The Perfect Taper Part 2: Taper Weeks By Sport

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

Last week I wrote a piece on common taper mistakes for the Endurance Corner website (http://www.endurancecorner.com/Alan_Couzens/race_week_taper). The piece spawned some great discussion on our EC forum that prompted me to go into a little more depth on both the practicalities of an optimal taper and the rationale behind it in this follow up article.

When tapering, an athlete is looking to exploit a key principle of exercise physiology – that fitness decays more slowly than fatigue. If we consider performance to be the sum of these 2 components, this leads us to a ‘sweetspot’ when, after a period of reduced training, fitness remains relatively high while fatigue is very low & performance is maximized. An example of this is illustrated below.

 

I suggested in the article that this sweetspot is a function of:

·         Fitness – Fitter athletes need shorter tapers.

·         Race type – Shorter events need longer tapers

·         Gender/Body type. – Bigger athletes need longer tapers.

However, when getting down to the nitty gritty of planning the contents of the taper, there are other factors that need to be considered. The first of these is….

Content of the taper weeks by sport.

To complicate matters of optimal tapering, each sport (swim, bike, run) exhibits different rates of decay for fitness and fatigue, leading to different ‘sweetspots’ for each sport.

1.    Some time ago, I wrote a piece on using ‘influence curves’ to frame the importance of load through the season (http://alancouzens.blogspot.com/2009/12/influence-curves.html

). We can apply this same concept to the taper to ascertain the relative benefit of a given swim, bike or run load at various points though the taper.

Using data from mathematical modelling studies on the various sports (Busso et al., 1991, 1993, 1997, Hellard et al., 2005, Morton et al., 1990, Millet et al., 2001, Mujika et al., 1996), I have averaged the fitness and fatigue constants from each study to produce the following SBR influence curves.

It should be noted that these studies represent all levels of athlete from untrained to the very elite, so, as mentioned above, the actual SBR patterns will also be a function of fitness. But, speaking generally, the figure below represents the typical influence curves for swim, bike & run -  the curve of maximal impact of load on performance vs time from performance date.

 

 Looking at the curves, the following general conclusions on the content of taper weeks by sport can be drawn.

·         The impact of load on performance is maximized for all sports at a period of approximately 28-35 days from the competition date. In other words, for most athletes, the 5^th week out should be a big week.

·         In the 4^th week from competition (days 21-28), the influence of cycling load on performance tends to drop off more quickly than the other 2 sports. In practical terms, you may want to apply this by making the 5^th week out cycling focused (i.e. a bike camp) & 4^th week out (while still relatively big) more SBR balanced.

·         In the 3^rd week out from competition (days 14-21)the influence of cycling and running load (while still generally positive), tend to fall at similar rates. This leads to 2 key ‘take aways’ for this week:

1.       Keep the swim load generally high

2.       If in doubt, leave it out – Load is starting to trend towards negative at this point & for larger or less fit athletes, may be approaching negative, so if a session feels tired, this is the week where more rest may begin to trump more fitness.

·         In the 2^nd week out (days 7-14), bike and run load trends quickly towards negative. Almost all athletes should be dropping load quickly at this point, from bike and especially from run.  Swim load will also start to drop but should remain relatively high (50-75% of peak) 

·         In race week (0-7 days from the event), both bike and run load will generally have a negative impact on performance. At the extreme, you may take this to mean (with the exception of a couple of trips to the pool) that you should spend the time with your feet up in your hotel room, however, this is a mistake as, when we drill down a little deeper to the training and detraining rates of the various physiological qualities, you’ll see  that there is one in particular that the Ironman athlete wants to stay in touch with during race week. I’ll look at this question of  content of taper weeks by intensity level in my next article on tapering.

Until then, train smart.

AC

Wko+ for simpletons

After my last blog entry, my buddy Jaakko advised me to use my skills in translating the complex math of wko+ into terms that the layman can understand, to write a book on wko+ for Dummies. In fear of copyright infringement, I elected to go with today’s title :-)

There is also a little hidden meaning to today’s title. Truth is, there is no negative intent to my use of the word simpleton (or Mr Gump). Au contraire, I deeply admire simplicity in all senses of the word.

As much as I love to deal with numbers and complex theories, the truth is, I abhor complexity. Whenever looking at a data set or a new theory, my driving motivation is to reconcile it with my current view of the simple truth, i.e. to break down complexity into simplicity.

We are all familiar with the term ‘paralysis through analysis’. The corollary to this would be ‘action through simplicity’. In other words, those who most embody action (and who, consequently, generate results) do so through a simple approach – a focus on spending their time DOING the essentials rather than analyzing the inessentials. So, this brings us to today’s blog.

Somebody whose approach I deeply respect is athlete, Tim Luchinske. It seems that the bulk of Tim’s actions are put in place with the aim to bring the essentials more into focus and I’m not talking along the lines of what logbook he selects. Check out his blog to get a feel for what I mean.

In fact, it was reading his blog over the last couple of weeks that partly prompted this post. I want to distance myself from my recent posts that seem to suggest that fulfilling your potential in sport is a mathematical problem. It is not. In order to actually ‘do the math’, requires tuning out the noise and tuning into your passion throughout the day, throughout your life. So, I write this post with that intent.

That said, there are some simple key essentials that have been known to elite coaches for decades and recently confirmed by (and elaborated within) the studies on mathematical modelling of the training process on which wko+ is based. These key principles are so key, in fact, that I have witnessed, on numerous occasions, very passionate, action oriented athletes who fail to observe them consistently perform below their potential.

So, in this post, I want to provide some of the key ‘take home points’ that I have learned from wko+ that can be applied to all athletes, irrespective of whether their training log consists of a docking port for every speed and power measuring device known to man or a writing pad sitting on your bedside table.

1. Every individual athlete has an optimal ‘chronic training load’ for any one season that is the result of their training base and constitution, not their aspirations.

In other words, every athlete has a limit to the training load that they can absorb at any one point in the training season. It is important to note/realize that this number, of what the athlete can absorb over a long term period is significantly less than what the athlete can do over a short term period. It is only through long term monitoring of large scale workload, e.g. month to month workload that a reasonable assessment of optimal training load can be made.

This optimal load will also change over the year as the athlete’s base improves. While a 50hr month may make an athlete tired in the prep period. At the end of the base period, the athlete may be able to absorb a 70hr month with no problem.

Irrespective, the take home message is to stick to one given training load until you have proven that you can absorb it (6 weeks or more) before deciding to up the ante.


2. Every individual athlete has an optimal ‘ramp rate’ to build training load towards this optimal level. Exceeding this rate results in failed adaptation (overtraining)

There are 3 basic scenarios that can arise from the application of a training load:

a) Too much load



If the athlete digs too deep a hole for themselves at the start of the season, by ramping up the volume/intensity too quickly, they will exceed their adaptation reserves and fail to supercompensate, i.e. too much load will make the athlete slower rather than faster

b) Too little load



If the athlete digs too shallow a hole for themselves at the start of the season by ramping up the volume/intensity too gently, they will receive full benefit from the load very early in the training season, i.e. they will ‘peak too soon’. Obviously this is preferable to the first option as it is much easier to maintain a given level of fitness through to competition than it is to shed fatigue, get healthy and get fit if too much load is undertaken.

c) “Just right” load.



