occasional day rides. Not sure how applicable it is to us.
Yes, there are a lot of people who think that OTS is something only athletes get, but even golfers get it, possibly because they're less likely to think they're at risk. All it takes is to build up a level of fatigue that you can't recover from between training sessions, and then maintain that fatigue for a protracted period of time. The less fit you are the easier it is to make yourself fatigued, particularly if you're new to exercise and impatient to build fitness faster than is realistic.