Why You're Tired: The Boring Answers, In Order

The most common message I get is some version of “I train hard and eat okay and I am still exhausted — what should I take?”

Almost always, the answer is nothing. Not because supplements are useless, but because the thing making you tired is sitting further up the list and no capsule outruns it. Here is the order I work through, on myself and with clients, before anybody spends a dollar.

1. Sleep, measured rather than estimated

Not how long you were in bed. How long you were actually asleep, and whether it happened at roughly the same time each night. Most people who tell me they sleep seven hours are in bed for seven hours and asleep for five and a half.

Track it for a week without changing anything. If the honest number is under seven hours, stop reading — that is your answer, and everything below is noise until it is fixed.

The changes that work are unglamorous: a fixed wake time including weekends, the last coffee before about two in the afternoon, and a dark cold room. I play night games and land in hotels at one in the morning, so I know how annoying that advice is. The fixed wake time still does more than anything else on the list.

2. Food, especially in the morning

Under-eating shows up as fatigue long before it shows up on the scale. Two specific things catch most people:

• Not enough total food. If you dropped calories to lose fat and then wondered why you have nothing in the tank at 4pm, those two facts are related.
• Not enough protein. Somewhere around 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of goal bodyweight is the range most people land in. Almost nobody hits it by accident.

Eat a real breakfast with protein in it for two weeks and see what happens. It is a boring experiment and it works more often than it has any right to.

3. Water and salt

Chronic mild dehydration feels like tiredness and a dull headache, and it is extremely common in anyone who trains, drinks coffee, or travels. If you sweat a lot, plain water on its own is not the whole answer — you are losing salt too. I notice this most in the middle of a season, and it is the cheapest fix on this entire page.

4. Training load

There is a version of tired that comes from doing too much, and it is easy to mistake for being out of shape. The tells: your warm-up sets feel heavy, you dread sessions you used to like, your resting heart rate is up, and you are sleeping badly despite being exhausted.

The fix is a deload week, planned in advance rather than taken in a panic. Cut the volume by roughly half and keep the intensity. Almost everyone who does this comes back stronger and is annoyed about how simple it was.

5. Stress and the things you are not counting as training

Your body does not have a separate budget for work stress, family stress and squats. A brutal month at work while running a hard training block is a training error, even though nothing in your program changed.

This is the one people skip because it is not a number. It is still the answer surprisingly often.

6. Then, and only then, get your blood tested

If sleep, food, water, load and stress are genuinely handled and you are still flat, that is when testing earns its place. Low iron stores, low vitamin D, and thyroid markers that have drifted all produce exactly this feeling, and none of them announce themselves any other way.

I wrote up the ten markers I actually watch, and the labs page covers how to get a full panel read by a practitioner without a referral.

Disclosure: I’m a Paath ambassador and I earn a commission if you order through that page, at no extra cost to you.

The part nobody wants to hear

Every item on this list is free, boring, and slow. That is exactly why the internet would rather sell you a powder. Work down the list honestly and most people find their answer somewhere in the first three.

If you would rather not work through it alone, that is roughly what coaching is — someone who asks the uncomfortable questions in the right order and holds you to the answers.

I am a coach, not a physician. Persistent fatigue can have medical causes that need a doctor. If this has been going on for a while, or something feels wrong, go get it looked at properly.