Optimal load will have the athlete arriving at maximal fitness shortly before their peak race of the year, with just enough time to taper and freshen prior to the competition.

Fitter athletes (athletes with a stronger consistency base) will generally be able to tolerate more aggressive ramp rates. However, the only way to not risk the fitness that you have accrued in the last block is to plan very moderate volume jumps from month to month until you have a proven baseline ramp rate that you have sustained over the course of a season.

3. Every individual athlete has an optimal season length before load makes them more tired rather than more fit. Exceeding this optimal season length results in failing adaptation (overtraining).

The other time of the season that the athlete risks failing adaptation is in a season that extends too long. When performance begins to drop late in the season in spite of maintained/increasing load, it is time to shut her down and take a worthwhile break. This optimal length also depends on the base of the athlete and how deep the initial hole is dug. Generally, this time period will be in the vicinity of 3-7 months.

4. It’s a lot easier to get fast by getting ‘fresh’ than it is by getting ‘fit’.

While the seasonal gains that an athlete can expect from appropriate tapering are less than those that the athlete can expect from training, the relative benefit makes allowing time for an optimal taper a key inclusion within the training plan. In a wko+ sense, an athlete can, under a good case scenario, expect a 10-20% improvement in fitness (CTL) from month to month. However, freshness (TSB) can improve almost 200% within 1 month of reduced training! This is worthwhile remembering when considering ‘doing a little more’.

*********

Wko+ is a tool that enables athletes and coaches to reconcile the relationship between training load and relative performance. It is especially useful as summary statistics for those athletes who experience frequent fluctuations in training load to keep track of expected fitness and to forecast what load modifications will lead to the best result. However…..

For the serious athlete, controlling variables should always be a higher priority than measuring them.

Train Smart,

AC

Structural Considerations in Planning the Microcycle (Basic Week)

“Planning training sessions appropriately within a week is like playing beautiful music. If the right keys are played at the right time, it creates a masterpiece. If the right keys are played at the wrong time, nothing but noise”


In this post, I’m going to complete the trilogy of training cycles by taking a look at some structural considerations in planning the fundamental microcycle - the Basic Week.

However, before I get started on today’s post, first a quick summary for those who missed the last couple of entries on the real world application of periodization principles to the macro and mesocycle:

a) There is minimal “real world” advantage (for working athletes) to cycling weekly volume within the mesocycle or month. Rather, a relatively constant basic week for a period of 3-5 months is indicated.

b) There are a couple of noteworthy exceptions within the season/macrocycle in which it makes sense to alter volume from the standard basic week. These would be (in order of importance)
- Tapering volume prior to racing
- Observing an off-season of 2-6 weeks after each season
- Inserting a short ‘preparatory period’ of building volume before really ‘hitting it’ each season.
- (For intermediates) Inserting high volume training camps in the early-mid season
- (For elites only) considering inserting a brief period of sharpening before key career peaks.

Understanding the sequencing of sessions within a microcycle rests largely on understanding and applying one key principle:

Every physiological quality has different rates of acquisition and decay.

The tricky part for the coach is to determine the ones you need for your race, determine the ones that you want to develop vs maintain and put them in the appropriate place in the season and the week. For example, see the chart below by Olbrecht (1998) that shows the different recovery times (hours) between sessions of differing content.


























Utilizing the above information, we can deduce optimal frequencies for development and maintenance of the core sessions in an endurance athletes repertoire:







Unfortunately, we simply don’t have the energy (glycogen) to accomplish all of these objectives, so we must, intelligently, ‘pick and choose’.

In order to intelligently do this, we must be aware of the dynamics of aspects of fatigue, particularly glycogen depletion and replenishment and we must be aware of what forms of training are compatible vs. contradictory. We must also, on some level know what reserves the individual athlete is working with and how much a given session takes out of them, i.e. are they a Prius or a Corvette?

A couple of considerations that are particularly pertinent to constructing the microcycle:

1. Fast twitch fibers take significantly longer to replenish that slow twitch fibers (Casey et al. 1995),

For instance, a typical ‘key’ long steady state workout will deplete most slowtwitch fibers, but only 50% or less FT fibers. With this depletion pattern, the athlete could manage a key strength workout after 24hrs recovery. On the flipside, if the first key session is a mod-hard or threshold workout, it will deplete significantly more FT fibers and, due to the different synthesis rates in FT vs ST fibers (Casey et al. 1995), the athlete may not be ready for a solid strength workout until 48-72hrs after the first session.

2. Eccentric exercises require longer recovery times than predominantly concentric (low impact) activities (Costill et al. 1990).

For this reason, extra space should be given to the key runs and strength sessions each week.

3. Glycogen depletion is a whole body process and is not entirely specific to the muscle fibers used (Krssak et al. 2000).

The whole body glycogen store is a finite resource and you need to use it in the mode (swim, bike or run) combination that is most appropriate to your limiters.

So, keeping the above in mind, let’s go about solving one particular puzzle, the Ironman Athlete….

For the majority of Ironman athletes the key objectives are steady-state endurance, skill and strength. For intermediate-advanced athletes, muscular endurance creeps in as a key physiological objective.

To maximally develop steady state endurance we want 4-6 key endurance workouts per week (from the table above). Obviously, a long swim, a long bike and a long run are a starting point. Additional workout(s) in the athlete’s weakest discipline would make intuitive sense for the remaining 1-3 workouts.

Additional to this, the the novice athlete who is still looking to attain Friel’s strength benchmarks should complete 2 key strength workouts per week.

Skill work can be easily incorporated within some of the aerobic workouts.

The following chart provides one example of how these workouts may be placed for a typical Ironman athlete, taking into account the dynamics of glycogen depletion and repletion (shown below). Estimated CHO cost (kcal) for each workout is shown in italics.







This offers 4-6 aerobic workouts and 2 strength workouts in an appropriately placed 15-18hr week.

Now let’s take a look at what’s going on ‘behind the scenes’ by looking at typical glycogen depletion and repletion patterns within a well balanced week like the one above.The blue bar shows expected muscle glycogen stores at the start of each day for an average athlete (whole body glycogen stores of ~2000kcal), while the red shows the amount of glycogen remaining at the end of each day (after training). A blow by blow description is given below:



Monday:
After a day of complete rest, the athlete goes in to Monday with full ST and FT glycogen stores. The athlete performs a tough long run and a moderately tough strength workout on Monday. Both of these are eccentric activities, the latter involving FT fibers. So, despite the time available for recovery within the day, it is likely that the athlete will be able to replenish only 25-33% of the glycogen expended during day 1.


Tuesday:
With the above in mind, leaving a little room for error, we go into day 2 with gas tanks only a quarter full. Keeping in mind that we want to be fully recovered for our key sessions on Wed, and the fact that a best case scenario for glycogen recovery after a session that utilizes a good portion of ST and FOG fibers in eccentric activity is 48hrs (Costill et al, 1990), very little should be done on Tuesday. An optional easy skills swim could be placed here considering most of Monday’s activities were lower body. However, the role of the upper body in replenishing the whole body glycogen pool after exercise should not be discounted. If in doubt, leave it out.

