Unstoppable or Overworked? How to Listen to Your Body Before It’s Too Late

In this episode of the Gutsy Chick podcast, we're exploring the difference between overtraining and pushing limits, drawing from my personal experiences as an athlete and engineer. I'm sharing my journey of overcoming the mindset that equated rest with weakness, which taught me a lot about how to achieve my goals without compromising my health.  

In this Episode:  

00:00 Introduction to Overtraining vs. Pushing Limits 

01:48 Personal Journey: The Cost of Overtraining 

07:31 Defining the Line: Pushing Limits vs. Overtraining 

10:12 The Bruiser Archetype: Traits and Risks 

14:40 Recognizing the Signals of Overtraining 

18:47 The Importance of Recovery and Listening to Your Body 

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Transcript

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0:03

Welcome back to the Gutsy Chick podcast. Today, we're diving into a topic that hits close to home for so many of us, over training or overworking versus pushing limits. If you're the kind of woman who thrives on going harder, faster, and longer, whether it's in the gym, on the field, or even in your career, this episode is for you. I'm your host, Amanda Smith. I'm an engineer that previously worked on several NASA projects and programs. I was also an NCAA division one and division two softball player who became a yoga instructor and a power lifter and then decided helping high achieving women with chronic health conditions was my true calling. Quite the switch. When it comes to overtraining versus pushing limits, I've danced that line, sometimes gracefully and other times not so much. Today, I'm sharing my own stories of overtraining, the injuries that followed and how learning to tune into the body transformed the way I performed. We'll also talk about the bruiser archetype from the gutsy chick quiz. If you've taken the quiz and you know, you're a bruiser. This episode is really going to hit home. If you haven't taken the quiz, go take it. But if you're the grit at all costs mindset type, this will probably speak directly to you by the end of this episode, you'll know the difference between pushing limits versus overtraining key body signals to watch for in that situation and how to push smarter without breaking yourself. Let's dive in. Let's jump into the way way back machine to take you to a time when rest was a weakness. At least that's what I thought. That mindset landed me flat on my back, literally, and then kept me there. It was the summer of 1999. I was headed into my senior year of high school and I was doing all the things. We had volleyball camp, basketball camp and practices and softball games upon games upon games. During the day I was doing volleyball and basketball at night and on the weekends I was doing softball. It was about 12 hours a day of sports and there was no time for rest unless we had a weekend off from softball, which was pretty stinking rare. The beginning of my injury that set me on my back started with volleyball camp. We were going about eight hours a day at volleyball camp, maybe six to eight. And I had softball tournament that weekend. We were closing in on the end of softball season for the summer and volleyball season was starting right after. So getting ready for volleyball season was crucial and that camp was perfectly timed for it. But having softball intertwined was a problem, but softball was my sport. Softball is what I went on to play in college. In fact, in the summer of 1999, I was looking at Purdue as the school I was going to go to. I was planning to go there because aerospace engineering degree was phenomenal there. They had a flight school and their softball program was division one and pretty good. I know some people are going to cringe when they hear that. So this was my school. This is exactly all of the things that I wanted to do. Are you noticing a trend here? I was an overachiever, extraordinaire. 12 hours of sports, Purdue, aerospace engineering, flight school, softball, division one, overachiever, got it? Well, here's where things turned sideways. Or horizontal, actually. We had volleyball camp going into that weekend. was one of our last tournaments of the summer. was sliding into third base and I popped up just the wrong way thinking I might have a shot at home, which I didn't. stayed at third base and I felt a little pop and then a whole lot of heat around my left knee. And I knew something wasn't right. And I looked at my coach and I said, something doesn't feel right. And he was like, can you make it home? Yeah, coach. got it over achieving, not paying attention to my body. I've got this. No problem. Going into volleyball season, my athletic trainer looks at me and he was like, okay, so if we're to keep you healthy the entire season, you can't do anything horizontal. And I was like, it's volleyball. I was a back row specialist. I served, I was a middle hitter. Everything that you do in those positions is not forward and backward. It's almost always horizontal