• 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.

Read More:

• 17 exercise habits that are actually hurting you
• 21 sneaky signs you're stressed — even if you think you aren't
• 9 warning signs you're running too much

• EvenUp vaulted past a $1 billion valuation on the idea that AI will help automate personal injury demands.
• Former employees told BI the company has relied on humans to do much of the work.
• EvenUp says it uses a combination of AI and humans to ensure accuracy, and its AI is improving.

EvenUp vaulted past a $1 billion valuation on the idea AI could help automate a lucrative part of the legal business. Former employees told Business Insider that the startup has relied on humans to complete much of the work.

EvenUp aims to streamline personal-injury demands and has said it is one of the fastest-growing companies in history after jumping from an $85 million valuation at the start of the year to unicorn status in an October funding round.

Customers upload medical records and case files, and EvenUp's AI is supposed to sift through the vast amount of data, pulling out key details to determine how much an accident victim should be owed.

One of EvenUp's investors has described its "AI-based approach" as representing a "quantum leap forward."

The reality, at least so far, is that human staff have done a significant share of that work, and EvenUp's AI has been slow to pick up the slack, eight former EvenUp employees told Business Insider in interviews over the late summer and early fall.

The former employees said they witnessed numerous problems with EvenUp's AI, including missed injuries, hallucinated medical conditions, and incorrectly recorded doctor visits. The former employees asked not to be identified to preserve future job prospects.

"They claim during the interview process and training that the AI is a tool to help the work go faster and that you can get a lot more done because of the AI," said a former EvenUp employee who left earlier this year. "In practice, once you start with the company, my experience was that my managers told me not even to use the AI. They said it was unreliable and created too many errors."

Two other former employees also said they were told by supervisors at various points this year not to use EvenUp's AI. Another former employee who left this year said they were never told not to use the AI, just that they had to be vigilant in correcting it.

"I was 100% told it's not super reliable, and I need to have a really close eye on it," said the former employee.

EvenUp told BI it uses a combination of humans and AI, and this should be viewed as a feature, not a bug.

"The combined approach ensures maximum accuracy and the highest quality," EvenUp cofounder and CEO Rami Karabibar said in a statement. "Some demands are generated and finalized using mostly AI, with a small amount of human input needed, while other more complicated demands require extensive human input but time is still saved by using the AI."

AI's virtuous cycle of improvement

It's a common strategy for AI companies to rely on humans early on to complete tasks and refine approaches. Over time, these human inputs are fed into AI models and related systems, and the technology is meant to learn and improve. At EvenUp, signs of this virtuous AI cycle have been thin on the ground, the former employees said.

"It didn't seem to me like the AI was improving," said one former staffer.

"Our AI is improving every day," Karabibar said. "It saves more time today than it did a week ago, it saved more time a week ago than it did a month ago, and it saved a lot more time a month ago than it did last year."

A broader concern

EvenUp's situation highlights a broader concern as AI sweeps across markets and boardrooms and into workplaces and consumers' lives. Success in generative AI requires complex new technology to continue to improve. Sometimes, there's a gap between the dreams of startup founders and investors and the practical reality of this technology when used by employees and customers. Even Microsoft has struggled with some practical implementations of its marquee AI product, Copilot.

While AI is adept at sorting and interpreting vast amounts of data, it has so far struggled to accurately decipher content such as medical records that are formatted differently and often feature doctors' handwriting scribbled in the margins, said Abdi Aidid, an assistant professor of law at the University of Toronto who has built machine-learning tools.

"When you scan the data, it gets scrambled a lot, and having AI read the scrambled data is not helpful," Aidid said.

Earlier this year, BI asked EvenUp about the role of humans in producing demand letters, one of its key products. After the outreach, the startup responded with written answers and published a blog post that clarified the roles employees play.

"While AI models trained on generic data can handle some tasks, the complexity of drafting high-quality demand letters requires much more than automation alone," the company wrote. "At EvenUp, we combine AI with expert human review to deliver unmatched precision and care."

The startup's spokesman declined to specify how much time its AI saves but told BI that employees spend 20% less time writing demand letters than they did at the beginning of the year. The spokesman also said 72% of demand letter content is started from an AI draft, up from 63% in June 2023.

A father's injury

EvenUp was founded in 2019, more than two years before OpenAI's ChatGPT launched the generative AI boom.

Karabibar, Raymond Mieszaniec, and Saam Mashhad started EvenUp to "even" the playing field for personal-injury victims. Founders and investors often cite the story of Mieszaniec's father, Ray, to explain why their mission is important. He was disabled after being hit by a car, but his lawyer didn't know the appropriate compensation, and the resulting settlement "was insufficient," Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of EvenUp's investors, said in a write-up about the company.