Wednesday:
After a day of focused recovery on Tuesday, the athlete (hopefully) goes into the hard Wednesday sessions with fully topped up glycogen stores. While there is a significant glycogen contribution from FT fibers on Wednesday, at least there is very little eccentric stress. Therefore, even after a good amount of depletion, recovery can be expected within 48hrs. Part of this recovery will occur between sessions on Wednesday, with the balance occurring on Thursday. Important note: The athlete will not be able to do a dedicated Mod-Hard bike set and still recover for the strength workout on Thursday (less than 48hrs recovery).Therefore, a compromise must be reached. For the novice, in favor of the strength workout, for the intermediate athlete, in favor of the muscular endurance set.

Thursday:
Whichever compromise one elects, the athlete arrives at the strength workout with glycogen 50-100% replenished. A moderate strength workout will have the athlete finishing the day with glycogen stores only 30-70% full necessitating another rest day, or at the very least, a very light day.

Friday:
Depending on how tough the Wednesday and Thursday workouts were and on the athlete’s individual recovery profile, Friday can either be an off day or a very light day of swimming or biking. After this light day, the athlete will be going into the big day on Saturday with glycogen stores very close to full. For most athletes Saturday is the most important session of the week and if there is any doubt, it is best to stick with more passive recovery means (sleep, massage, yoga etc) rather than active recovery on Friday.

Saturday:
It is essential that the athlete go into this day with glycogen stores at least full or, hopefully super-full, bursting at the seams via super-compensation after the Wednesday workout. The athlete will exploit these stores to their full potential on the key session of the week. Providing this workout exceeds the athletes minimal training threshold, the longer this workout, the better, as, due to the nature of improved fat oxidation with exercise of increased duration, this workout offers the athlete the most contractions for their glycogen “buck” of any workout in the week.

Sunday:
The athlete is going to be notably tired on Sunday. The good news is that most of the efforts in the Saturday workout were in the realm of slow twitch fibers (which recover glycogen much faster than fast twitch fibers), and, with the exception of the short transition run, created minimal eccentric stress. Therefore, with 36 or more hours of total recovery from the end of the Big Day on Saturday to the start of the long run on Monday, very close to complete recovery can be achieved before beginning the cycle all over again.

A couple of unique situations in which it may prove prudent to alter the format of the week:

1. For the rare example of the athlete with limited endurance but unlimited time, I would consider using the athletes glycogen allowance in the Wednesday session towards longer, steady-state training rather than mod-hard. This is most applicable to the novice-intermediate athlete during a camp period, and more obviously, is the most specific workout an Ironman athlete can do, irrespective of level.

2. For the intermediate athlete, mod-hard sets may also be included on the Saturday session in place of steady state endurance to meet the frequency quota for mod-hard sessions in order to induce a training effect. Of course, this won’t make sense for any athlete who is endurance limited.

3. For the elite/pro triathlete, consideration may be given, particularly in the final preparation to the inclusion of 2-3 VO2 workouts per week in order to spike central adaptations. The very significant downside of this strategy is that Fast Twitch fibers require considerably longer to replenish glycogen between sessions and it becomes next to impossible to do enough work to maintain steady and threshold endurance while building VO2max. For the Ironman athlete, the relative importance of keeping your peripheral adaptations generally outweighs the gain to be had from maximizing your central. Additionally, the time course of adaptation is such that your base qualities (steady state endurance and ‘threshold’ endurance) can be continually improved with 10-20 cycles of progressively increasing demand to effect an increase of 20-25% (Coyle, 1991). The maximal improvement to VO2max, on the other hand (5-15%) is reached after 1-2 cycles with a VO2max emphasis. Therefore, while the rapid performance improvement from VO2 work can be tempting, until breakpoint volume is reached, any time spent maximizing VO2 is essentially time lost from improving the more malleable ‘basic’ qualities.

An important sidenote: Sharpening training, on the whole, falls under the same category as tapering in that the athlete is giving up fitness in exchange for performance. Any athlete serious about discovering their potential cannot afford to give up fitness voluntarily during their key developmental years. Therefore it is important to choose events that you want to really ‘peak’ for in your athletic lifetime very carefully. Again, if in doubt, leave it out.

Regardless of the specifics of the week, the hard-easy format remains an essential principle for all level of athlete. Relative quantities or qualities of the workout will change with the athlete’s improved energy ‘bank’ and substrate efficiency that comes with enhanced ‘base’ but this format will remain.

The efficacy of the hard-easy format is not news. Reindell, Gerschler, Zatopek, Lydiard, Bowerman, etc all used this principle. Recently, mathematical modeling has provided further validation, with models indicating up to a 10% performance benefit to using the hard-easy format vs. flat loading. Looking at the pattern of glycogen depletion, it’s not hard to see that a small change in the scheduling of workouts could result in the athlete going into their key workouts with diminished energy reserves and could significantly compromise their performance.

Clearly, the above provides only one hypothetical pattern of a basic week based on an average athletes fatigue and recovery response to different sessions. If an athlete has a marginally different recovery profile, this week would be entirely useless. For this reason, getting to intimately know an individual athlete’s fitness and fatigue rates is an essential task of the serious coach.

In this age of technology, several applications attempt to help the coach with this task, e.g. in the case of wko+, setting appropriate chronic and acute training load constants. However, this process is complicated enough without the realization that not only does every athlete have different rates of fitness and fatigue acquisition and decay (on a given day!!), but additionally, as Olbrecht’s chart illustrates, every physiological quality also exhibits different fatigue and fitness decay rates. Thus, the coach has two choices, lock themselves away in a math lab and spend 6 months coming up with a myriad of series and sequences, or turn to our good old friend, trial and error.

Make no mistake, the best coaches all have a firm understanding of the theoretical background of how athletes generally respond to different types of sessions but they excel in assessing the individual’s response to a training stimulus by using trial and error to see how long it takes them to get back to (or exceed) normal training performance in the key sessions. This is where coaching ‘art’ meets ‘science’.

Additionally, this readiness will change on a day to day basis and the ‘aware’ athlete has a huge advantage in getting the timing right for optimal improvement. This education (to both parties) should be a high priority in the coach-athlete relationship.

Putting some serious thought and experimentation into coming up with a week that gives the athlete the best possible chance to have the energy to hit the workouts that address their specific limiters as hard as possible should be a key task that is undertaken at the beginning of each training cycle. The gap between maintenance and supercompensation is a small one but identifying and maximizing this gap is one of the key differences between repeating the same performance as last year or breaking through to the next level.

As always, train smart.

AC

*******Update 12/29/2008***********

More good reader questions this week. I felt one in particular was worth adding as an addendum to this piece on building your basic week. SB asks:

“If the most training that we can fit in while still allowing for replenishment of glycogen stores is 15-18hrs per week, then why are most pro’s training 30+ hours per week? Are they training at a lower intensity to accommodate this extra volume?”

The answer to this question lies in 2 key adaptations to endurance training:

1. Elite athletes are able to use a higher proportion of fat as a fuel (and therefore ‘spare’ more glycogen) at the intensities that stimulate aerobic improvements.

2. Elite athletes are able to store much more glycogen than recreational athletes within their liver and muscles, i.e. progressively, with training, their fuel tanks get bigger.

I had used an average glycogen store of 2000 kcal for our hypothetical athlete in the basic week piece. However, the latter adaptation, in particular, can greatly increase this number and result in substantially more fuel to work with for the elite athlete.

