Destructing your Annual Training Plan - Part I

“The best laid plans of mice and men go often askew”
- Robert Burns

It’s that time of year again. The end of the old season and the beginning of the new means that coaches and self coached athletes throughout the country are buying their notebooks, double clicking their excel spreadsheets and picking up the training manual du jour for the 2010 season.

Of course the training manual du jour of the 2010 season will likely be the same one used in the past recollectable seasons, Joe Friel’s Triathlete’s Training Bible. Joe is a magnanimous guy and as such is offering additional information in a new blog series on ‘constructing your annual training plan’ for 2010, the part inspiration for the somewhat pithy title of this piece.

No disrespect to Joe or his training philosophies at all are implied by this article. 95% of everything I know and do as a coach is related to concepts either espoused or invented (!) by Joe. However, you may find some interest in the 5% of things that I do a little differently to many of the coaches out there.

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The other polar opposite inspiration for this post comes from a comment made by my good buddy Chuckie V in the comment section of one of his recent stellar blog pieces, where he says (in response to a question about Chrissie Wellington):

"Chrissie is a product of Brett (Sutton) and I work pretty closely with him. He doesn't "believe in" periodization or have much to do with planning. He simply finds the right template for the athlete and puts them to work. Over time, I've migrated to this line of thinking more and more.

So many coaches tout the merits of having a good plan (after all that's how they survive, by providing plans) but our body doesn't respond to plans (only our minds do, though not always favorably). Sometimes you just have to learn to listen to your body's needs and what your goal races require; these two considerations don't always sync up however!

An athlete can ruin a whole career on planning; it's best to get to work."

-V

I find myself and my own coaching method smack bang in the middle of these 2 perspectives. I am a planner by nature and yet I have come to realize that no rigid annual plan ever works out even close to 100% for my athletes. Furthermore, as Chuckie suggests, attempting to adhere too rigidly to a plan can severely compromise an athlete’s performance potential. And yet the absence of any plan can also compromise an athlete’s potential.

Races happen on a schedule therefore some attempt must be made to gel the athlete’s ‘body clock’ with the race calendar. The difference in the two approaches of overplanning vs underplanning can be likened to rocking up to the train station without even glancing at the timetable then arriving to find that the next train doesn’t come for an hour vs planning your jaunt to the train station rigidly around the time table and arriving 5 mins early, seeing the train and deciding to wait for the next one because that’s what your schedule says to do. Some responsiveness and reactivity is needed in order to get where you are going as fast as possible.
So I find my approach to be one of controlled chaos or organized anarchy. While I really can’t in all good conscience draw up the blow by blow details of any athlete’s annual training plan, I can quite accurately describe ‘the method’. This is going to be the subject of this blog post and likely a couple of others to come. I want to describe some elements of the practical application of ‘the method’ so that you may choose to use them in the destruction of your old concept of the ATP and the construction of your new one.

Step 1: Determine Competition Dates and Phases.

In my world, phases of preparation are largely about when you concede basic development. In an Ironman sense, for a novice to intermediate athlete there comes a point 8-12 weeks out from the race in which, irrespective of how high the athlete’s aerobic threshold endurance, we must put that on the back-burner and succumb to the reality of the athlete’s true race pace. It is certainly my goal at the beginning of any season to extend the athlete’s aerobic threshold endurance to the extent of their race duration, however, for Ironman, this is a loftier goal than many athletes are willing to concede and so, for lower volume Ironman athletes (less than ~500hrs/year) or athletes with a young training age, I frequently arrive 12 weeks out from the race with the athlete yet to ‘prove’ their ability to hold AeT endurance for a good chunk (more than 2/3) race duration. At this point it’s time for a reality check and a recognition of what true race pace is likely to be.

Similarly, for a short course athlete, even for those athletes in who aerobic threshold endurance is relatively weak, there comes a point at which the athlete must start training for the specific speed and demands of their event. Therefore, 12 weeks out, truly specific training (training over close to race duration at close to race pace) begins irrespective of where the athlete is at and to a large extent, irrespective of their strengths and weaknesses. It is the nature of this specific training that is largely determined by how diligent the athlete was in rectifying these weaknesses in the basic preparation phase of the season.

In addition, there comes a point 2-4 weeks from the race date at which work has a net negative effect on performance due to the fact that the athlete will generate fatigue that he/she cannot shed by race day. Therefore a peak/taper phase should be implemented.

So, in summary, step 1 is a simplified ‘traditional’ approach:
• Identify race date
• Count back 2-4 weeks and begin the peak/taper phase
• Count back an additional 6-8 weeks and begin the specific preparation
• Count back an additional 12-32 weeks and begin basic preparation.

