The Excitement Trap: Why Feeling Good Is Exactly When People Overtrain
Dr Trevor Chetcuti, B.Chiro.Sc, B.App.Sc (Clin), DIBAK, CNET | Clinical Director, Spinewise Maidstone
Overtraining doesn’t usually creep up on people through laziness or a lack of care. More often, it happens because someone finally starts to feel good — and that good feeling is what pushes them straight past the point they should have stopped.
A Pattern We See Constantly in Clinic
This comes up so often with people we work with that it’s become a familiar story. Someone starts to feel good again — genuinely good, often for the first time in a while — and out of pure excitement, which is a good thing in itself, they go and train. Then they keep training. A few weeks later, they’re back in, saying they’ve been at it for two or three weeks, they’ve been happy the whole time, but they’re now just feeling exhausted from it.
Why Excitement Makes This Trap So Easy to Fall Into
The excitement itself isn’t the problem — wanting to move, to push, to make the most of feeling good is a healthy instinct. The trap is that excitement doesn’t come with a built-in sense of pacing. It’s easy to mistake enthusiasm for readiness, and to keep adding sessions or intensity simply because it still feels good to do so, without any signal telling you to hold back until the exhaustion has already arrived.
The Cost of Skipping the Ramp-Up
By the time someone recognises they’re exhausted, they’ve usually already spent two or three weeks building up a debt their body hasn’t had a chance to repay. That’s the frustrating part — the enthusiasm that got them started is exactly what’s needed for long-term training success, but applied without a gradual build, it turns into the very thing that derails progress and often leads to a longer step back than if they’d paced themselves from the start.
Turning Excitement Into a Sustainable Start
If you’re feeling good and ready to get back into training, that motivation is worth protecting — which means building in structure around it rather than letting excitement set the pace on its own. Our team at Spinewise in Maidstone can help you channel that energy into a plan that builds rather than burns you out — call us on (03) 9318 7758 or book online.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not at all — that motivation is genuinely valuable. The trap isn’t the excitement itself, it’s letting that excitement dictate pace and volume without any structure around it.
If you’ve been training consistently for a couple of weeks, still feel motivated, but notice growing exhaustion rather than growing energy, that’s usually the early sign this pattern is underway.
Build up gradually rather than matching your effort to your enthusiasm — increase volume and intensity in small steps over weeks, with planned recovery, rather than training as much as you feel like in the moment.
Because it isn’t caused by a lack of discipline or care — it’s caused by a lack of pacing structure around genuine motivation, which is a completely different problem to solve.
About the Author
Dr Trevor Chetcuti, B.Chiro.Sc, B.App.Sc (Clin), DIBAK, CNET
Dr Trevor Chetcuti is Clinical Director at Spinewise in Maidstone, holding dual degrees in Chiropractic and Clinical Science from RMIT University and a Teaching Diplomate in Applied Kinesiology through the International College of Applied Kinesiology (ICAK). He is chairman of ICAK International’s Board of Research and Standards and has spent over 20 years helping patients work through complex health, neurological and pain-related concerns.