Hickner et al (1997) showed that endurance training increases the potential for glycogen storage to ~1.7 times that of a novice athlete. Based on our own lab results, in addition to this, well trained athletes are sparing an additional 20-30% CHO at a given workload compared to novice athletes (due to increased fat burning). These 2 adaptations combined represent an ~2 fold increase in endurance capacity at a given workload. Thus the 15-18hr weeks of your recreational athletes become 30-36hrs (of workloads of similar intensities) for an elite athlete.

It is important to note that this is a long term adaptation and therefore the athlete’s basic week should be built progressively in accordance with their ability to handle work of an appropriate intensity. Sacrificing intensity so that you can throw down weeks of similar volume to the elites makes about as much sense as starting your long runs at 6:00 pace. Just as you must earn the right to train progressively faster, you must also earn the right to train progressively more.

Train smart,

AC.

Structural Considerations in Planning the Macrocycle (Season)

In my last blog, I gave some perspective to the relative merits of adopting a periodized structure when planning a mesocycle. I concluded that while there is benefit to using a ‘staircase’ structure in planning the weeks within a given training month, in general, the practical limitations of a fixed work schedule and life schedule outweigh the potential 3-5% that can come from using this structure.

So, what about the training season (macrocycle)? Should we adopt a flat loading pattern, where all weeks are the same or are there key points within the season that should have a higher or lower volume than the athlete’s basic week?

In my last blog, I hinted that there may be some substantial benefit for the serious working athlete to be had by utilizing appropriately placed training camps that focus on aerobic volume overload within the training season.

Additionally, it is commonly known that a short period of reduced volume prior to the peak competition for the season provides a better performance than continuing a constant load through to the competition.

Let’s begin by taking a look at the use of training camps. Many working athletes will have the choice of spending a portion of their vacation time on a training camp for the 09 season. How much extra benefit can you expect from inserting an ‘overload’ block and where is the best place to put it?

To answer these questions, I tested various structures of a 5 month macrocycle using Banister’s model, which has been validated in real world training instances a number of times (e.g. Morton et al. 1990, Busso et al. 1994, Mujika et al. 1995)

I selected a 5 month macrocycle because it has been shown to be the optimal macrocycle length (prior to unloading and beginning the next cycle) for an average, intermediate athlete (T1=45, T2=15, k1=1, k2=2) (Morton, 1997). This should be adjusted in accordance with the fitness of the athlete, the fitter the athlete, the longer the season, with novices best served with seasons of 3-4 mo duration and elite athletes best served with seasons of 5-7mo. Of course, this at least to some extent runs counter to the desire to peak many times each year in professional athletics. In these situations, an intelligent compromise must be reached.

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at how a training season with 1 x 2 week training camp during which volume is overloaded compares to a flat year-long “basic week”


Same average training load (100 TSS/d) but distributing it with a 200 TSS per day training camp during the second month offers a 5% advantage over flat loading (1519 vs. 1448 units). In other words, a similar advantage to inserting a big week every 4th week of 160TSS per day every in a step loading format but without the stress of trying to do a relatively big week and keep your job and family together at the same time. If you’re going to hit it, get away from your job and family, let us take care of the food and the laundry and just spend a couple of weeks this year focusing on nothing but training with us in sunny Tucson.

So, you may be asking, is the placement of the training camp all that important in the grand scheme of things. Answer: Yes!

I tested a couple of alternative placements for the 200 TSS/d training camp. Results compared to a flat loading 100 TSS/d macrocycle are shown below:



In short, hitting it hard right out of the blocks after a full off-season is a bad idea. If you survive it, you will create a big hole for yourself that will likely take you half a year to climb out of. The first month of training is stressful, irrespective of how easy you take it. It is common practice for swim teams to perform a month of ‘singles’ prior to resuming ‘two-a-days’. Despite this strategy, the return month to training is typically the most tiring.

The best place to insert a camp for the average athlete is month 2 or 3 of the cycle. This is not a revelation by any means. The ‘hell week’ of most swim training programs typically occurs in the third month of training. Likewise, February-March high volume training camps are common practice for professional cycling teams.

Additionally, sports scientists have been aware of this phenomena for some time. Former GDR sports scientist and one of the leading authorities in periodization, Ekkart Arbeit describes the phenomena by using a modified figure of Selye’s adaptation process:

When an organism is exposed to any new stimulus, the first response is alarm. At this point the organism is most vulnerable. After continued exposure to the stimulus, the organism develops resistance or, in other words, enters a phase of adaptation. This is THE CRITICAL PERIOD where the athlete can expect the most (fitness) bang for their (training) buck. This model is applicable across all athletic cycles and is the reason that training load employed in late puberty is so important to the athlete’s long term development (Balyi, 1999). In the case of the training year, load applied in the late preparatory period occurs in the ‘sweet spot’ of this curve and is, therefore, most significant.

Another diversion from the basic week that gives the athlete the most performance improvement is the inclusion of a period of reduced training during the taper period. I have touched on this before so will only briefly revisit it in this post. But basically, the model indicates a 5-7% performance improvement using common taper strategies e.g. 50% average volume reduction in the 30 days prior to competition. This is supported by research by Mujika et al. (1996) who came up with similar numbers in a study on elite swimmers.

Finally, as I highlighted in my off-season blog, the other situation in which a diversion from the basic week is recommended would be for a period of 4-6 weeks at the end of the season.

In summary, intelligent athletes can expect a 7%-13% performance improvement by planning appropriate diversions from the basic week. In particular, early-mid season training camps and pre-competitive tapering are indicated.

If you want a great training camp to kick off your 2009 season click here. Note: The camp is filling fast (that’s not a gimmick. It really is :-)

Train smart.

AC

Periodization vs. The Basic Week

“There’s more to being a model than just being really, really good looking”
- Derek Zoolander

Wise, wise words from Derek Zoolander. As many of you know, I have been really into models lately – training models that is. I have received some great feedback from you all, including a number of elite athletes that validates some of the theoretical constructs I presented in my last piece on the off-season. My buddy, Mat wrote a great ‘real world’ piece on his experiences with the off-season on his blog.

The past couple of weeks, I have managed to get my hands on a number of studies by the big players in mathematical modeling of the training process – Banister, Busso, Morton, Fitz-Clarke etc. While these studies contain some pretty sexy series formulae that describe fitness, fatigue and performance at any one time, as Zoolander says, there needs to be more to a training model than just being good looking. As coaches, we want more than theoretical constructs. We want a ‘roll your sleeves up’ computer model that allows us to put in data from a given athlete and accurately forecast race day performance using a variety of training methods, so that, as coaches, we can come up with the optimal training program for a given athlete. Software such as wko+ and RaceDay are a step in the right direction, however, they are much more easily used post-hoc rather than as a forecasting tool. I’m an impatient kind of guy and only have so much time to spend on trial and error. So….

I spent the extra time in the first week of my off-season creating a computer model of the impulse-response formulae of Banister (1975). I am not the first guy whose curiosity got the better of him. Rowbottom (2000) used the Banister formulae to expand on Morton's (1991) study and test different training structures. He found a consistent 3-5% performance difference when using a periodized training structure vs. a flat loading “basic week” structure.

