Recovery, sleep and avoiding overtraining
Physical Education · Key Stage 3 · The School
Why sleep matters most
Teenagers need MORE sleep than adults — commonly 8 to 10 hours a night — and much of the body's physical repair happens during deep sleep. Cutting sleep to fit in more training time usually costs more than it gains, because the repair the extra training needs is exactly what got cut.
Signs of doing too much
Persistent tiredness that does not lift with a normal night's sleep. Performance dropping despite training more, not less. Trouble sleeping despite being tired. Getting ill more often. Feeling unusually irritable. Any one of these, especially several together, is a sign to reduce load rather than push through.
What a rest day looks like
A rest day can mean COMPLETE rest, doing nothing structured. Or it can mean ACTIVE recovery — gentle movement like a walk or an easy swim, which keeps blood flowing without adding real training stress. Both are legitimate. What a rest day is not is a hard session done anyway because a day off feels like giving up.
WEEK 1: training feels normal, sleep is good, mood is fine. WEEK 2: the same sessions feel harder, sleep gets worse despite being tired, a cold appears out of nowhere, and times or scores start dropping even though nothing about the training changed. That pattern — same effort, worse results, worse sleep — is overtraining showing up. The fix is not a harder week 3. It is reducing the load and letting the signs settle before building back up.