side to side movements for days. We were in Chicago. I went up, I had one of those Kabluy spikes cross court spike into the defender's chest. was awesome. I remember seeing it perfectly. And then I landed. And when I landed. My knee went out. I'll save you the gory details, but it wasn't the pain that made me cry laying on that gym floor. It was realizing that everything that I had been working for up to that point just changed. Going to Purdue was out the door. Potentially playing at division one was out the door. Going to a school for mechanical and aerospace engineering was still on the table. but not the way that I had envisioned it. My path just got changed. I was devastated. And it was from pushing and pushing. It was my senior year. I wanted to go out with a bang. It was my opportunity to achieve again and again. Well, I was so focused on pushing through that I completely ignored what my body was trying to tell me, which was take a break, which my athletic trainer was trying to tell me, which my softball coach wished I would have listened to. Here's the thing, there's a difference between pushing your limits and pushing past them. Let's break it down because these lines get blurred very, very easily. I have seen so many of my coworkers when I worked in aerospace, blow through this. And in some instances it costs their lives. I've watched So many athletes blow through. past the limit and injured themselves, sometimes taking them completely out of their sport. So let's define these because I love definitions. love being able to point out what to watch for pushing your limits feels like challenging, but doable. You are pushing yourself, but it's within your grasp. It's within your abilities. It's such a blurry line when you're trying to become a better athlete, when you're trying to become a better worker. Pushing limits leads to growth. You're tired, but you can recover. Again, hindsight is 2020. Trying to see this on the other side. Well, before things crumble, it's tough. Pushing limits is a mental and physical win that outweighs the strain. Overtraining, the other side of this coin, overtraining looks like persistent fatigue. Persistent fatigue means you're tired even when you got rest. You can't catch up on rest. Overtraining leads to injuries. If you have a recurring pain that doesn't fade, that is your brain telling your body, You have an injury you need to pay attention to. Overtraining is mood swings. I have a story to tell about that. Overtraining is disrupted sleep. Same story. I'll get there. I promise. Overtraining is loss of performance. I used to think that if I wasn't crawling out of the gym or off the field, I wasn't working hard enough, but that mindset wasn't making me stronger. was breaking me. If you've taken the gutsy chick quiz and landed as a bruiser, this is for you. If you think that you're that go at all costs type mindset, then here we go. The bruiser traits, you have relentless drive, high pain tolerance, and a keep going mentality, sometimes at your body's expense. Your strengths are your unbelievably resilient. You don't quit. Period. Ever. Never. You set bold goals. That's hard to say bold goals and you crush them. Here's where the risk comes in. You override early injury signals. You blow right through them. Rest feels like a weakness, which means you push when you should pause. I remember a time when my bruiser mindset had me working 80 hours a week on NASA's Artemis program. We were in a huge engineering push. for the first test article, which was Pataboard one. And I was the bottleneck. It doesn't feel good to be the bottleneck. So I was like, okay, I'm going to do whatever it takes. then hopefully the program will make some changes so that I'm not the bottleneck. I was a checker, which meant that I looked at all of the engineering blueprints and made sure that they were actually manufacturable and that the parts went together at the next level. That was my job. Pretty critical when you're building spacecraft. So no sleep. 80 hours a week, how? How could you sleep? And then when I did sleep, I was dreaming about work. So was I really sleeping? Probably not. Eating was a part of living. It was a requirement, but it wasn't about thriving. So I was just cramming in whatever I could whenever I could. That meant missing meals. That meant eating at old Chicago's a lot. It was right next to my house. It was convenient. eating habits were out the door. I was unbelievably moody when I got home. I was a mess. I couldn't go work out. I didn't have the energy to do anything other than work and try to sleep. And I was just ridiculously moody, but I would put on a mask when I went to work because they didn't need my moodiness, my negative attitude that was brewing under the surface and putting on a mask that takes energy too. So I was exhausted and then I snapped. I snapped and I let management know we got to fix this problem. I do not feel comfortable being the bottleneck. I don't deserve to be treated like I'm the bottleneck and I'm working 80 hours a week. I don't