• Exercising can make you feel great, but some of your workout habits could be hurting you. 
• You shouldn't be in lots of pain because of a workout, so you should reassess your routine.
• Getting sick often, not sleeping well, or losing your appetite are signs you may be overtraining.

What you think are healthy exercise habits might actually be hurting you or putting you at risk for injury. 

If you're on a fitness journey this New Year, Business Insider spoke with training experts about the common signs your workout could be hurting you.

If you're in any amount of pain, stop what you're doing.

Jasmine Marcus, a New York-based physical therapist, told BI why pain during your workouts is a recipe for disaster.

"Pain is your body's way of protecting you and it most likely means you are injuring yourself," she said.

If the pain is localized to one body part, and you're able to finish a workout, Marcus said, you can continue working out as long as you're sure to seek medical treatment for whatever it is that is bothering you.

"For example, if your shoulder is bothering you, you should avoid irritating it further with shoulder presses, but there's no reason you can't keep working out your lower body," she added. "Just make sure to eventually seek out treatment for your shoulder."

Always listen to your body because toughing it out through an injury could end up sidelining you longer. If your pain is sharp, stabbing, or severe, or if you experience swelling, bruising, or any sort of open wound, you should seek medical assistance.

Working out shouldn't make you dizzy or weak for extended periods of time.

If you're experiencing dizziness or feeling weak long after your workout, that's not a good sign.

Mitchell Starkman, a sports and orthopedic physical therapist based in Canada, told BI that some dizziness is normal, but it shouldn't persist.

"If you're consistently getting dizzy while working out, it's always a good idea to follow up with your doctor first," he said, "That being said, many people become temporarily dizzy while training during position changes."

Starkman added that, similar to feeling light-headed when you stand up too fast, this dizziness comes from your body readjusting to the pressure change caused by sudden movements (like squats or deadlifts), which can lead to a "momentary lapse of blood flow to the brain."

Another reason for dizziness could be your eating habits. Every person's dietary needs vary, but if you're frequently working out on an empty stomach, it might make you feel woozy during a workout.

Your workout routine could be to blame if you keep getting sick.

Consistent exercise can boost your immune system, however, overtraining can backfire and cause you to get sick.

"Exercise is an amazing thing, and it, when done consistently, actually boosts our immune system over time," Starkman told BI. "That being said, when it's too intense, after our workouts, the body's immunity actually slightly drops for a few hours, making us more susceptible to sickness."

If you're constantly getting sick, you might want to reassess your fitness regime and make sure you're planning enough rest days and properly fueling your body before and after your workouts.  

If you're having trouble sleeping, it might be from overtraining.

Exercise is thought to benefit the quality of your sleep, but if you're lying awake at night tossing and turning, it means you might be overtraining.

"Insomnia is a sign that your sympathetic nervous system is not functioning healthily and is directly linked to exercising too much," Chelsea Axe, a board-certified chiropractic physician and certified strength and conditioning specialist at DrAxe.com, told BI.

She continued, "An overactive sympathetic nervous system and trouble sleeping are more closely linked to anaerobic activities, like sprinting, and especially heavy resistance training, like weightlifting."

Since the sympathetic nervous system is closely connected to the brain's fight-or-flight response, these kinds of exercises can easily cause insomnia or restlessness. Working out earlier in the day or scaling back on workout frequency and intensity can help alleviate sleep issues tied to your workout.

"Exercisers with signs of an overactive sympathetic nervous system could benefit from regular meditation, gentle yoga, and massage," Axe said. 

In addition to messing up your sleep schedule, your routine may be causing extreme fatigue.

If you find yourself feeling tired all the time or leaving the gym feeling exhausted instead of energized, you might need to scale it back.

"Sore muscles are common with a new routine, but excessive fatigue is not. If you are getting adequate sleep and are still super tired, there [might be] a couple of reasons," Megan Ostler, a registered dietitian and the director of nutrition at iFit, told BI.

One common reason for it, especially in women, is iron deficiency anemia.

"When we are deficient, we can't transport as much oxygen, and without enough oxygen, our muscles and organs can't perform the way they should, including converting nutrients to energy," she said. "Low energy production means low energy for us."

Another common reason for fatigue is not consuming enough calories pre- and post-workout.

"Our bodies work hard to make sure we don't die from starvation, so when our food intake decreases or exercise increases, our bodies must adapt," Ostler told BI. 

Loss of appetite is also a sign of overtraining.

Although it's true that you might find yourself hungrier than usual as your body adapts to a new fitness routine, suddenly finding that you're never hungry should set off some alarm bells.

"Many athletes assume that they can just follow their hunger cues to know how much to eat. However, that isn't always the case," Ostler told BI. "If you are working out at a high level your appetite might actually be suppressed."