A 24 week output of these two training structures with a training load of 100 TSS/d (with average ‘Middle of the Pack’ fitness and fatigue constants of 45 and 15 resp) is shown below (k1=1,k2=2):

X axis is days of training. Y1 axis is training load, Y2 axis is performance in arbitrary units.

Note: Both of these structures have exactly the same total training load (an average of 100 TSS/d) over the 24 weeks. In the case of the first, this is distributed as a the extreme example of a flat-loading “basic week”, same load day-in, day out over the 24 weeks. In the case of the 2nd, the load is distributed as:

Wk 1: 70 TSS/d (~12hrs of easy-steady training)
Wk2: 120 TSS/d (~21hrs of easy-steady training)
Wk3: 160 TSS/d (~28hrs of easy-steady training)
Wk 4: 50 TSS/d (~9hrs of easy-steady training)

The performance difference between the two structures is predicted at 1485 units for the periodized method vs. 1424 for the flat loading, a difference of ~4%.

Now, 4% is nothing to sneeze at. Most 11hr Ironpeople would welcome a 26 minute PR with no extra training load. Seems like a good deal. So, as Joe Friel asks in his latest blog post, “what’s wrong with periodization? “ Faster times for the same training load seems like a no-brainer. However, there are a couple of caveats that you should be aware of when deciding upon whether to use a traditional periodized training plan for the 2009 season.

The most important caveat is that in almost all cases, the structure of the training load is secondary to the quantity of training load.

In other words, there are many training programs that emphasize an arbitrary periodization structure: Dividing the total load for the mesocycle into 18%/30%/40%/13% etc. As displayed above, this is often a superior way to distribute training load providing the load is equal to what would be accomplished with a flat loading basic week. This is an important proviso. If you want to average 100 TSS/d (~17hrs of easy-steady training per week) this season, but the most training that you can fit into a week (without giving up sleep, increasing stress or compromising recovery) is 20hrs/wk, then obviously the training structure, rather than the total training load needs to be amended.

In other words, to answer Joe’s question, the thing that is ‘wrong’ with periodization is that our lives aren’t periodized. If you have the job flexibility to be able to work 50hr weeks on your easy weeks and 20hr weeks on your hard weeks, without significantly increasing job stress, then you should do it. For most of us, however, this structure is not an option and, particularly as the athlete improves, they will be forced to adopt a structure that more resembles a flat loading ‘basic week’ in order to accommodate the extra load. As a footnote, some of the most successful age group athletes that I have worked with are those with the most job flexibility. In other words, if you are serious about climbing to the very top of the age group ranks, finding a job or a position within your current occupation that offers more schedule flexibility should be a high long-term priority.

Obviously, the two examples I have presented here are extremes and deal with only one ‘level’ of periodization. Even those athletes confined to a flat load weekly structure, will likely have days that they can do significantly more work (e.g. weekends) and so the load won’t be constant on a day to day basis.

Additionally, in terms of the macrocycle, serious athletes can get a significant jump on the competition by taking advantage of appropriately placed jumps in the training load via training camps.

However, on a day-to-day basis the most important consideration in determining the optimal distribution of the training load falls not so much in the realm of the mathematician, but rather the realm of the life coach. Or, put another way, look at your weekly planner first and the training texts second when constructing your 2009 annual plan.

Train smart.

AC.

****************Update 12/22/08 ***********************

I received an interesting email from a coach asking about what the model indicates regarding the frequency of recovery weeks within the schedule, i.e. if we do want to insert periodic ‘rest and test’ weeks within the schedule, how frequently should they be planned?

It is not unusual for elite coaches to implemement a ‘recovery on demand’ approach, with the exception of some testing weeks. This approach is used by Aussie Swim Coach Bill Sweetenham to good effect. That said, most coaches will generally want to conduct some tests in a ‘fresh’ state. Additionally, even with a well tolerated basic week, accumulating fatigue is to some extent inevitable and periodic ‘shedding’ of this fatigue is indicated.

Obviously, if an advanced mesocyclic program is used with frequent shock weeks, such as the 70/120/160/50 cycle, more frequent recovery will be warranted. However, in the case of a traditional ‘phase’ periodization approach, the majority of recovery should occur within the week.

I tested a number of different frequencies for the insertion of a 60% recovery week on a 100 TSS/d ‘traditional’ periodized program for an average athlete (T1=45, T2=15, k1=1, k2=2).

I found that recovery weeks more frequent than once every 10 weeks results in a predicted performance decrement if this traditional ‘basic week’ model is used. In general, it is not until the 10th week of a given phase that the addition of a recovery week will actually improve performance. For this reason, I recommend that the coach who uses this model, as opposed to a more advanced ‘stair case’ model (with pretty marked changes in volume from week to week) should only plan to insert ‘rest and test’ weeks at the end of each phase not every 3-4 weeks as needed with the more advanced step loading program.

If recovery is needed more frequently than this then it is a good indication to the coach that the basic weekly load is excessive. For this reason, the coach needs to come up with a basic week that is sufficiently moderate to only require recovery after a prolonged, consistent period of training. The mechanics of this are discussed further in my recent blog on structural consideration in planning the microcycle (basic week)

The Off-Season: The most important phase of all

“Resuming training too early is much like pulling an onion out of the garden and realizing it is not yet fully grown. One cannot put it back in and expect more growth!”

- Peter Coe (Coach of middle distance legend Sebastian Coe)

The opening picture for today’s post was put together by one of the athletes that I work with at the end of his season for 2008. I think it pretty eloquently describes how many of us feel at the end of a tough season. I know I’m certainly ready for a break after my own 2008 A-Race, Ironman Arizona. Before I get into the ‘whys’ and the ‘hows’ of planning an appropriate off season, a quick summary race report of my AZ experience:

AZ was without doubt the physically easiest and mentally hardest Ironman that I have completed to date. Let me elaborate:

Swim: Great swim, was as lazy and efficient as I could be, stayed right on the buoy line and jumped from feet to feet. After the initial obligatory chaos of a mass swim start, took advantage of the many folks swimming way harder than they should have in the first 1500m or so. Stayed on their feet until they flamed out and then jumped across to the next fastest swimmer. Don’t think I could have swam any easier. Was surprised to see 1:05 on my stopwatch as I was running along the dock. Felt much slower. Was equally surprised to see an average heart rate of 147 for the swim. Never ceases to amaze me how high the heart rate is on the swim despite feeling very easy. I’m sure the feeling like you’re in a boxing ring with 1500 other people for the first 10mins has something to do with it. I’m a lover, not a fighter :-)

Bike: Quite windy on the uphill section of the course, with a ripping tailwind on the downhill back to town. Plan was steady on the way out, easy on the way back. Good amount of coasting @ 48km/h+ on the way back. First lap everything according to plan. Drank 2x500 cal bottles of Infinit and was feeling very good. That said, lots of folks were ripping by me, obviously working. I was taking it easy, using the legal draft wherever possible to conserve energy. Had a couple of big guys sitting up into the wind. Was very sad to wave them goodbye :-)

Second lap things started to go wrong. I broke the cardinal rule of IM racing and tried something that I hadn’t rehearsed: 2x gel flasks with chocolate gel. I have used the chocolate gel before and the flasks but never together. Word to the wise – the chocolate is not easily squeezed through a gel flask. Didn’t stop me trying though. Probably sucked down 9/10 air, 1/10 gel in my attempts. That plus riding into a hot, dry wind and I had the makings of a huge air bubble in my gut. Good news is it cleared, bad news is it took 10hrs to do so! Managed to get 600cal of tangerine gel down + a bunch of water before I was bloated beyond all belief. Last lap of the bike was not comfortable. Slowed way down (HR under 125) and sipped water as my buddy Dr. J advises but it was too late. So, I was 8hrs in with ~1800 calories in me (planned on having 4000 by the time I got off the bike). Knew at that point that it was going to be an interesting ‘run’.

