The Price I Paid for Doing too Much
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[00:00:00] Welcome

back to Next Level Chess Podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noel Studer and I help chess players train deliberately with what I call the Simplified Chess Improvement System. Deliberate chess players live by three rules. Do what matters. Do it well. And do it consistently. If you're tired of training randomly and want to follow a simple proven system, this podcast is for you.

Today's podcast episode is a painful one for me because, well, I should have known better and it's something that actually really pains me. It's a real injury I got. But at least I hope I have [00:01:00] realized this lesson now really well, and that you guys listening to this podcast can avoid doing the same mistakes.

Doing too much has cost me heavily once again. I've been training for a half marathon since November, with a clear plan in place since Christmas. Everything went great. I ran my first 10 kilometer race in January, achieving a better time than my 5k average in December. I stuck to the simple training plan with three weekly sessions.

It went so well that I felt I could do more. I started increasing the pace and doing a little extra here and there. And also, by the way, as a side note, I have realized that I've been also extremely sloppy on the stretching part. One week I ran 17 kilometers on Saturday. That was my longest distance so far.

I felt super energized afterward, even though it was really hard. When I didn't feel any muscular [00:02:00] pain in the evening or the following morning, I had a genius idea. Why not play some indoor football with friends the next day? If I don't feel my muscles, I must be invincible, right? So I played football for over 2 hours, not even 24 hours after running my longest distance yet.

Surprisingly, I felt pretty fine. My legs were sore, but there was no significant pain. Without thinking too much more about it, I stuck to my plan. Tuesday, speed training. Thursday, mid distance. Saturday, long distance run. I felt pretty good, even on Saturday, when the next long distance was on the schedule.

A 19 kilometer run. But then was when overtraining really hit me hard. Because the first 10 kilometers went pretty smoothly. I had a good pace. Again, over the pace of what the training plan suggested, but then after a few kilometers more, at kilometer 14, [00:03:00] I started feeling pain in my knees. I really wanted to finish this longest distance, so I pushed.

And by the way, for my American listeners and anyone using miles, the half marathon I'm preparing for is 21 kilometers, that's 13 miles roughly. And what I'm talking about right now, if I say 10 kilometers, that's that somewhere around six miles, and then kilometer 14 would be somewhere around 8.99 miles.

So at kilometer 14, I started feeling pain in my knees. I really wanted to finish this longest distance ever. So I pushed myself. On kilometer fifteen, I thought, this really starts hurting. On kilometer sixteen, I thought to myself, just don't stop. Even though this feels bad, when you manage to do it, you'll be proud of yourself.

Kilometer seventeen, now I've come so far and I'm so close to kilometer 19, I have three days to rest after that. It'll be all fine. [00:04:00] Kilometer 18, it feels like my knees are going to fall apart, but I'm not a quitter. I will make it. And then kilometer 19, finally, my longest distance ever was done. But even when I slowed down and I didn't run anymore,

just walking really hurt hard in my knees. That was over a month ago. And since then, the longest distance I've been able to run without pain is 4.5 kilometers. That's around three miles. I really messed up my plan. And honestly, I should have known better. After a few weeks in pain and not fully understanding what was happening, thinking to myself, I'm so unlucky,

why does this only happen to me? I asked a good friend who is an athletic coach for high performance athletes. Hearing about my pain, he had three questions for me. And by the way, as a side note, when you have coaches in any area, I feel like the questions they ask and how well they relate to your [00:05:00] situation is showing how much expertise they had.

So these three questions were extremely well formulated. Question number one was, did you gain a lot of weight in a short amount of time? So this, I feel, no, no, I'm stable on my weight. Question number two, now it gets interesting. Did you increase your speed before the pain started? I was like, how do you know that?

Yes, I did. I thought I can train faster than the training plan. So yes, I did increase my speed. Question number three, did you add any extra training before the pain started? I was like, dude, not now. Why do you observe me? Like, why do you know what I'm doing in my life? But I argued, well, I increased, but then I didn't feel the pain immediately.

Right. Saturday, 17 K. Sunday, playing football with my friend, but Monday there was no pain. But then he just smiled and he said that this is basically a beginner mistake. If we increase the load on our body by more than 15%, that's a rough number he told me, in [00:06:00] a single week, we start risking injury. His questions covered the most common ways to increase our load.

We can either increase the weight, we can increase the speed, or we can increase the distance. And what I did, I kept my weight normal, but I had much faster or gone always faster than the limit, and then started adding distance or adding training days by playing football on this Sunday. A good training plan already accounts for a 5 to 15 percent increase in load.

That's what makes me run faster or longer over time. The idea of a training plan is that I improve, but adding the football training and speeding up when it wasn't part of the plan threw everything off balance. And apparently it's also common for the problem to not appear immediately. What happened when I ran the 17k and played football was that my body didn't fully recover.

So what he told me basically is that your body, when you have a [00:07:00] strenuous exercise, it gets like below a hundred percent. So it goes down, it gets taxed really hard and then it needs a few days to go back to a hundred percent. Then you train again, then you go down, then you have a few rest days, you go up again and so on.