For short course athletes, a further option is to insert a short precompetitive phase devoted to VO2 enhancement. However, for the vast majority of sub elite folks, the basic development that you give up while VO2 training makes its emphasis a bad deal in a long term development sense.

The wide time span in the last summary point brings us to the next task:

Step 2: Determine whether you will have 1, 2 or 3 peaks this season and how long the peaks will last.

It is a simple but oft forgotten fact that for every peak performance the athlete gives up valuable training time in the form of taper and recovery. In relative performance terms, an athlete can expect ~7.5% less relative performance improvement over the course of a year for every additional peak (assuming a 1-2 week taper and 2-4 week transition/prep period after each). In other words, if the athlete could potentially improve their performance 10% with one annual peak, they will likely improve only 9.25% if 2 true peaks are attempted, this is down to 8.5% for 3 peaks etc etc.

Additionally, while in theory, a relative peak can be held for a competitive season of 6 months (as displayed by the performance of ‘career triathletes’ on the ITU circuit) maintenance and improvement are 2 different things. It is only when the athlete reaches the limits of their own personal performance that such a strategy is appropriate. With the small differences separating Olympic medals, one could argue that in an Olympic year this strategy is not even appropriate for these folk!!

Generally speaking, the intelligent developing athlete should plan one true peak with a full taper and active recovery period each year. This is not to say that they shouldn’t race B and C events during the year, in fact, I recommend a mid-year B event for most of my athletes in order to mentally break up the season. However, the important thing is that if the highest levels of improvement are to be attained, these B and C events should be performed relatively untapered and should be sufficiently short that they don’t require extended recovery (much longer than a normal key workout). Additionally, in an ideal world, these races will be selected to support the training aims of that mesocycle.

In summary, plan 1 true peak period of only 2-4 weeks and be careful with the effort level of your B and C events!

Step 3: Take a CONSERVATIVE guess at your starting point (load)

Plain and simple, this is where a lot of athletes go wrong. For year to year improvement to occur, an athlete needs to let A LOT of fitness slide in between training seasons. Consequently, the starting load of the following season should be very low in comparison to last year’s peak. This is a tough pill to swallow when we’re talking a 50-70% reduction in tolerance to training load in the space of 6-8 weeks but believe me, IT IS NECESSARY. In fact, for a lot of good age group & neo-pro athletes it is the difference between remaining ‘good’ in the following season or becoming GREAT!

Some suggestions related to peak volume in the preceding season.



These numbers are assuming a couple of things:
1. We’re talking about sustained volume, not one off camp weeks.
2. We’re assuming the bulk of training is easy-steady aerobic training
3. We’re assuming that peak volume occurred within the past 3 months

And, most important of all…
4. We’re assuming the athlete took a month off serious training at the end of the season!!

Step 4: Come up with a balanced (general) weekly program that represents mixed training methods at an appropriate load.

Even at the beginning of the year, providing the athlete is healthy (getting rid of any niggles is a high priority of the transition period), some training content from all intensity zones should be included:
- A BULK of easy-steady aerobic training
- One slightly longer session each week in each sport (~1.5x average)
- Gentle whole body strength/circuit training 2x/wk
- An up-tempo effort on at least one of the aerobic days (5-8% of weekly total)
- One solid effort at least every other week (<5% of weekly total) – a timed 1500 run or CP5
- A small amount of regular fast training – reps, strides, jumps, sprints in each sport(<3%) of weekly total

So, for a novice triathlete (training for anything from a super-sprint to a long course triathlon) with a peak weekly load of ~40hrs/mo in the previous season, an initial basic week may look something like….



Step 5: Get out the door and train! Every day!

The above 5 steps represent the limit of my preliminary planning.

The direction you will take from here depends on:
- Progressively moving towards the specific needs of your event
- Revealing your current strengths and weaknesses (a moving target)
- Figuring out how your body responds to training (another moving target)

There is only one way to answer the last two questions – Get out there!

Tune in next time for more on ‘the method’ and above all else…

Train Smart.

AC

The Fatigue Curve

A big part of understanding the training process comes down to understanding all there is to know about being tired. After all, in order to ‘supercompensate’ to a level of fitness above the ‘norm’ requires the athlete to take on more work and become more fatigued than they would ordinarily submit themselves to.

However, fatigue in and of itself isn’t enough. If the athlete doesn’t allow sufficient time to supercompensate from a given training session, in other words, if the athlete decides to ‘kick himself while he’s down’, all he or she will do is get more tired rather than more fit.