Run: Was soooo happy to just get off the bike and with my 30mi of very easy riding, still had a little energy in the tank. Got back on the plan – first lap of the run easy 6:00-6:15k pace (HR under 140). Still feeling great as I ran through the crowds to begin lap 2. Plan was to push it up to steady 5:30-5:45/km pace (HR 140-150). Knew I was in trouble when HR started going down. Tried to get calories – coke, gel etc but stomach was still shut down and more bloated than ever. Started to walk and become resigned to the fact that it’s going to be a long day. It took 5+ miles of slow walking/staggering before stomach cleared and I could start taking calories. Made up for lost time. Couldn’t stomach fluids at that point so hit up the pretzels and choc chip cookies hard! Energy levels started coming back so got back to running. Feet started to hurt a bit by that point (started looking for grass wherever possible), but other than that, felt really strong and ran through to the finish: 13:22. Disappointed about the time, but happy that despite one of my most challenging days to date, my inner monologue kept coming back to one word: Finish.

And, as I crossed the line, and hit up the burger joint, thus began my off-season and the topic for this post :-)

The off-season or transitional period is probably the least understood training phase of the annual plan. Athletes vary widely in their interpretation of what the purpose of the off season is, and indeed if an off-season is needed at all. The “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” mentality is all too prevelant among the type A Ironman world. It is my opinion that this is a grave mistake and a mistake that can fundamentally limit the expression of your long term athletic potential.

I am not the first to come to this conclusion. Bondarchuk, one of the leading experts in periodization has studied factors leading to long term athletic stagnation in elite athletes (1995) and, the #1 predicting factor that he came up with was athletes who either a) fail to take an off-season or b) athletes who continue specific training during their off-season. So, without further ado, let’s get into the nitty gritty.

First of all, what is the purpose of the off-season?

Simply, the purpose of the off-season is to shed ALL of the fatigue accumulated in the preceding season so that the athlete is starting from a blank slate at the start of the next preparation period. If you hold onto just 20% of your fatigue from the previous season, the cumulative effect means that after 5 years you’ll be starting the next season as fatigued as you were at your peak training volume 5 years ago. This is going to significantly compromise your ability to tolerate the extra training load that you want to do that season and ultimately lead to a plateau in your long term performance.

It should be noted that while studies have shown a significant correlation between performance fatigue and hormonal markers of over-reaching/over-training, less of a correlation has been exhibited between subjective ratings of fatigue and performance indicated fatigue. In other words, while you may feel ‘good to go’ and ready to start the next season, it is the lingering fatigue that you don’t feel that will ultimately limit your performance.

How long should the off-season last?

For an ‘average’ athlete training at 100 TSS/d, upon cessation of training, fatigue will decay rapidly for the first 2 weeks (hence the taper length implications) and will then continue to decay albeit at a slower rate for the next 2+ months (see figure below). On the other hand, fitness decays at a much slower rate. In fact, it will take most fit athletes 1 year of no training before they have lost all of the fitness that they achieved with training. Intelligent athletes can exploit this difference in decay rates between fitness and fatigue.

For an average athlete, at ~60 days post race they will have less than 1% of fatigue remaining from the season. Yet, they will still be retaining 17% of their fitness from the preceding season. Zero fatigue plus some fitness is a great deal for an athlete looking to undertake an all time high training load in the following season.

If some is good, is more better? Like all aspects of training planning, timing is everything. If our hypothetical athlete waits another month to start his preparation for the next season, fitness will decline to only 7% of starting levels. Therefore, it is certainly possible to extend the off-season for too long.

On the flip-side, for those athletes looking to shorten the off-season, and get a jump on next season, it is worthwhile remembering that training performed more than 5 months before your target event has very little performance impact (Morton, 1991). Save your mojo for when it counts.

Are these recommendations true for all?

Short answer is no. In general, the better trained the individual, the longer the off-season needs to be.

Completely novice athletes can shed fatigue very quickly. In a study by Busso (1991) untrained individuals shed all fatigue within 2 weeks after a 14 week training program. On the other hand, in a study of Olympic level swimmers by Hellard (2005) some fatigue was shown to remain up to 6 months after a swimming season. In other words, even for the elite, the gap between fitness and fatigue narrows each and every season. When fitness and fatigue reach the point that they are decaying at similar rates, performance is maxed out. For this reason, individuals with very fast fatigue decay rates have a great advantage. Or, put another way, athletes should do all that is possible to speed recovery at all times. In this sense, health and performance overlap.

So what should I do during the off-season?

1. Not very much.
Keep in mind that your #1 objective is to shed (not create) fatigue. Taper studies offer some recommendations in this regard. In most studies volume drops of 60-90% have elicited the greatest improvements in performance, presumably due to the greatest rate of fatigue shed (Costill et al. 1985). IOW, 10-40% of your in-season volume offers the best short term fatigue vs. fitness compromise.

With a couple of exceptions (see below) any exercise that you do should fall under the category of ‘active recovery’, i.e. you should feel more invigorated after the session than before it: A walk in the forest, an easy spin on the mountain bike, renting a canoe for a couple of hours. Think ‘feel good’ and ‘fun’.


2. General Training
At this point in the season, the more removed from the specifics of your event, the better. As mentioned above, after the non-existence of an off-season, the next greatest predictor of training stagnation in Bondarchuk’s study was starting specific training too early in the season. Just how general? You can come along to my girlfriend’s aquarobics class and ask me. That’s where I’ll be this Sunday :-)

3. Speed/skill and flexibility training.
Of course, when we talk about “fitness decay” we’re using a general term to describe a number of physiological components. In reality, each one of these has a different fatigue decay and fitness re-acquisition rate. A couple of particular physiological attributes differ markedly enough that they demand specific attention during the transition period.

First of all, flexibility can decline 100% within 4 days of training cessation (Maglischo, 1990). While it can be re-acquired at a good rate, the off season is the perfect time to make in-roads in this quality. IOW, do some yoga classes.

Additionally, skill, speed and power are three related qualities that can diminish rapidly and take a lot of time to reacquire (Hsu and Hsu, 1999).

The transitional period offers a great opportunity to give some weight to some of these fast decaying physiological qualities that we may neglect during the inseason but with semi-specific training means, e.g. ball sports provide a good agility and basic speed challenge to us ‘linear athletes’ who do most of our movements at one speed in one plane. Likewise, circuit routines that incorporate basic speed and agility via tools such as agility ladders, slideboards, plyo-boxes etc are a good inclusion to keep you busy and prevent basic skill, speed and power decline during the off-season.

Train smart.

