You don’t get stronger when you train. You get stronger when you recover.

5 months of multiple fight camps, PT sessions, training through injuries, fatigue, and building a business finally caught up with me. I finally took a week off, or rather, my body forced me to take one.

It could've been worse, overtraining can easily lead to long-term illness, insomnia and injuries but I definitely was feeling the signs that it was on the way - a 6 minute shadowboxing round gave me DOMS for a week. My body wasn't feeling right and I had no more to give.

There’s a quote I once heard:

"It’s better to be 20% undertrained than 2% overtrained."

Whether the numbers are true or not, I get it.

What Actually Happens When You Overtrain

Overtraining isn’t just about feeling tired or sore. It’s true breakdown of your body and mind. Performance drops, mood worsens, and your body (and its systems) struggle to recover.

📚 According to the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA):

“Excessive training loads with insufficient recovery can cause overtraining, leading to long-term fatigue, poor sleep, and elevated injury risk.”

And it's regrdless of your level - as it really is about how much your body can handle - so, surprise or not, even the elite of the elite athletes experience it too with a 2020 study in the European Journal of Sport Science found that sustained high training loads without recovery lead to neuromuscular fatigue and hormonal disruption.

The Myth of "Earning Rest"

So overtraining can happen to anyone, why do you need to take this in? If you're purpose-driven and chasing a goal, whether it's sports, business, every day health or whatever, it’s easy to treat rest as something to earn, as if it's something you can only take when the job is done. But as much as hustle culture has us WORKING, rest needs to be part of the process itself.

📚 As explained in Sports Medicine, “Training adaptations occur during rest, not during exercise itself. Without recovery, progress stalls or reverses.”

So if you’re skipping recovery, you’re not “outworking” the competition, you’re undercutting your own growth. I'm obviously using sports as the foundation, but this is as true for work as it is for gains.

All work and no play, makes the good times go away. Or something like that. You can't grind all year without a break because you'll burnout, under-deliver or sacrifice your personal life. Or all three.

Rest Is the Hidden Growth Phase

Think about it this way:

Muscles repair and grow during sleep, not lifting.
Your nervous system recalibrates during downtime, not stress.
Hormones like testosterone and growth hormone spike during deep sleep—not HIIT.
Sleep deprivation impairs performance, cognitive function, and recovery.‍

So if you want your mind and body at your best, you need stress AND rest.

Signs You Might Need a Break

If you’ve been training hard and find yourself experiencing:

Low motivation
Constant soreness
Poor sleep
Mood swings
Plateaued progress

…your body’s not being weak. It’s asking you to recover.

Final Thoughts

Listen, life happens and sometimes you have to go harder than ideal. Some targets, some goals - they can't wait. But know that's a short-term and not long-term strategy.

I needed that week off, I couldn't have kept going. And the breathing room helped my body recover, my sleep improve and took my mind back into alignment. Rest isn't a joke.

Whether you’re a seasoned athlete or just getting started, learn from my pain and don’t wait until you break to rest. Build it in. Own it. Your consistency depends on it.

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