We often get concerns about athletes “overtraining” when they begin to workout at school or when their season starts. The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that teens should not exceed 20 hours a week including strength training and practicing before beginning to feel burned out or overtrained. When we start to break down an athlete’s week many do not come close to that number and depending on the sport the task at hand is not very demanding physically or mentally. Take hitting off the tee or throwing plyos (for position not intent) for example. Most high school athletes off-season look something like this:

• School Workouts 3 -5 days per week for an hour (3-5 hours total)
• Skill Specific work 3-5 days per week for an hour (3-5 hours total) 

That puts most athletes at a total training time anywhere from 6 to 10 hours per week and some not even that much. That leaves an additional 10 hours available for extra work throughout the week. The research suggests that the majority of athletes can certainly handle additional training and now let’s take what the elite athletes of their sports have done. 

Kobe Bryant during his off-season would train 6 months a year, 6 days per week, for 6 hours a day between his strength and skills work. Specifically 2 hours of strength work, 2 hours of skills work and 2 hours of conditioning. Michael Jordan was on a very similar plan training 5 to 6 hours per day multiple days per week. That is a total of 36 hours per week these two were training and developing during the off-season, almost double what the research suggests. Once again the research is based on your average high school athlete not guys trying to be the best in the world. Personally, I see our professional athletes and the work they put in to stay on top. They put in easily 20 hours a week between recovery, mobility work, strength sessions, skills 

work and conditioning. High achievers find a way to be great and it is that simple. They do not have super powers, they are human like you and I. What they do have is an incredible mindset that loves the challenge and a major focus on one thing that is missed in the majority of athletes and that is recovery. 

If you are sleeping 4 to 5 hours a night staying up playing video games or on your phone talking to your girlfriend or boyfriend it will probably be difficult to recover. If you are eating 2,000 calories a day of ultra processed foods, when you know you are supposed to be shoveling 4,000 calories a day of whole foods, it will probably be difficult to recover. If you are so concerned with keeping up with your friends and going out partying and acting foolish it will more than likey be hard to recover. If you are drinking one bottle of water a day and the rest is sweet tea and coca cola it will probably be hard to recover. Understand it has a lot more to do with how 

you handle yourself after that workout then it does the workout itself. We must stress the system through training and then adapt to that stress through recovery. So the question you have to ask yourself is are you truly overtraining or are you just under recovering?