AC

Rocky VI: Fitness v. Fatigue

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger”
Friedrich Nietzsche

So, being in the middle of an Ironman taper for the past couple of weeks seriously got me thinking about the role of fatigue in the training process. Dropping a significant amount of load over the past couple of weeks has me feeling like Superman, running my 200’s almost 5s faster than what I do in a normal training week, swimming times that I haven’t seen in a long while and feeling an unfamiliar pep throughout the day.

These sensations got me seriously asking the question, what if I was to throw down a training block right now? What sort of quantity/quality could I accomplish? Of course, it’s purely speculative, but I do know that I have energy and motivation for training that has been missing over the last couple of months while I have been pitching my tent in the valley of fatigue.

I guess all of this extra energy devoted to firing a few more neurons brought me full circle, back to that undying question: When it comes to fatigue, how much is too much?

Any athlete who has taken the time to browse through the popular literature on triathlon training will be familiar with the following figure:

The figure is a graphic display of Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome, which, when it comes down to it, is the very crux of the whole training process. You apply a stress that is beyond the athletes normal day to day level, the athlete gets fatigued, the body recognizes the fatigue and, while the athlete is recovering, supercompensates beyond the initial fitness level so that if the stimulus is encountered again it will be ready for it.

Now, most athletes are at least aware of this process on some level (though a great many fail to apply the recovery portion in their training). However, without putting some numbers on the x and y axes, this theoretical construct stays firmly in the realm of training theory. If we really want to put this concept into practice, we need the answer to some very fundamental questions:

When it comes to endurance training (numerically);-

• How much fatigue do we want to accrue before resting and recovering?

• How long can we maintain a given training load, with improving fitness, before we need to ‘up the ante’

• How long should we rest to ensure that our body supercompensates to the highest possible fitness level before an important event?

• How long can we maintain this fitness level before we have to ‘get back to work’?

A number of researchers, beginning with Banister (1975) have ‘done the math’ on the preceding questions and have come up with the following mathematical model to answer them:

For the mathematically inclined (for those not inclined, feel free to skip to the next paragraph – the important stuff):

pt = Performance at any given time
p0 = Initial performance level
T1 = Rate of decay of fitness
T2 = Rate of decay of fatigue
k1 = Amplitude of fitness decay
k2 = Amplitude of fatigue decay
ws = Daily ‘dose’ of training.

While the math deals with some pretty abstract stuff, when we express the model graphically, throwing in some ‘real world’ numbers, the implications are pretty clear. The following model, using the above formula with real world data acquired from distance runners was created and tested by Morton et al. (1990)

On this chart, the x axis represents the number of training days and the y axis represents fitness gained and fatigue accrued.

This chart represents the physiological response to a uniform training load of 100 TRIMPS/day. In our terms, this would equate to about 2.5hrs of easy-steady training per day. This load is a constant from day 0-120, i.e. 2.5hrs each day, every day.

The implications are clear:

As anyone who has swam competitively and experienced the early season return to ‘2-a-days’ can attest, just like Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV, you are going to take a beating in the opening rounds, as fatigue (Drago) dominates fitness (Rocky). For the first week or so, Drago has a slight upper hand but you are still primed and ready for a good fight. Then, as the fight goes on, Drago begins to dominate the early rounds big time. There may be times during the opening month that the accrued training will make it very tough to keep motivation up. You will be tired and at points will want to quit/change your plan, but as Rocky says:

“Going that one more round when you don’t think you can is what makes all the difference in your life”.

So, you stay the course and like all Hollywood endings, somewhere around Day 50, you start to get the upper hand and providing Drago isn’t too steroid supercharged (i.e. your training load is not so ambitious that you fail to adapt and get sick), you start to win and then at Day 120, you jump on the Russian PA system and in one fell swoop you end the cold war by stating the immortal words:

“If I can change, and you can change, everybody can change!”

OK, I’ve taken the metaphor too far :-)

Back to the important stuff, a couple of things to remember:

1. At least in this case, fitness didn’t trump fatigue until ~50 days of constant loading. How many of us bail or change the program (either up the ante prematurely or insert premature recovery) before giving the program a chance to work?

2. Fitness continued to improve to a standard training load for ~4 months before approaching the asymptote, i.e. max fitness gains for a given workload/level of fatigue. At this point, it would be necessary to increase the stimulus to ensure further fitness gains.

3. One may suggest that the greatest fitness “bang for your buck” would be to structure training around 60 days cycles, i.e. loading cycles that take the athlete to the tangent to the curve, i.e. ~60 days in, when fitness begins to exhibit a tendency toward diminishing returns.

These three conclusions provide a good deal of validation towards the efficacy of the ‘basic week’ structure and serve to place periodization in it’s appropriate perspective.

Another question that the model can help to answer regards the taper, i.e. what is the optimal time period to reduce training load prior to competition? And what performance improvement can be expected?

In other words, what happens to performance if we cease (or reduce) the training stimulus at a given point? The chart below shows what happens if we taper training 60 days in.

The model shows that by tapering load 60 days in, the athlete can expect performances equal to what would previously have taken 120 days of continuous training to achieve. In addition, it shows that the optimal performance will occur, in this case, 23 days after the beginning of the taper (on day 83) when the athlete experiences the greatest gap between fitness and fatigue.

Of course, there is a cost to ditching training load. This cost is paid with diminished fitness (see below).



In the case of this model, the athlete can expect to lose ~33% fitness over the course of the taper period. However, they also lose 85% of the accrued fatigue (due to the different rates of decay between fitness and fatigue). So, in the grand scheme of things, when performance is the name of the game, it’s a good deal. However, it is important to note that this drop in fitness essentially takes the athlete back to the fitness level that they were at 50 days ago. In other words, over the course of this training cycle, the athlete only gets to ‘keep’ 10 days of the fitness that they accumulated to carry over into the next cycle because they took 60 steps forward, but 50 steps back. For this reason, one needs to seriously consider the # of A races (races that they taper for) that they place in their season (or during the course of their athletic development). 3 x A-Races essentially means 150 days of lost training just getting back to their peak seasonal fitness.

So, you may say, all of this is very interesting, but how universal are the training responses to this training model?

You may be surprised by just how robust the training model is. It has been applied to and shown to be valid for a number of sports ranging from strength sports (Hammer Throwing) to endurance sports (swimming, cycling and running).

It has also been used with athletes of a wide ability range from elite swimmers (Mujika et al, 1995) to novice cyclists (Busso et al., 1991).

In all of these studies, the fitness acquisition and decay rates have been surprisingly similar. The fatigue constants on the other hand have differed, primarily in accordance with the athletes fitness. Somewhat unsurprisingly, higher level athletes who undertake greater loads require more time to shed the associated fatigue.

These fatigue constants have ranged from mean values of 2 days for untrained men undergoing 4x60min cycling sessions/wk (Busso, 1991) to 13 days for moderately fit cyclists undergoing 5 days/wk of interval training (Busso, 1997), to 19 days for elite swimmers training 45-50km/wk (Mujika et al. 1995)

The constants used in the above charts (Tf=15 days) are therefore within the range of moderately trained individuals and should provide a good starting point in predicting performance response within that group. On the other hand, if you’re a couch potato or your busting out 50km+ per week in the pool, you may need to ‘tweak’ the charts accordingly, which brings us to the next point….

