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Monday, 02 March 2015 00:10

Gain fitness and have fun doing it this year

By Jason Gootman and Will Kirousis (usatriathlon.org)

Are you using awesome training principles? Or just logging lots of miles? These are the ways the best triathletes in the world train. And you can adopt them today! Are you ready to stop just logging miles and really get fast?

Swim, ride and run enough to stimulate adaptation, not to fill all available time.

One of the first areas we investigate with a new athlete we’re starting to coach, and that we monitor in an ongoing sense for the athletes we coach, is how much time they have available for workouts. Highly motivated athletes often look at their day and suspect that any time not taken up by work, chores and family/friends can and should be used for swimming, riding and running.

This approach results in no down time, no real rest and greatly impedes recovery. Without strong recovery, plateaus are inevitable. You will train and train and train — and stay the same. Poor recovery also makes you more susceptible to injuries. And when you’re injured, you can’t do any of this fun stuff. And not taking any downtime is a road paved to burnout. When you are always pushing forward and always need to be...

accomplishing something, you never recharge (physically, mentally or emotionally) and you’re not a machine. Your desire to improve needs to be balanced with your desire to just be. When you look at your schedule for a given week, yes, plan your swims, rides, runs and other workouts, but also leave some space for rest. Build some slack into the system.

Training is about creating adaptation, which leads to improvement. Workout load (workout volume times workout intensity) is a way of quantifying the stimulus you take on that your body attempts to adapt to. Because load is described several ways, it can be complicated to use in an example. So, to clarify this point, let’s simply use hours of working out at a set level of intensity. Imagine you need to workout for eight hours a week with that mix of workouts (different intensities) to create adaptation and improvement, but you had as much as 15 hours available to workout on most weeks. You could do almost twice as much and get double the results, right? Wrong! If the amount of work you are doing is stimulating adaptations to occur, that means that it is already enough to knock you out of homeostasis — your body’s desired set point where everything is operating smoothly and in rhythm. Anything beyond that amount of work, which was stimulating positive adaptation to occur for you, is amplifying fatigue significantly, and doing nothing more! Doing an hour or two more, may increase your rate of improvement slightly, but, beyond that, you’re really only going to be fatiguing yourself. This will impede your recovery from your workouts. At best, you will plateau. At worst, you will slow down, get hurt and burn out. It’s not easy to find the exact amount, type and layout of workouts that’s right for you. It takes some experimenting and communication between you and your coach to fully dial in. They key is to find that sweet spot where you are creating adaptation and improvement and not get greedy. If you stay on an improvement curve, over time, you can reach any goal....READ MORE