How Close Are Your To Burning Out As A GAA Player? (And Four Ways To Avoid It)

Do you fall asleep; but wake up feeling as tired or even more tired than when you went to bed? 

You train hard but still your pitch performance has seemingly stalled or plateaued? 

You go to the gym, but you still can’t drop the fat from your stomach or add any extra size? 

You eat well, but your digestion feels really sluggish all of a sudden? 

You’re able to have sex but you’re not really sure how badly you want it anymore? 

If you answered yes to any or all of the above, you might be close to burning out. 

The first step is identify the correct problem as many players confuse over training or burn out with under recovery. As you’ll see, the symptoms and to a lesser degree, the solutions is largely the same; but understanding the nuances is the difference between progression and improvement vs regression and frustration.  

If you and I were walking down the street and I said “turn left down here” you’d more than likely turn left. 

If I said go right, you would obviously go right.

But what about if you had Gerstmann’s syndrome and couldn’t tell your left from your right. How confident would you be then? Well, if turning left or right are your only two options, you would probably be pretty confident as you  still have a 50:50 chance of going the right direction. 

That’s kind of what ‘over training’ and ‘under recovery’ is like. 

Most players who feel they are over training are actually under recovering and they are generally trying to solve the wrong problem. They are figuratively turning left when they should have been turning right. 

Over training vs under recovery – what’s the difference? 

Before we explain the difference, it’s important to first understand how stress impacts physical performance. To make progress in the gym, on the pitch or in any training environment, you need to push yourself.

Successful training must involve overload, which mean consistently pushing your body beyond its capacity to elicit the super-compensation effect that any GAA player needs to progress. 

At the inter county level, the best athletes have the highest training volumes compared to the average club player. So if you want to make it to the highest level – or go up an notch from under age or junior to senior or club to intercounty, then you need to put in the work. It seems straight forward enough: just add more volume to your training. But it’s actually far more complex than it appears.

The more you train, the greater the likelihood of sleep disturbances. The more you train, the greater your potential risk of cold and flu. The more you train, the more closely you walk the tightrope between healthy and harmful overload, not to mention flirting with the health and performance abyss of over training.

It can be a bit of a slippery slope. How much volume or training can you do before you your progression transforms into regression; and you start to go backwards? This is a vital consideration for a GAA player as you have games and repeated events that occur over and over again throughout the season. 

Compare this to something like training for a marathon where you have one date in the future you are trying to ‘peak’ for and you can see where the complexity comes in.