Depression or irritability can be unwanted side effects of working out too much.

When we sweat, our body releases endorphins, the feel-good hormones that make us feel relaxed and alleviate stress. However, Axe said, exercise can actually also lead to spiked levels of anxiety or depression.

"Too much aerobic activity can lead to parasympathetic overtraining," she said. "Symptoms of this include fatigue, depression, and impaired sports performance."

She continued, "Overtrained athletes can also suffer from adrenal dysfunction, in addition to mood disorders exacerbated by excessive cortisol levels in the body."

If your heart is racing long after your workout, you might be overdoing it.

A telltale sign that you're overdoing your workout routine is if your heart rate is fluctuating at rest.

"If you're new to exercise, variation in resting heart rate is expected as your body gets into better shape," Axe said. "But for seasoned exercisers, heart rate variability may be an easy way to pick up on early signs of overtraining."

Persistent muscle aches may be a sign that you're injuring yourself.

Muscle soreness is common in the days after a particularly strenuous workout, but it shouldn't completely sideline you — and it should go away relatively quickly.

If your muscles are constantly sore and achy, you might be overtraining.

"When you work out, you cause small micro-tears to your muscles," Emily Paskins, a personal trainer at iFit, told BI. "This breakdown is then built over, which causes muscle growth. However, if you are constantly 'tearing' the muscles down without allowing adequate time for them to rebuild, you will begin to cause a state of constant wear and soreness."

This story was originally published in May 2018 and most recently updated on January 8, 2025.

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A few weeks ago, after a long day of work and several wrestling matches with my 30-pound toddler, I collapsed onto my couch and opened my phone. By then I was in my third trimester, and my approaching labor was on my mind. And my phone knew it.

Before I realized what was happening, I was watching the kind of video that will be immediately recognizable to anyone who's been pregnant in the age of Instagram and TikTok. In it, a "birth trainer" demonstrates the appropriate way to relax while pregnant. Apparently, I should be sitting upright, feet on the floor, with hips open — or, better yet, in butterfly pose — to ensure my baby could get "optimally" positioned for birth.

I wanted to throw my phone across the room. I was exhausted, damn it. Why couldn't I just curl up on the couch and turn off my brain for a moment? Why did every single thing I did have to be tailored to my pregnancy?

But the lure of optimization was impossible to resist. I wanted to be that mom who aces every aspect of childbirth, bringing my child into the world in the best possible way. So I sat up, placed my feet on the floor, opened my hips, and exhaled. And I wasn't the only Good Birth striver out there: The video had half a million views.

To scroll through social media as a pregnant woman is to be told that there are a million things you should be doing to optimize the birth experience. I'm not talking about the common-sense basics, from birth education classes to making a birth plan. In a country with a sky-high rate of maternal mortality, we desperately need to pay more attention to ensuring the health of pregnant women. What I'm talking about is the growing cottage industry of birthing influencers, who market their preferred birthing styles through sponsored posts, consulting services, and online courses. There are advocates of everything from "natural" birth (minimal intervention and no epidurals), "ecstatic" birth (achieved through hypnosis and other mental gymnastics), "total control" birth (meaning a scheduled C-section), and "free birth" (one that happens outside the medical or midwifery systems).

Much of the talk around optimizing birth is well-meaning. But it also feeds an absurd narrative that childbirth can be mastered. How we give birth — or how we think we'll give birth before our due date arrives and reality takes over — has become the latest way we define, and judge, ourselves as parents. At a moment that is inherently fraught with anxiety, the Gospel of the Good Birth gives expectant parents one more thing to be anxious about.

"It feels like pregnancy content is part of this initiation into contemporary parenting," says Rebecca Silber, who works in marketing in New Jersey and is pregnant with her second child. "It starts with 'I do natural birth' or 'I'm an epidural mom' and then turns into 'I sleep train' or 'I'm a gentle parent.'" What has long been a war over the best way to raise a child — and the identity that comes with choosing one parenting style over another — now precedes the child's birth.

For many expectant parents, the appeal of embracing one birthing style over another is about asserting control. Or, more precisely, the illusion of control during one of life's most emotionally charged, high-stakes experiences.

When Megan Nash, a physical therapist assistant in Roanoke, Virginia, was preparing to give birth to her daughter, she followed birth influencers who advocated breathing work and mantras to control the pain of childbirth, free of medication. She conjured up the sort of gently lit images familiar to her from her Instagram feed — teary-eyed, beaming women staring in wonder as they cradle their newborns.

"I envisioned this wonderful, natural, empowering experience," she says. "Because that's what I thought was possible, based on what I was seeing on social media."

