Check this out: What you do in the gym determines your muscle building progress – and downfall. If you’re thinking, “What the heck are you talking about?” you need to read on.

When you consider that weight training essentially constitutes stress that you place on your body to which it responds by getting bigger and stronger, it should come as no surprise that you can stress your body too much.

When this happens, you end up overtrained. Basically, overtraining occurs when you train too often at too high of an intensity.

You’ve consistently trained with too many sets and reps or lifted too much weight and your body hasn’t had a chance to recuperate fully.

As a result, your gains are stopped dead in their tracks and, even worse, you’re pushing the injury envelope.

Though everyone is prone to overtraining, if you’re a beginner you really need to watch out. I know it is tempting to try the same routines the pros use, but it’s not a good idea.

Why? Because your body more than likely can’t hang with that type of training. My advice is to stick to the beginner’s routine and, over time, build on it until you reach your highest level of fitness.

To avoid overtraining, pay attention to any one and/or combination of the following symptoms:

• Aches and pains you can’t seem to shake
• You aren’t able to put on body-weight and/or get stronger
• You’re losing bodyweight and/or getting weaker
• Your appetite has decreased
• You don’t sleep as well as usual
• You seem irritable
• Your resting heart rate is higher than normal
• It takes you longer to recover after a training session
• You have an increased incidence of colds
• You have less desire to train

If any of these symptoms appear, take a closer look at what’s going on. If you have more than one symptom, change your training ASAP. Your line of attack is threefold:

1) Take a week off. 2) Back off in training volume, your sets, by 50%. 3) Decrease your training intensity by 50%. Once you start feeling up to it again, you can slowly increase your training volume and intensity.

As a final caveat, if the weights feel heavy and you think you have to keep pushing it, you’re wrong! Unless you allow for sufficient rest between workouts, your body will simply shut down and you can kiss your gains goodbye. [source: M&F Guide]