Can too much exercise be bad???

I heard about a study they did on the radio and Olympic Athletes who take one day off a week tend to perform better. So maybe take a day off to let your body rest and recover.

I don't think you are overexercising, but you should be eating your exercise calories back --- it is necessary to build muscle and keep your metabolism up.

First, you really shouldn't be eating less than 1200 cals/day. If you are 20-30 below, that's okay, but a substantial amount is not good. Your body may go into starvation mode, thinking it's not getting enough calories, thus it holds onto what you feed it. Especially if you are exercising that much. I would suggest taking at least one day of rest and increasing your calorie intake to 1300. Eventually taking in 1200 cals may not work for weight loss.

I agree with everyone else. Time to rest/recover is very important, especially for your muscles. Also, you should try increasing your calories a bit to better fuel your body for those workouts.

I'm a huge exercise buff. You need to rest at least once/week for your muscles to actually grow/tone or else you are consistently just breaking them down. This includes cardio btw as many assume it's just strength training with this rule. Cardio is essentially ST'ing but using your weight as a "weight" and repetitive motion. What is the bigger issue though, is your lack of calories. What will happen is that you will plateau at a certain point. So what I suggest instead is to increase your cals by 100-200/day and then take 1-2 days off/week. If you're the type that needs to do something daily or you won't do it, walk a few miles on your off days. Walking won't break down your muscles bc it's something you've done all your life, if that makes sense.

ETA- I agree with the above poster that said malnurishment is usually the issue, but if you're new to exercise, no rest days make you a much, much higher risk for injury unless you go slow. You don't want an injury our you're back to square one. You can do many amazing things with your body, but even olympic athletes that train 4-6hrs/day have to take a rest day or they won't perform as well. Anybody that's run a marathon will tell you that they won't run the week of the marathon bc of how much your body breaks down.

Remember that a major key to long-term lifestyle changes is making changes that you are able to maintain and not get burned out. I think being super gung-ho about exercising is great and I used to go to the gym twice a day most days every day of the week. Unfortunately, I tend to be an "all or nothing" type of person so, when my schedule changed and I was no longer able to fit in as much exercise, I found myself doing NOTHING! Annnd..... slowly but surely the weight I had lost came back on and the fitness gains I had made disappeared.

Remember that you really don't want to get burned out on trying to do too much or get injured or, if you are like me, back yourself into a psychological corner of feeling guilty about not exercising for HOURS every day. All of these things make it hard to maintain long-term changes.