Spotting the line between productive training and unrecovered overtraining.
5 min read
Exercise is one of the more reliable ways to lower chronic inflammation over time — which makes it tempting to assume more is always better. It isn't. Intense training without adequate recovery can tip from helpful into a stressor of its own.
A hard workout is, briefly, a controlled stressor — that's how it triggers adaptation. The problem is when hard sessions stack up faster than the body can recover from them: sleep suffers, resting heart rate creeps up, motivation drops, and minor niggles start lingering instead of healing.
This is the pattern sports scientists sometimes call "non-functional overreaching," and left unaddressed for long enough it can slide into genuine overtraining — where performance drops even as effort goes up.
Instead of scoring a single workout in isolation, THE FAD's Exercise signal factors in your recent training load and recovery signals together. A hard session after several rest days scores differently from the same session stacked on top of a already-depleted week — because physiologically, they aren't the same thing.
Practical signal: if your Exercise contribution to your score keeps rising even as you train harder, that's usually recovery debt talking, not a reason to push more.
THE FAD