Hey, what's up, motivators taryn here.
So often, athletes who get into endurance sports get a little bit of a taste
for a good race, then want to step it up when they seek better performance.
The way that they do so is almost always with training more.
Unfortunately, this this often leads to worse performance instead of better.
Why is this more?
Isn't always more.
In endurance sports, a study was even done
on ironman athletes who you would expect to have to train an enormous amount.
But the study surprisingly showed that the athletes who trained the least
were actually just as fast or even faster than the athletes who trained the most.
Today we're going to talk about
the biggest time wasters in endurance sports that you can cut out so you can get
faster with fewer training hours, allowing more people to experience
excellent performance and being the person that they want to be.
My name is Terry Gazelle.
In my twenty s, I was overweight,
unfulfilled, and couldn't even run to the end of the block.
Over the following years, I found endurance sports lost £65,
won age groups, race world championships, wrote records, and trained and learned
from some of the best athletes and coaches in the world.
You too can use endurance sports to change
your life and accomplish your fitness goals.
You just need a system.
A system that's meant for us amateurs
who want to be our best while feeling our strongest and healthiest.
My company, Motive, offers that system,
and I want to share some of the tips from it today.
The first area that runners, triathletes, do, athletes, swim runners and cyclists
waist training hours is by starting a plan too far out.
Fact of the matter is that you shouldn't
be starting a proper, structured training plan leading
into a race where you're building up week after week after week.
That is taking a lot of time to do until just the last few months before the race.
Really year round.
You should be working on becoming a strong athlete, a balanced athlete,
and just building the basic skills to be able to start a training plan.
So for a guideline, if you are doing a race less than 2 hours,
you really only need about two to three months to prepare for this.
Assuming that you have a basic level
of fitness coming into the training plan, if you're racing a two to four hour race,
no more than three to four months is necessary.
A four to six hour race, about four to five months is a good guideline.
And for a race of 6 hours or more, six months is the maximum that you need.
As opposed to preparing for a race 18
months, twelve months, ten months ahead of time,
you really only need a small amount of time with the rest of the year being
at a much lower level, being much more balanced and lighter training.
So you can come into that training plan ready to tear it apart.
We actually have a free tool on our website that will link
to in the description below where you can go and put in the goal that you have
with the race that you have and the current level of fitness that you have.
And it'll spit out approximately how many hours a week of training you'll need
and how many months of good training that you'll need to reach that goal.
Hint it's far less than most people expect.
The second area that endurance athletes waste time training is by spending too
much time endurance training and not enough time doing strength.
There was actually a study done that looked at what would happen if you
just added on strength to a current training plan versus replacing some
of your current training plan with strength training.
So this meant not actually training
anymore, but instead actually training for endurance less and just replacing
that time that you are already spending with strength training.
In the study, they replaced up to 19%
of the run training of already elite athletes with explosive strength training.
And this actually improved running performance.
And what has been shown in study after study is that it's not necessarily just
adding on strength training to a current plan and adding in more hours,
it's actually by replacing some of your current training and not even training
anymore that is going to result in the best performance improvements.
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The third area that endurance athletes
waste time training is by spending too much time training hard.
Now this admittedly isn't necessarily just
additional time training, but it's additional time spent training hard.
It's a much higher mental toll on our body
and our brain to train hard than it is to train easy.
And when I mean easy, I mean really easy.
There was an excellent study done comparing polarized training where
the vast majority of the training is done at a very low intensity level,
much lower than you would actually self describe as a low intensity level.
And they compared it to threshold high intensity or high volume training.
And threshold high intensity and high volume training are what most people
actually do meanwhile, they think that they're doing polarized training.
The reason that people think they're doing polarized training but are actually doing
more of a threshold, a high intensity or high volume training
method is because the low intensity training loads in the polarized training
method are so very low that it's actually hard for people to work out that easy.
But when they looked at the results of the polarized versus all of these other
training methods, it was very clear that the polarized
method resulted in the greatest improvements in the most key variables
of endurance performance and even well trained endurance athletes.
This isn't just for hobbyist performance.
This is to get you excellent performance no matter your skill level.
In fact, about 75% to 80% of your total
training hours should be spent at such a low intensity level that you should
actually feel guilty for how easy you ran or cycled or swamped.
The fourth area that endurance athletes waste training hours is by not having
a nutrition strategy that pairs with every single workout that they perform
to enhance the training effect of that specific workout.
And as you know, the workouts themselves would be very different.
A top end workout would be very, very intense, while an endurance building
workout would be very low intensity, but quite long.
The fact of the matter is that most athletes use the same nutrition strategy
regardless of what the intention of the workout is.
The biggest detriment to this is in the endurance building category.
There was actually a study done where they
looked at the performance of Ironman triathlon athletes and they looked at what
were the key differentiators between good performance and bad performance.
And one of the biggest key drivers of good performance was maximal fat oxidation.
How much fat an athlete was able to burn
every single minute that they were in that race.
Athletes who were able to burn more fat as fuel were able to access more energy
and go faster for longer, slowing down quite a bit less by the end of the race.
But what happens with most endurance
athletes is they fuel with carbohydrates for those peak level workouts,
and then they fuel with the same refined carbohydrates and sugary drinks
for the endurance building workouts, shutting off their fat metabolism
and blunting their body's ability to learn how to use fat as fuel.
The fifth and final area that endurance
athletes waste training hours is by not taking enough days off,
just literally training too much, training too frequently.
This is a chart of the heart rate
variability of an athlete who we work with very closely.
We monitored their HRV to determine when
their body was able to actually absorb training and when it needed rest.
And as you can see, even during good, well managed training loads that were
supervised by an exercise physiologist and one of the best coaches in the world,
there were times that the seven day readiness to train dipped under the level
at which the athlete could actually absorb training.
So during those times, the athlete would actually take days off.
And this was an athlete who race after
race after race, we set PDS that they never imagined actually possible.
What we actually recommend to the athletes in our app is that if they complete 85% or
more of their scheduled workouts, they are going to reach their goals.
There are going to be days that you need some rest.
Thank you for watching Motivator.
We have links over here to videos where
you can get a sense of how much you need to train for races like Iron Man's
and marathon, and then see just how little you actually need to train compared
to probably how much you think you need to train.
There is also a link in the description
below to that free calculator on our website that you can use.
And if you want a wellbalanced training
plan designed specifically for real people who want to do amazing things and do it
in the midst of being busy and having jobs and having appropriate amount of training
provided to them with whatever your goal is and whatever your current level
of fitness, check out the link to our training app in the description below.
Later, Motivators.