have any more time to give and I'm still the bottleneck. So they hired more checkers and guess what? I became the manager of the checkers. That meant more hours because I was the checker. I was managing the checkers and I had to make sure that the checkers knew how to do their jobs and keep their schedule and go report that schedule off to management. And you can see how the snowballs, right? When Pat abort one engineering push was done, I went on vacation and on that vacation, was sick half the time I was there because I needed to catch up on rest. I knew this was my one opportunity to get caught up. The pressure was unbelievable. And I decided it's time for a career change. What's cool about all of this is that I went into yoga teacher training and that took me down the rabbit hole of what I do now in body whisper healing. Everything has its point and its reason and its purpose and its path and direction. I just don't feel like overdoing it anymore is worth it. So here are the signals to look for when you're asking yourself, am I pushing too far? First off, that's your first signal. If you're asking yourself that, you probably are. So signal number two, technically, persistent pain. It's not soreness. It's sharp, reoccurring pain. This is your nervous system, your brain telling your body something is wrong. Pay attention. The third, the third signal is sleep. If your sleep is disrupted, you can't get to sleep, you... are sleeping and dreaming about the thing that you are trying to gain sleep from. That's a signal that your nervous system is in a sympathetic state instead of a parasympathetic state. That means you're in fight or flight more than you're in rest, digest. That's a problem. Our body ebbs and flows through parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system throughout the day. But when one overtakes the other, That creates issue when sympathetic fight or flight is your default mode all the time pay attention When your performance declines, this is number four, when your performance declines, this is how you know you've gone too far. Your numbers are dropping at work, it's time to reassess. You can't do normal function at your sport. For me, it was taking a grounder and then watching it go between my legs. That's when I knew there's a problem here. I'm over training. So the quick check-in exercise that I recommend, ask yourself, is this pain or progress? And am I recovering well or am I burning the candle at both ends? Look back at the signals to help you answer those questions. Looking back, can see clearly how much of my identity was tied to how hard I could push. It was so far beyond hitting PRs and being in the spotlight. It was this belief that if I slowed down, I'd lose ground. Everything would fail. Nothing would work. And I'd lose what I was working toward. I ignored the signs. I ignored the knee that swelled up. I ignored the notes from my trainer saying, Hey, you can't go side to side in volleyball. You should probably take a break. I ignored all of it. I thought rest was a luxury I couldn't afford because I had these big audacious goals going to Purdue, getting an aerospace engineering degree, working on NASA's programs, playing softball at the division one level, maybe going on to play in the Olympics or pro. Yeah, those were all my goals. And I wore burnout like a badge of honor. Here's what I've learned over that time. Slow down. That doesn't mean you're weak. It means you're smart. The strongest, most successful athletes and leaders know when to push and when to pause. I've learned as an entrepreneur, I haven't had a choice, but to figure out that I can't just keep working all the time, there's always going to be something to do as an entrepreneur. Gotta hit pause. When I finally allowed myself to recover, fully recover, I didn't lose progress. I gained it. My body got stronger. My mind got clearer and I started trusting myself on a deeper level, which made my intuition stronger, which gave me the ability to do what I do now in body whisper healing, which is rely on my intuition to help others heal their bodies. I'm gonna stress this one again. If you're wondering, am I doing too much? You're probably doing too much. I promise you stepping back won't erase your strength. It won't erase your progress. It might just be the thing that makes you unstoppable. And trust me, being unstoppable feels a whole heck of a lot better than being broken. Here's the truth, gutsy chick. Pushing limits isn't the problem. Ignoring your body signals is. If your body is screaming at you, listen. Let's get it back to some whispers. If today's episode resonated with you, I want you to do two things. Number one, go take the gutsy chick quiz. If you don't know you're a bruiser, but man, a lot of this sounded like you are, go take the quiz and find out. And two, share this with other driven high-performing women that you already know who need to hear that rest is part of the process, not a weakness. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Stay gutsy. I'll see you next time.