What's up, motivators taren here.
If you're a busy triathlete,
you want to get the most out of the hours that you put in.
So we have put together the seven best
things that you can do in your day to day workouts in your overall training plan
that are going to allow you allow you to build more fitness.
With fewer training hours, you're going to perform better and you're
going to get a lot more out of the hours that you put in.
Let's do it. When regular people want to do something
personally amazing in an endurance event, they use motive training plans.
Whether you're just getting started or
you've done several events and want a little more structure to step up your
game, we know what it takes to get amateurs to their goals.
No matter how big or small, you can accomplish anything you want.
You just need a plan designed
for the unique needs of people with families, jobs and a busy life.
The motive training method is that plan to get you to the start line feeling
confident, and across the finish line feeling strong.
The first way to get better performance
from the training hours that you put in is to focus on technique.
If you are an athlete who swims on the slower side of the pack,
this means that if you do a sprint triathlon swim in 15 minutes or slower,
an Olympic triathlon swim in 30 minutes or slower, a half ironman triathlon swim
in 40 minutes or slower, or an ironman triathlon swim in 80 minutes or slower.
The best return on your investment for the swim time that you put in will be
achieved by working on your technique because at this point,
you're just an inefficient swimmer and the biggest gains that you can make
are by making yourself a little more slippery in the water,
a little more efficient in the water, not by working harder in the water.
So getting a training plan that tends to focus on technique as opposed to just
big volume of swimming is what will generate the best results for you.
I think that probably about 80% of triathletes fall into this camp.
And this is why our training plans tend
to focus a lot more on technique and then just polishing up a little bit of fitness
and making sure that you can actually complete the duration of the swim
at a fairly high effort level in the last two to three months before race is how we
like to recommend people do their swim training.
The second thing that you can do to get
more out of the training hours that you're putting in is to make your lower intensity
sessions actually a little bit more purposeful.
We like to look at our sessions in one of three ways.
One is endurance building.
This is long and low intensity.
One is speed building, this is very high intensity.
And the next is recovery focused.
Now, these recovery focused sessions don't
all just have to be strictly very low intensity, boring sessions.
What you can do with these sessions is actually manipulate them a little bit
to get more out of them while keeping the training load low.
So, for example, this could be something
like low cadence riding where you're riding at 50 to 60 rpm.
And this low grinding riding tends
to build up muscular endurance while keeping your heart rate low.
So the training intensity and the lactic
acid buildup is very low, but the training effect is a little bit
higher because you're pushing out higher power.
Similarly, if you're doing your easy runs
or your very low intensity runs, instead of doing them on flat ground,
on cement, you can do them on trails and hills.
Keeping your heart rate low.
This is going to force your body to make little micro adjustments and adaptations
and run up and downhill stabilizing yourself.
So even though your heart rate is
in the same place, you're going to be getting a better training effect.
The third thing that you can do, and this is very critical for age group
athletes, particularly those who spend a lot of time sitting via desk workers or
people who spend a lot of time driving, is to do some really intense bursts.
These are ten to 62nd very intense bursts
that will activate a lot of muscle groups, strengthen the neurological connection
between the brain and the muscles, and turn on those fast twitch muscle fibers.
This is key for age group athletes because
we don't tend to activate our fast twitch muscle fibers very well.
And when we have a very fast, high top end, all of the bottom end,
steady effort stuff feels easier and it's actually easier to execute.
So it unlocks a little bit of speed that's sitting dormant in our body.
We tend to do a lot of these efforts in the off season,
in the baseballing season, with big, big rest in between,
so that by the time we get into race specific training,
our ability to hold fast efforts is going to be a little bit faster.
The fourth thing that you need to do
to make your time efficient is your long rides.
And runs that are meant to build endurance
have to be very, very low intensity at very, very most.
We're talking roughly five beats per
minute away and lower from the top end of your heart rate zone two.
The reason for this is that the stress
response from those low intensity rides is going to be very low.
This is going to keep your nervous system
primed and ready so that when you have a fast workout, you can hit it really
fast, really hard and actually absorb that training.
If you're cooking it a little bit too hard
in those long rides and runs, you're not going to be able to push as
easily in those fast runs and you're not actually going to even be able to absorb
those fast workouts so they're not even going to have the effect that you want.
The fifth thing that you can do to enhance
your training plan is to make sure that the nutrition for every single
workout complements the desired training effect from that workout.
Sometimes a workout is meant to push your
top end into very high intensity fast effort.
For this, we want to have lots of carbs
on board, easy to access energy so that you can very quickly push
into that very painful, difficult state and get a training effect from that push.
The flip side of that is that when we are going long and low intensity focused
on building endurance, one of the best things that we can do
to build endurance is to increase our ability to burn fat as fuel.
And if you can do this,
you have a nearly endless energy source that you can access in your rates.
So instead of loading up with carbs and taking a gel or a chew or a bar every
20 to 30 minutes, you're taking much, much less carbohydrates and keeping your
blood sugar nice and low, possibly from something like a Yukan bar,
so that your insulin doesn't spike blunting your fat metabolism.
The second to last thing is strength.
Strength and more strength.
It's been found that athletes can replace up to 20% of their endurance training
with strength training and actually enhance their performance.
So let's say you're training 8 hours
and you want to get on board with doing strength instead of just adding
on strength training and doing nine or ten total hours.
You can actually do 7 hours of endurance training and 1 hour of strength training
each week and you're actually going to perform better.
The reason for this is that strength training makes your body more efficient
at using energy, your economy improves so that you're using less energy at the same
pace, or you can go faster at the same effort level.
Strength training is the number one
performance enhancer next to the final thing that you should do to make your
training much more effective with the hours that you're putting in.
And the final thing is sleep.
Sleep is a nonnegotiable with the athletes that we work with.
Anytime we have a consultation
with somebody who feels like they've plateaued or they're working really hard
and completing all their sessions but not being able to actually get any faster or
execute on race day, the first thing that we ask is how much sleep are you getting?
And typically the answer is less than 7 hours of sleep.
And when people are getting less than 7
hours of sleep, they just aren't recovering enough
to repair the body from all of the hard work that they're doing.
So they're putting in all the hard work
and not actually getting anything out of it.
What we found is that 7 hours is a minimum
seven and a half to eight and a half hours is ideal.
A lot of pros do sleep more than eight and a half hours.
But most pros are also training three to 5 hours a day.
And studies have shown that unless you are
training three to 5 hours a day, seven and a half to eight and a half hours
for all of us age group athletes is much more appropriate.
I hope that you found this helpful if you
want a complete guide for how to get into triathlon.
If you're a total beginner, click the video that is on the screen
right now and go see our total guide for Beginner Triathletes later.
Motivators.