Then the reality of labor hit her. She wound up asking for an epidural — a decision that brought immediate physical relief but left her with the nagging feeling that she had failed herself and her baby girl. "I felt shame," she says. "Like, if I couldn't be chill about it, and do it without the help, it showed some type of weakness."

The guilt trailed her home from the hospital. When her newborn turned out to be a colicky, fussy baby, Nash came across a post that equated epidurals with giving your baby fentanyl. It was a completely bogus claim, but she worried that her daughter's fussiness might be her fault. It wasn't until she met another mom who was facing similar struggles, but who'd had an unmedicated home birth, that Nash accepted what her pediatrician had been telling her: Everything was fine. "It was the first time I realized that even if I'd done everything differently, the outcome easily could have been exactly the same," Nash says. "It was freeing to think maybe I didn't have anything to do with it."

For Sarah Denney, a professor in Indianapolis, the "optimal" childbirth experience meant lying on her side. She'd saved a dozen videos from Instagram that convinced her that a side birth would reduce tearing and make recovery quicker than lying on her back. But that's not how it worked out. "I was in agony, lying on my side, pushing, with one of my legs lifted straight in the air, just dangling there," she recalls. "And I tore anyway."

Even those who feel good about their choices wind up fretting over whether they got it wrong. Shannon Wolfman, a mother in Indianapolis who ended up having a C-section, doesn't regret having the procedure, but social media made her worry that she had interrupted the natural process of postpartum bonding by subjecting herself and her baby to medical intervention.

"Objectively, I know I made the right call in the moment by moving ahead with the C-section," Wolfman says. "But the comparison game, both online and just in general, is so intense." Doing the right thing, in the age of Instagram, is no protection against the fear of having done the wrong thing.

I write about women's health for a living, but that hasn't stopped me from falling prey to the Gospel of the Good Birth. My addiction to Instagram hasn't just given me anxiety about my coming labor — it also has me relitigating my first experience giving birth.

Anyone not tethered to social media would conclude that my first birth went fine. As my pregnancy progressed, I read a handful of books, practiced meditation as a tool for staying calm during painful contractions, and made flash-card reminders about labor positions and breathing techniques to take with me to the hospital. My water broke right on time, and my partner and my doula met me at the hospital. My labor, which took 22 hours, was the hardest, most shocking physical experience of my life, even with an epidural. But I delivered a healthy baby girl, and I walked out of the hospital happier than I'd ever been in my life.

Two years later, social media has me second-guessing the whole experience. A few days after Instagram yanked me up from the couch, I found myself going down a rabbit hole of unfounded claims linking medical interventions during delivery with bonding issues later in life. A wave of panic washed over me as I remembered how, after my newborn daughter was placed on my chest, a few minutes passed before I was able to interact with her.

My mind jumped to the present. When my daughter catches me walking off to grab something or go to the bathroom, she sometimes gets upset and yells, "Mommy! You forgot me!" Had my decision to get an epidural short-circuited our bond, dooming her to an anxious attachment style?

There's zero evidence it had. When Nash, the physical therapist, shared a similar worry with me, I'd recognized immediately that her natural anxiety as a mother had been amplified to an excruciating level by the idiocy of social media. But there I was, crying over the dishes, worried that I had failed as a mother. My big, heaving sobs drowned out the sounds from the baby monitor on the counter — my toddler upstairs with my partner, giddily splashing around in the bath.

These days, when I mention how stressed I am about my approaching due date, my friends gently ask if I've considered deleting Instagram. During my prenatal appointment at 34 weeks, I peppered my obstetrician with all the questions about my first labor that my social media diet had triggered. Was the epidural the reason I labored for so long? Did my perineum tear because I pushed on my back? I couldn't work up the courage to ask if it was possible that the epidural had harmed my baby's bond with me.

My obstetrician did his best to calm my Instagram-induced fears with actual medical facts. But all of his answers were carefully couched variations of "maybe, maybe not" — a far cry from the certitude offered by online influencers. That's because the Good Birthers aren't concerned with the specific complexities that attend every individual birth. They're marketing one of the most lucrative products of all: the fear of being a bad mother.

Today, I'm 36 weeks pregnant. My birth plan is as set as it can ever be. I'm basically aiming to do exactly what I did last time. I'm going to prepare as much as I can, and then see what happens when the moment arrives. If it hurts too much, or I get too tired, I'm going to get the epidural. I'm going to trust my doctors, and most importantly, I'm going to trust myself as I roar this baby out of my body. I expect to walk out of the hospital torn and exhausted — but alive and well and happier than I've ever been.

But this time, I've done one thing differently to ensure a Good Birth. I deleted Instagram.

Amelia Harnish is a health reporter based in New York's Hudson Valley.