To complicate matters, there are all kinds of ways of getting both tired and fit and to train effectively, the coach or athlete needs to have some rudimentary understanding of them all. For example, no serious athlete can afford to wait for full structural recovery (repair of muscle fibers and functionally disturbed mitochondria) between sessions. To do so would mean that the athlete would be reduced to performing about a session a month. Even the fast responder must concede that it takes more than 6 miles of running a month to achieve anything in endurance sport!! And so the athlete is left to only allow partial recovery between most sessions. This brings us to the concepts of ‘residual tiredness’ & the ‘fatigue curve’(below).



We can ostensibly divide the recovery from fatigue into 4 key periods.

Phase 0: High-Energy Recovery:

Refers to recovery within the session, i.e. the recovery of muscle ATP and Creatine Phosphate stores, resaturation of muscle myoglobin stores with O2 and general repayment of the classic ‘O2 debt’ that comes with vigorous exercise and enables us to repeat this vigorous exercise with relatively short rest. This is the basis of interval training.

Phase 1: Metabolic Recovery

However, even allowing for recompensation of the body’s O2 needs, if sufficient steady-state training or a sufficient number of intervals is completed, eventually the athlete will begin to run low on glycogen. This phase of fatigue (phase 1) requires longer to recover from - 24-96hrs depending on the level of fatigue, the muscle fibers involved and the content of the athlete’s diet. This is the basis of ‘hard-easy’ training within the microcycle or week.

Phase 2: Structural Recovery

Yet, even applying an intelligent approach to structuring your weekly training isn’t sufficient when it comes to recovery. With every one of these tough sessions, a residual muscular damage is carried over from session to session. In other words, the 48-72hrs between hard sessions, while sufficient for supercompensation of the body’s glycogen stores is insufficient for repair and supercompensation of the muscle fibers and intramuscular components which represent a large part of the long term performance improvement in endurance sport. It is both desirable and necessary to do structural damage that will eventually compromise performance within the mesocycle or loading block. This is providing these ‘beat down’ cycles are accompanied by a ‘worthwhile break’ at the completion of the cycle. This period may be 7 days, 10 days or 14 days or more depending on the recovery needs of the athlete. The important thing is that the athlete recovers their performance potential once each cycle. You may notice that this aspect of fatigue comprises about 50% of the fatigue curve. Therefore this aspect of recovery is the key component in the training response.

Phase 3: Neuro-Endocrine Recovery

And, still, even the use of appropriate recovery between sessions and between cycles is not enough to prevent an eventual performance plateau in long term training. In addition to the issue of residual damage, the athlete must also deal with the habituation to stress that comes with long term load cycles. In the interests of protection from stress, in an organism who is perpetually involved in the stress response, the body will eventually habituate itself to higher stress levels so that it literally doesn’t wear itself out. Eventually the body will ‘run out’ of stress hormones or the body’s stress receptors will become less receptive to these hormones (Lehman et al. 1993). This represents the poorly understood fatigue of the neuro-endocrine system. Therefore the response to training is blunted. When performance begins to plateau, the smart athlete rests. This represents the final phase of the fatigue curve. Periodically, a multi-month recovery period will be needed to avoid carrying this small amount of habitual fatigue from one training year to the next.

If we accept Gordo’s saying that, when it comes to training, getting tired is the point then surely a big part of being an intelligent coach and athlete is about understanding what it really means to be tired. Hopefully, in addition to helping to better elucidate the concepts of periodization, in the same way that Eskimos have 100words to describe snow, this article has added to your vocabulary of being able to define your own tiredness :-)

Train Smart.

AC

The Science of Decoupling

Those of you familiar with the training philosophies of Joe Friel (the guy decoupling big time in the shot above :-) will have no doubt come across the concept of ‘decoupling’, i.e. a shift in the power: heart rate relationship as a workout goes on.

An example of this, from one of the athletes I work with, in the form of a rise in heart rate and a drop in power as the session progresses is shown below.



Clearly, as time went on the gap between the athlete’s power and heart rate widened, to the point that by the end of the session, the difference in power:HR compared to the start is 26%. Or in other words, it is taking this athlete an extra 30 beats/min to generate the same power!!

Detailed info on the calculation of decoupling can be found here, but the general gist is; we take the power/heart rate for the first half of the session and divide it by the power/heart rate for the second half. E.g. if that athlete did 105 watts at 100bpm in the first half (power/HR = 1.05) and 100 watts at 100bpm in the second, i.e. he lost 5 watts (power/HR = 1.00), then his decoupling would be 5watts/100watts = 5%.

When you think about it, this is a pretty perplexing phenomena. We assume physiologically that a given effort requires a given amount of energy, which requires a given amount of oxygen, which in turn requires a given amount of heart beats, at least for a particular individual! So what are the causes and implications of a need for more heart beats at the same workload?