So this is the natural flow. You want to get back to close or to 100 percent then train again. So what happened when I did on Saturday, let's say went to 80%, but then on Sunday, I, instead of recovering and slowly going to 85%, I hit it hard again. So maybe it went to 50%. Then on Monday, it started slowly recovering, Tuesday again a hit.

So I go down again, then Wednesday, same thing, short recovery, Thursday, boom, again a hit. So by the next Saturday, instead of being at a hundred percent, which would be the goal of starting for a new longest ever run, your body needs to be ready. It's anyway already very intense. My body was maybe at 40 percent because it was still strained by [00:08:00] my exercises from the previous week.

So this would have even been fine if I would just run five kilometers, 10 kilometers and very easily. But running this 19k and even trying to go faster in an average speed than I should was really a huge problem. That's where the overtraining happened and I realized that, and that's what my friend and coach told me, that it's not even a real kind of, you hit your bones or something in your muscle has tore, but it's just my tendons and ligaments were overtrained.

And so they were just not ready for another training. And that is what made me stop for four to five weeks. So trying to go a little bit quicker and adding extra was meant to make me progress faster. I think many of you can relate with that. We try to add this additional training, not because we just like training, but [00:09:00] mostly because we want better results more quickly.

But it resulted in a four week break and a serious slowdown of my half marathon training. I'm now only slowly building up my training again, and I'm optimistic I can still run the half marathon. That's now from when you will hear this, it's roughly in a month but I won't be able to progress as much as I would have if I just stuck to the plan.

That's obviously a serious hit, like one month without proper training, my body will not be as quick as I would have been just following the plan. Some of you might again say, well, this dude again is talking about running on a chess improvement podcast. What the heck? So let's talk about why this applies to chess and why I'm so mad at myself in a certain way, because I see this same principle with many of my chess students or readers or listeners of this podcast.

And then I basically made the same mistake in running. [00:10:00] So the same principles apply to chess. Ironically, this is exactly what I tell my students. Don't overdo it. What makes things harder in chess is that you rarely experience this pain so obviously. I have it now in running, right? So in chess if you over train your symptoms are much more subtle.

So that's why I believe so many also amateur chess improvers are overtrained, but they don't really feel it as obvious as well. My knees just, I can't run anymore, right? At the beginning of this overtraining, like if I would run like 500 meters in a super slow pace, I would get real knee pain. My body is screaming, don't do that.

So the symptoms in chess mostly look like lacking focus, right? You sit down at the chessboard, but your brain doesn't really want to think about chess. Slowly draining mental energy, just general fogginess when you calculate, maybe fading away motivation, so you know you would like [00:11:00] to improve your chess, but you're like, ah, do I really want to sit down and train?

And then also the intensity of your training is decreasing. Just like my running example, the effects are not immediate, making it even harder to understand the cause. So maybe for two weeks you train a lot. And then one week we train normal again. And then suddenly the week after you're like, I'm so unmotivated, but last week I didn't train too much.

So what is that? So it's not immediate, which makes it even harder to understand. You can overdo it in one week and still feel fine the next. But the longer you push beyond what your brain can handle, the more you'll suffer from it. And then we have an additional thing is that you can even overload your brain not only with chess, but you can do other mental activities that can lead to this kind of overtraining because, well, you use your brain

with many different activities, maybe with your job and so on. So just as I didn't go jogging, I went for football, right? [00:12:00] It's a different physical activity that made the overtraining. In chess, it might be that you have a very busy week at work and you work with your head and then you try on top to do 10, 15 hours of chess and then slowly you're just getting so overwhelmed that your brain can't handle it anymore. 

In amateur chess, it's common to hear of adult improvers who eventually have to quit chess because they burn out. And this is super sad because it's a hobby, right? You're doing it for fun. This is the worst case scenario of overtraining. As I wrote about it before, overachievers in the corporate world, CEOs, lawyers, business owners are especially prone to overdoing their training and burning out.

And this again is also because they already have a super demanding job, but they are so used to doing more. That's how usually these overachievers, they manage to get in these positions. It's also by grinding away stuff. So if they grind away at work and then they grind away at chess, at some point [00:13:00] it's just too much and your head is just I don't want to do this anymore.

So the desire to get ahead faster, cut corners and feel special pushes us to overdo it and eventually our bodies pull the plug. And again, in chess, it's way more subtle. So if this sounds like you, if you're someone that just like me. In theory, you would know that this is not good, right? Training too much is not ideal, but you still feel that your nature is pushing you to get there.

Here is how you can avoid it. And here's what I did in some parts and I did wrong as well. So step number one is always starting small. I did this well by running two to three days a week without a specific goal for a month before I started my structured training plan. So what I did is in November I just started running whenever I felt like I just said two to three times I need to go running.

And then in December I started a specific plan, which is three runs per week. [00:14:00] I stuck to that plan. What then happened is, later on, I overdid it. Step number two is follow someone who knows the risks. So I had this plan designed by an experienced coach that helped me avoid burnout. If I just stick to that plan, I can avoid burnout.