"We've trained a machine to be able to read through medical records, interpret the information it's scanning through, and extract the critical pieces of information," Mieszaniec said in an interview last year. "We are the first technology that has ever been created to essentially automate this entire process and also keep the quality high while ensuring these firms get all this work in a cost-effective manner."

EvenUp technical errors

The eight former EvenUp employees told BI earlier this year that this process has been far from automated and prone to errors.

"You have to pretty much double-check everything the AI gives you or do it completely from scratch," said one former employee.

For instance, the software has missed key injuries in medical records while hallucinating conditions that did not exist, according to some of the former employees. BI found no instances of these errors making it into the final product. Such mistakes, if not caught by human staff, could have potentially reduced payouts, three of the employees said.

EvenUp's system sometimes recorded multiple hospital visits over several days as just one visit. If employees had not caught the mistakes, the claim could have been lower, one of the former staffers said.

The former employees recalled EvenUp's AI system hallucinating doctor visits that didn't happen. It also has reported a victim suffered a shoulder injury when, in fact, their leg was hurt. The system also has mixed up which direction a car was traveling — important information in personal-injury lawsuits, the former employees said.

"It would pull information that didn't exist," one former employee recalled.

The software has also sometimes left out key details, such as whether a doctor determined a patient's injury was caused by a particular accident — crucial information for assigning damages, according to some of the employees.

"That was a big moneymaker for the attorneys, and the AI would miss that all the time," one former employee said.

EvenUp's spokesman acknowledged that these problems cited by former employees "could have happened," especially in earlier versions of its AI, but said this is why it employs humans as a backstop.

A customer and an investor

EvenUp did not make executives available for interviews, but the spokesman put BI in touch with a customer and an investor.

Robert Simon, the cofounder of the Simon Law Group, said EvenUp's AI has made his personal-injury firm more efficient, and using humans reduces errors.

"I appreciate that because I would love to have an extra set of eyes on it before the product comes back to me," Simon said. "EvenUp is highly, highly accurate."

Sarah Hinkfuss, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said she appreciated EvenUp's human workers because they help train AI models that can't easily be replicated by competitors like OpenAI and its ChatGPT product.

"They're building novel datasets that did not exist before, and they are automating processes that significantly boost gross margins," Hinkfuss wrote in a blog post earlier this year.

Long hours, less automation

Most of the former EvenUp employees said a major reason they were drawn to the startup was because they had the impression AI would be doing much of the work.

"I thought this job was going to be really easy," said one of the former staffers. "I thought that it was going to be like you check work that the AI has already done for you."

The reality, these people said, was that they had to work long hours to spot, correct, and complete tasks that the AI system could not handle with full accuracy.

"A lot of my coworkers would work until 3 a.m. and on weekends to try to keep up with what was expected," another former employee recalled.

EvenUp's AI could be helpful in simple cases that could be completed in as little as two hours. But more complex cases sometimes required eight hours, so a workday could stretch to 16 hours, four of the former employees said.

"I had to work on Christmas and Thanksgiving," said one of these people. "They [the managers] acted like it should be really quick because the AI did everything. But it didn't."

EvenUp's spokesman said candidates are told upfront the job is challenging and requires a substantial amount of writing. He said retention rates are "in line with other hyper-growth startups" and that 40% of legal operations associates were promoted in the third quarter of this year.

"We recognize that working at a company scaling this fast is not for everyone," said the spokesman. "In addition, as our AI continues to improve, leveraging our technology will become easier and easier."

Highlighting the continued importance of human workers, the spokesman noted that EvenUp hired a vice president of people at the end of October.

Alabama A&M University football player Medrick Burnett Jr. died after sustaining a serious head injury in a game, the school announced. 

Burnett was 20 years old. 

The news was announced by Alabama A&M athletic director Paul A. Bryant, who said Burnett died Tuesday. 

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"Medrick was more than an exceptional athlete; he was a remarkable young man whose positive energy, leadership and compassion left an indelible mark on everyone who knew him," Bryant said in a statement, according to TMZ Sports. 

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"While words cannot adequately express our grief, we are humbled by the strength of his family, who stood by his side throughout this unimaginable ordeal."

Burnett, a redshirt freshman who transferred from Grambling State this season, sustained a severe head injury in a collision during the team’s game against Alabama State in October. 

Dominece James, Burnett’s sister, had a GoFundMe established for her younger brother, explaining he had brain bleeds and swelling from the injury. 

"He had to have a tube to drain to relieve the pressure, and after 2 days of severe pressure, we had to opt for a craniotomy, which was the last resort to help try to save his life," James said on the GoFundMe page.

Burnett was a 6-foot-2, 225-pound linebacker who grew up in Lakewood, California. 

He played in five games this season, registering five tackles. 

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