To illustrate, let’s start with a typical ex phys scenario:

Say that I start pedaling a bike at 260W, a level of power that on average requires approximately 3.5 L/min of Oxygen. As I start the exercise & my muscles figure out “we’re gonna need more O2 captain”, my body goes to work transporting O2 to the working muscles.

Let’s assume that I have 12g of hemoglobin per deciliter of blood (an average amount) Assuming 100% saturation, this 12g/deciliter carries 16ml of O2, so 160ml of O2 per liter of blood. But I need 3.5 L of O2, so it’s going to take me about 22 liters of blood per minute to keep up with the demand (3500/160). Assuming I have a cardiac stroke volume of 150ml, it will take my body 150 beats per minute to pump these 22 liters (to the ex-phys geeks, yes I’m ignoring the a-VO2 difference for the purpose of simplicity).

Pretty simple, eh? A given workload requires a given O2, which requires a given amount of heart beats. So, if the workload stays constant but the heart rate changes over time, what’s going on? At what step in the chain is the breakdown occurring?

The obvious one and the most commonly cited cause of increased heart rate for a given power is a change in stroke volume due to dehydration. If my cardiac stroke volume all of a sudden goes from 150ml down to 140ml my heart would need to beat 10 beats faster in order to get the same amount of blood per minute to the muscles. So, for my 260W, I would now be putting out 160bpm instead of 150bpm. The most common cause of this drop in stroke volume is a drop in blood volume via dehydration. For this reason, cardiovascular drift frequently occurs under hot conditions where some of the body’s fluids must be devoted to cooling rather than maintaining the integrity of the blood volume.

However, can an increase in heart rate for a given power reveal more?
Joe suggests that not only is decoupling of power and heart rate a sign of heat stress, he also uses it as an indicator of aerobic fitness. Is there a possible mechanism by which this metric could be used as a sign of not just heat tolerance, but also aerobic endurance?

Thomas and Chapman (2006) may be able to help answer the question of the validity of decoupling as a training metric. By observing VO2 during prolonged downhill walking on a steep grade, they saw a progressive rise in VO2 uptake with no change in body temperature or stroke volume. OK, you say, “the sweat thing made sense but what’s going on here?”

The break in the chain under these conditions occurs not in Oxygen transport, but Oxygen demand, i.e. at the top of the chain. During the eccentric exercise, as muscle damage occurs, the legs are forced to recruit larger, less economical muscle fibers. These fibers require a greater amount of O2 to exert a given level of power and the heart rate goes up for a given power output when the more economical fibers begin to fatigue.

In fact, type II fibers require ~twice the O2 for a given power output. Therefore, small fiber shifts result in relatively large differences in heart rate for a given power output (Coyle, 1992)

As we know, muscle damage isn’t the only cause of muscle fatigue. When a muscle fiber runs out of fuel (glycogen) it’s out of the game. Thus, decoupling can serve as an indicator of how our targeted muscle fibers are doing, both in terms of muscle damage and fuel stores.

As the targeted muscle fibers become stronger and more fatigue resistant, the time before the muscle fatigues to the point that it needs to call on it’s ‘big brother’ fibers increases. Therefore, as an athlete’s muscle fibers become more trained, decoupling over a training session decreases. In fact, the researchers above found that the effect disappeared when athletes were trained in downhill walking for a period of weeks. Or, in other words, as fitness for a given task increases, decoupling decreases.

Additionally, if we accept that HR:Power can indicate muscle damage and fuel depletion, we can also then use this metric to help determine if an athlete is adequately recovered for a key workout. If we know that typically an athlete takes 140bpm to run 7:00/mi (after warm up) we can use this number as a ‘check-in’ before key sessions. If the athlete takes 147bpm for the same pace (a difference of 5%) it may suggest that recovery is incomplete and the session should be postponed. Chuckie V wrote a great post on the practical implementation of this concept here.

Incidentally, a swing in the opposite direction can also indicate incomplete recovery via other mechanisms. In fact, over-reaching studies have typically found either decreased power/pace of ~5% for a given effort (e.g. Coutts et al. 2007, Jeukendrup et al., 1992), OR a decreased heart rate of 5% for a given power/pace (e.g. Hedelin et al, 2000). Therefore, ensuring athletes are within +/-5% of ‘normal’ power and HR is a good policy.

While it’s true that heart rate is subject to more confounding variables than other measures, it is not, as some coaches would suggest ‘useless’ as a training metric. The confounding variables can quite easily be accounted for by a good coach with effective communication and athlete knowledge. When used with a given athlete over a period of time, observing power:heart rate relationships offers the coach a fairly objective indicator of both the athlete’s base fitness and their readiness to work (two things that athletes notoriously over-estimate when left to their own devices). For this reason, in my opinion, decoupling is a key concept of science-based coaching.

Train Smart.

AC