Between 60 and 64% of elite athletes experience overtraining during their careers.
The consequences are well-documented: significant drops in performance, with recovery times ranging from 4 to 14 weeks in moderate cases. And full recovery only happens after reducing training volume by 50–60%. When we apply this evidence to business, one truth stands out: pushing too much or for too long beyond limits costs more than wise rhythms planning, and those most at risk are the top performers.
In sports, performance doesn’t come from effort alone.
Performance is forged through the union of effort and recovery. A principle so simple, yet so often forgotten.
It is the foundation upon which every human adaptation is built.
Athletes know this instinctively: it’s not fatigue that makes them stronger, but the body’s work in the hours that follow, when it activates, assimilates the stimulus, and transforms itself into a more resilient version of what it was before.
In sports physiology, this process has a name: supercompensation.
After every stress peak, if recovery is adequate, the body doesn’t just regenerate — it grows above its initial performance level. It’s the invisible curve that transforms fatigue into evolution.
Healthy supercompensation of course depends on how much stress you put your body under: if too low (e.g., Z1 Active Recovery) you won’t leverage the supercompensation effect, while if too much Z5 (Anaerobic) will bring mainly negative effects. Magic seems to happen in Z3 (Moderate) and Z4 (Threshold).
And when the next training stimulus arrives exactly at the top of that curve, the effect is, almost “magically”, a tangible improvement in performance.
If the next training session happens later, once the curve has flattened, the body returns to its baseline without harnessing the benefits of supercompensation. The result? Stable performance, but no growth.
This is acceptable during maintenance phases but, if prolonged, could lead to de-training.
Indeed, the worst outcome arises when the stress stimulus becomes continuous, without pause or recovery. The curve inverts.
This is overtraining.
The paradox where the pursuit of improvement leads, ironically, to decline.
The supercompensation model is a theoretical principle that can be used as useful lens, not a law.
It captures an intrinsic truth about how systems adapt, yet it must be interpreted through each team and individual’s unique rhythms.
But still, sport science is teaching us key lessons we can apply to business.
From sports to organizations: same mistake, different context
In modern organizations, similar patterns repeat itself.
Constant high intensity rhythms has become the standard. Endless meetings, challenging deadlines, constant pressure, where energy is consumed without cycles of regeneration. The performance curve stops being a living wave and becomes a flat line, slowly deteriorating.
A team may still look productive, but decision quality decreases, creativity fades, and relational tension grows. This is the organizational version of overtraining: increasing effort without adaptation.
The brain, like the body, needs cycles of load and recovery. When that rhythm breaks, studies say that the cognitive system protects itself by blurring its perception of fatigue.
Tiredness become normal, people are “just functioning”. But beneath the surface, resources are draining away.
In sports, every athlete knows very well lactate: that metabolic residue that builds up in the muscles during prolonged effort. In small doses, it’s useful; it’s the raw material of adaptation. But if it accumulates without being cleared, it becomes toxic.
When cognitive residue builds up faster than it can be cleared, performance stagnates instead of adapting
The same thing happens in organizations.
Every redundant meeting, every postponed decision, every overlapping task, repetitive long working hours produce a form of cognitive lactate that can be thought as the mental fatigue that accumulates within the system: invisible yet very real.
As explored in Organizational Lactate: How Managing Cognitive Load Unlocks Flow — when cognitive residue builds up faster than it can be cleared, performance stagnates instead of adapting.
At first, the system compensates by working harder. Then it adapts. And eventually, it collapses and not from lack of effort, but from saturation. When organizational lactate surpasses a certain threshold, the team can no longer regenerate focus, energy, and clarity.
We’ve seen this pattern before in Leaders, Protect Focus or Lose Performance — when cognitive noise replaces focus, clarity vanishes and teams lose their adaptive rhythm.
When fatigue becomes culture
In sports physiology, overtraining shows clear symptoms: performance drops, sleep disturbances, irritability.
In organizations, the symptoms are subtler and not immediately recognizable.
It takes the shape of what Flow Performance Impact Leadership defines as fatigue normalization — the normalization of exhaustion.
And that’s the most dangerous point of all.
When fatigue becomes the default state of the organization. It infiltrates its culture.
This is degenerative adaptation: the system doesn’t stop, but it stops growing.
This phenomenon echoes what we called the tyranny of short-term pressure in Beyond the Tyranny of the Quarter, where constant urgency becomes institutionalized and fatigue turns cultural.
In those cases some early indicators of overtraining emerge to the leaders who are able to perceive them; some are measurable, others are felt. Quantitative signals include:
- Expanding working backlogs
- Repeated priority shifts
- Slower lead times
- Escalating multitasking
- Rising error rates or bug counts
- Decline in perceived quality of deliverables and services
- Falling team health scores
- Longer and more frequent decision meetings
And yet, the most revealing signals are behavioral and emotional:
- Less spontaneous humor, replaced by cynical sarcasm
- Communication style drifting from assertive to passive or passive-aggressive
- Decline in curiosity and reciprocity
- Weakened collaboration and mutual support
These are not just soft indicators. They are weak signals of a system that has lost connection with its rhythm.
A conscious and inspired leader can read and sense these signs.
These leaders don’t rush to control; they observe. They distinguish between useful tension and destructive tension.
And this is where one of the most critical leadership capabilities of our time enters the scene: Flow Coaching.
Flow Coaching: the competence of rhythm
Flow Coaching is a core competence every leader must develop.
It means learning to sense the system’s load, see its difficulty in generating value, and perceive the emotional fatigue that suffocates creativity and innovation.
Then, acting to regulate the organizational rhythm, keeping the team within its optimal range of adaptation.
Like a coach, the leader must alternate intensity and decompression.
They create spaces for cognitive recovery, protect focus, and use sensitivity as a design instrument.
It’s not about doing less, but about doing better, varying the activities. alternating task and being more conscious about the natural cycles of attention and energy.
Just as athletes leverage sleep, balanced nutrition, active recovery, and lightweight forms of cross-training to amplify the effect of supercompensation, organizations too should design their own forms of recovery to create the conditions where effort is integrated, not accumulated.
This is what we think should be the leadership style that transforms fatigue into adaptation.
IT DOES NOT ELIMINATE STRESS. IT ORCHESTRATES IT.
GROWTH = STRESS + VARIETY + RECOVERY
From fatigue to clarity
Overtraining — in both sports and organizations — is not a sign of weakness. it signals an imbalance between intensity and regeneration. And like any signal, it can be read and transformed.
The true challenge of leadership today is not to push harder, but to learn how to regulate the dynamics by providing the right balance of challenge and recovery.
Creating stimuli that inspires people, pushing them slightly beyond their limits, and give them space to recover and integrate what they’ve learned. This is the core concept o the State of Flow theory from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
The future of performance will not be built on endless acceleration or permanent peaks, but on sustainable, challenging rhythms — cycles that stretch, regenerate, and evolve the system.
Because, just like in sports, success in leadership doesn’t belong to those who push the hardest.
It belongs to those who know when to recover, preparing for the next challenge.
Content: Human-Generated + AI Processing
