This week, I would like to return to the mindset and structure of your training, to help execute your sessions as intended. I am going to reword to say the same thing, which might sound disappointing, but I have a sneaky feeling that it may well resonate with a few of you. I would love to hear your thoughts and follow up questions on our group forum, if you dare?

Before I dig in, let’s remember our whole purpose in taking on our performance challenge of sport. You likely have important sporting goals, which we will help you achieve.  These are important challenges that provide a direction to your training, and deliver a great sense of satisfaction and pride when you nail them. Chasing goals is fun and important, but it shouldn’t be the most important thing. I believe the most important outcome is that, by chasing these goals you learn a whole bunch of lessons about yourself, you amplify health, and elevate performance across work and life. You improve toward becoming a better version of yourself. You can evolve to become highly resilient, adaptable and more happy.  That is success, and this is why we embrace the term embrace the journey so much. We want you in it for the long haul - longevity of performance improvements. This is important grounding when it comes to our training. We want you to improve specific to your sporting goals, but also amplify across health and life. As you ramp to A-races, then race specific training takes priority. For the rest of the training journey we are preparing you to optimize the results of race specificity, while also hitting the four legs of the stool that make up performance gains as a human being.  This is where most of our training has been anchored over the last few months, and will be over the next couple. Building your potential, so you can amplify race and life performance leading into races. I see your training (strength and endurance) holding four priority focuses:

• Endurance (better butter burner): Consistency of training hours, over many weeks and months, improves aerobic efficiency and muscular resilience. You are an endurance athlete, so this is critical. The good news is that the training intensity required to improve this leg of the stool is not that high, in fact, low intensity training does a super job of it. The reason this is important to know is that you can be confident you are completing high value training when out on soul filling walks or runs, and embracing the lower stress bike rides integrated. Low stress training is a big part of the plan, so don’t be afraid to go easy when asked. Oh, and the more hours you complete, the greater percentage would be at lower intensity.
• High Power work.  In swim, bike or run, every athlete benefits from plenty of training at well above any sustainable steady state.  Short intervals or higher intensity are critical for muscular recruitment, raising physiological performance potential and driving fitness gains. We implement a lot of this work, with short 25s and 50s in swimming, 30-60 sec high intensity on the bike, as well as strides and short intervals in running. As we stray toward race builds, we shift to more sustained longer effort intervals, but the results of these are amplified due to the higher intensity completed in months prior.

Now let’s dive into the strength pillar.  Our final two legends of the stool, that work to help create the athlete you want to be.

• Stability and Posture.  Being able to improve your posture across movement planes, and becoming highly stable in a range of positions, creates the backbone for the rest of your work to mold around. So much of our strength program focuses on your improving your stability and, in turn, posture.  You cannot optimize your strength, endurance or power gains without a strong baseline ability to achieve and retain posture and stability, even when under fatigue. You want to improve your run off the bike, this is a good place to start your focus - it is the path to anti-fragility.
• Strength and force production.  You cannot maximize this without the posture and stability discussed above, but it remains an important leg of the stool. You want to get stronger to then optimize the performance yield from the ‘strength-based’ endurance training, such as hill running and strength-endurance cycling. Strength training plays its roll, and cannot be separated.

If you view each week of training as building around these four stool legs, you are better equipped to embrace the ‘why’ behind your sessions. You will likely execute as intended and yield greater results.  I hope that helps.

Cheers,

Matt