While a model that predicts a large sample of athlete’s performances is good, a model that predicts your athletic performances is even better. To this end, wko+ offers athletes a tool that enables them to come up with their own performance model that best predicts peak performance. It uses similar concepts to those above, a Chronic Training Load number (fitness constant), an Acute Training Load number (fatigue constant) and a Training Stress Balance (performance prediction number) to enable athletes to model their own training response.

Of course, like most tools, it must be properly calibrated to be accurate. In this sense, it is important that the athlete sets an appropriate Acute Training Load (fatigue constant) in accordance with performance markers from their own training. If this is done properly, wko+ offers athletes a fantastic individualized snapshot into their fitness, fatigue and form at any point during the training season and enables them to make intelligent decisions as to:

What is an appropriate long term training load for me?

What races are worth shedding fitness for?

When should I change up my training plan?

How long should I taper ?

Etc.

It is only with this kind of strategic information that an athlete can really hope to win the long term battle between fitness and fatigue.

Train smart.

AC

Individuality II: Adaptive Training.

“Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, let it grow, be like water”
- Bruce Lee

I was tempted, this week, to write an article on one of the remaining principles of training, the principle of specificity. But, I am forced to admit that I don’t buy into that principle to the extent that I once did. I, like Matt Fitzgerald and other coach/athletes who place a high importance on sensory acuity, have found now, on a couple of occasions, that my bike load does influence my running performance, that my strength training does influence my bike performance and vice versa. There are a couple of preliminary performance and dose-response modelling studies that also support this notion, but in a broader sense, the jury is still out. So, under the old adage that it is better to be presumed a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt, I’ll keep my mouth closed on that one…..for now :-)

Instead, I wanted to write a follow up piece on a principle that I DO believe in 100% - the principle of individuality. This piece was inspired by two things. First of all, I picked up a copy of Brad Hudson’s book “Run Faster”. This is, unequivocally, the best book that I have read on training theory in a very long time. Speaking from the vantage point of someone who is looking at 2 book shelves full of over 200 books on swim, bike and run training, hopefully that statement carries some weight. Do yourself a favour and buy a copy.

The second thing that inspired this piece was a discussion with one of the well-known coaches who espouses cookie-cutter programs as the cost-effective solution for the majority of triathletes looking for some guidance with their training program. I have a number of issues with this approach and the way that triathlon coaching seems to be going that I will address below, not the least of which is that it fails to acknowledge the physiological, psychological and socio-cultural realities of individuality as athletes and as human beings, that contribute to the fact that, when it comes to creating an effective, appropriate training program for the individual, one size does NOT fit all.

In fact, as you will see below, I would go so far to say than an athlete would be far better starting their journey with no schedule and a blank log book in hand than a generic schedule that is not tailored to them.

If you were to take a look at the 200+ books on my bookshelf, you would notice an interesting pattern. The older, more tattered books are much more practical in content (Triathletes Training Bible, Serious Training for Serious Athletes, Road Running for Serious Runners, etc.) . It used to be the case that if I didn’t see immediately practical schedules, routines, workouts when flipping through the pages of the new entries in the sports and fitness section, I deemed the book worthless and moved on. Now, I am much more likely to deem it worthless if it does contain schedules supposed to fit various age or ability groups because, after experimenting with various schedules & programs on myself and in earlier years, my athletes I have come to the conclusion that it is both preposterous & frustrating to think for a second that you can forecast with any degree of accuracy how quickly any individual will adapt to a given workload or even what physiological changes a given weekly schedule will create. It is a truth and certainly not a negative comment that, in a lot of ways, the very best coaches are ‘making it up as they go along’.

Bruce Lee is an athlete and an individual that I respect very deeply. His art of Jeet Kune Do was largely based on ‘formlessness’. An extension of Krishnamurti’s concept that ‘truth is a pathless land’, in a practical sense, formlessness simply means adapting a resolve to not hold to one form or one theory, but rather to have an open mind and use whatever works. While there are certain core concepts that have proven common to the great endurance athletes of the past, e.g. relatively high volume training, multi-pace training, some form of periodization, hard-easy training, etc. there is also room for a lot of grey. Some things have proven to work for some athletes, some for others.

However, this is not to say that there are 100 best ways to achieve your athletic potential. For every one athlete, there is one best way, specific to your own physiology, psychology and life circumstances. The real art, and perhaps joy, in training comes from discovering your Way

One of the more interesting things that I have done as an exercise physiology student is to look under the microscope and examine various muscle biopsy samples. It is very easy for the human mind, in a search for uniformity and schemata to forget just how physically different and unique that we all are. When your gaze is shifted from common faces to the foreign environment of a microscope slide, you are given a startling reminder of the fact that we are all completely unique. Even letting go of all the quantitative differences of muscle fiber type, # of cytochromes, mitochondria etc, it is clear, even to the layman that one guy’s muscle ‘looks’ very different to another’s. It is a logical extension then, that with different capacities, the ‘right’ way to train one person will be very different from another, even if the individuals are of similar fitness and training for similar events.

While most coaches will acknowledge these differences, the complexity of creating truly individual training programs tailored to each individual’s physiological peculiarities leads many to simply give up and adopt a ‘best fit’ approach, which works out fine if you’re one of the athletes who fits within the parameters of the best fit, but not so well if you’re one of the unlucky who lacks the adaptive potential or the optimal physiology to benefit from the fixed training plan. I will tell you from experience, that it is very easy to rationalize the success of a particular training method based on 1 or 2 athletes, of a squad of 20 or more being very successful on it. (I am honestly sorry to those 18/20 that didn’t make it. If only I knew then what I know now).

The good news is that you don’t have to perform daily blood analysis and muscle biopsies to determine the optimal training program for each athlete. A little flexibility, a little responsiveness is all that is required. Bruce Lee hit the nail on the head when he penned that quote 40 years ago. There is much to be admired about a single drop of water. From the day that it is deposited on an alpine slope and it begins thawing, it has only one mission, one way to use the potential energy that it has been given, and that is to find a path that leads it to the sea. However, like you on your athletic journey, the eventual path is undetermined at this point. The water droplet must be responsive. When times are good, the water will flow quickly. When times are tough, and the tributaries shallow, the water must slow down. When the water hits an obstacle and stops moving forward, it must quickly and subtly change course. If the hand of man comes in and attempts to hurry the water beyond it’s natural rate of flow it will spill over the sides and be removed (at least temporarily) from it’s forward path of progress.

This metaphor describes, quite succinctly, the way that I coach and train as an athlete. While the mission may be set in stone, the path & the rate of progress are not. The smart athlete rather than adhering to a particular schedule ‘no matter what’, will:

1. Pay attention to his/her body on a daily basis to determine if they are ready for a particular workout. If not, they will do an easier workout or rest without hesitation, irrespective of what the schedule says. In addition, they will make note of what they are able to absorb and plan the next training cycle accordingly.

2. Pay attention to the physiological adaptations that are occurring and once one plateaus, will move their focus to another, all with the aim of becoming an appropriately balanced athlete. I discuss the practicalities of this in my previous blog on complex training. In this way, a schedule forecasted forward more than 3 or 4 weeks is worthless because no one can guess the rates at which each physiological capacity will improve for each individual.

Ultimately, training responsively will prove to be the quickest route to your goals. It is true that nature does a poor job of anything when hurried. The water learned this a long time ago. Maybe, as athletes, we can too.

Train Smart.

AC