The risk of doing your own plan, for example, without asking anyone is that you're doing unrealistic stuff. I remember that when I started being a chess professional I did my plans myself and my plans were basically starting at 8 am and finishing at 10 pm by lying in my bed and reading still a chess book.

So it was just absolute madness, way too much. Only one day off. Sometimes I didn't even take a day off. So it was just pure madness and this can be avoided if you have someone that has experience with people that burned out before you and just say, Hey, take it easy. Step number three [00:15:00] is trust the training.

It is good enough. It is, if it's good enough This is where I went wrong. I felt I could go quicker than the plan allowed and push myself too hard in every session. And the point of a good plan is to have recovery runs and then faster runs and longer runs. So, going 110% every time isn't what brings the best result.

And so usually what I tend to do at least is, when I had very good results, some people from outside also told me, wow, Noel, you're running so quick, you're making such fast improvements. That's incredible. And so I was like, oh yeah, maybe I'm different. Maybe I can just adjust it myself a little bit.

That's where the risk starts coming in because, even if I would be a talented runner, I don't know how much I should twist on the training plan, even taking into account that I might be a talented runner and my body might be ready for a little bit more. Maybe I was ready for 3 percent more, but not for 7 percent [00:16:00] more.

I have no idea how to adjust the plan myself. So if we ever feel like adjusting a plan, I would say, ask someone that is experienced and don't just say, yeah, yeah, it's fine. I'll just follow this training plan and then I'll add this, this, this, and that. And then we don't even realize that we are just completely overloading ourselves.

That's the same in chess. So for example, if you are in Next Level Training or how my course is soon going to be called To Simplify the Chess Improvement System. If you're in there and you see some training plans, some recommendations, and you do it, plus you just think, well, I'll also do this and that.

And the other thing, then you risk to just overdo it and suffer the same consequences as I suffer right now. Step number four is increase training load by a maximum of 10 percent every week. That's a super simple number that he just gave me. He said, Hey that's my friend, the [00:17:00] athletic coach he said, Hey this is a good benchmark.

If you want to increase your training load, it should be 10 percent again. If you already have a training plan from someone prepared for you for a specific goal. So that was this half marathon training plan. It's a 16 week training plan to go from five kilometers to 21, and to increase the speed as well.

That means that this coach already accounted for this 10%, so I should just stick to that because the coach did it for me. Now, if you have a chess training plan, so let's say you decided to study six hours per week, You say that's small for you. You started small six hours per week. Great. What you're doing is when you do this week, well, so you did the six hours.

You feel like next week I want to do more. So what you're doing is you're just adding 10%. Very nice with six hours. So it's 36 minutes. You can just go for 35 or 40 minutes, whatever, somewhere around 10 percent of the [00:18:00] time that you're studying. You can add that on top next week, you train six and a half hours, and then you add another half hour next week and so on.

And I would do the same thing in reverse. So if you're having six and a half hours on your training plan, but you realize, Oh, this was a super busy week. I didn't manage to do it. Then I would just go back 10 percent and try to see if you can hit your target the next week. Okay, last but not least, point number five, think long term, not short term.

This is something I teach and follow often, but no, not always. And sometimes I fall back into wanting everything right now. And my injury is the price I paid for. I remember as well that when I did the training plan, even a thought was popping up to me. Oh, maybe I'm just running the marathon. If I'm making such quick progress, it's like, dude, no, stop that.

Okay. So we need to catch ourselves when we have these kinds of thoughts say, [00:19:00] Hey, in the long run, I can run a marathon at some point. I can do that, but everything needs time. And the funny thing or the sad thing is the more we push for something to happen immediately, the more we will suffer and have to delay it.

And what I also realized is that many of us, well, if you can relate to my pain is like we are thinking, well, I'll just do this extra, this extra, and this extra, because I want to get extra good results. And so if I do this extra, I can get extra good results. Sounds logical to our brains. But what is happening, what I realized from chess mostly, is that doing a simple good enough plan consistently is what is special already.

It's not doing the extra stuff that is special. It's being able to stick to a plan long term and just do what's on that plan is what 99 percent of people, and you see me included in the running example, [00:20:00] can't stick to. So the exceptional stuff is to have a simple, good enough plan and to stick to it and not to try to outsmart the system.

That's what everybody tries and then everybody is failing. So if we just think long term and then stick to that plan, that will be super positive. Last but not least, remember, progress takes time, whether it's running or chess, consistency and balance are key. Pushing yourself too hard might seem like the shortcut to success, but in the end, it's the steady, sustainable effort that leads to real growth.

Stick to the plan, trust the process and avoid burning out. It will pay off in the long run. And just as a small reminder, the five steps to avoid an injury or an overtraining like I had is step number one, start small. Step number two, follow someone who knows the risks. Step number three, trust the training.

Step number four, increase [00:21:00] training load by a maximum of 10 percent every week. And step number five, think long term, not short term. And then I hope you will be able to learn from my overtraining and not overtrain yourself and not burn out.

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