- Oh, nice morning trainiacs
Whether is beautiful it's like,
try to speak American lingo like 82,
many kilojoules is that.
So with all this extra time on my hands
this year with no racing,
I thought, you know, what was the perfect race I've done?
Now, I've done
a 428 Half-Ironman a 941 Ironman and,
you might just be saying like,
"Well, it wasn't the perfect race,
the one where you went fastest."
No.
Now, personally,
I think that the perfect race that I've done
is a 436 Half-Ironman,
but the reason that it is slower
than my PD Half-Ironman is because,
the race of the amount of hours
that I spent to train for it is phenomenal.
I think the average amount of training hours I did
was like, eight hours 30 minutes every week,
whereas the 428 was somewhere around 13 hours.
That's normal,
you're gonna get diminishing returns the more you train.
But, fact of the matter is that most of you out there
can't train 13, 15, 20 hours a week.
So we have to look at
what is an efficient amount of training?
So today, I'm gonna outline the principles
that I used in that eight hour 30 minute training week
that will hopefully allow you to get as much as you can
out of the hours that you have to have your perfect race.
(upbeat music)
All right, so Trainee X.
First thing that I wanna show you is,
what my workout week looked like in 2018?
Cause this is something
that I would actually recommend that
if you're in this situation,
where these are your time constraints,
and these are your goals, by all means,
you can duplicate this.
So this is a page that we have on teamtraineeact.com
where to help people figure out
how much they need to train
and what a good workout week schedule looks like?
You just have to click a few buttons.
So, in my case what I had time for
was about 12 workouts a week.
So go 12 workouts a week
and I wanted to work on my swim the most.
So that's what I worked on.
And then I had a half-Ironman here,
and I want it to be competitive.
So what that tells me is
all right, well, 11 to 14 workouts is about right
for what you need to do to be competitive
and somewhere on average
of eight and a half to nine and a half hours
of training per week is what you can expect.
That's the average of course
it went up from there to a peak of around
I think 12 and a half hours per week,
but that was the average
eight and a half to nine and a half.
And then the weekly schedule here,
I had to make a small little change,
but this was basically it.
And the only change that I made, I went like this.
I had an intense bike on Tuesday,
and it was followed by an intense run.
I actually did this
because I was really, really time crunch
fairly busy in 2018.
I did my intense run right after the bike.
So I had four swims,
the swims with the main swim, the key swim,
that was actually about 60 to 90 minutes.
Looks like I've got an update to run in the app here.
The main swim of 60 to 90 minutes was Monday,
just a steady kinda endurance building swim
of about 45 to 60 minutes was Wednesday,
45 to 60 minutes of a technique focus swim was Thursday
and then I just did an opening water easy
30 to 40 minute recovery swim on Sunday after my run,
Running because I was a little bit banged up
and my running was decent, but I didn't wanna risk injury.
So I didn't wanna load up on running
I want to be efficient with running
I had my main long run,
going up to just 90 minutes on Sunday,
but I'll tell you what I did to make that work
and then I had about a 10 to 15 minute brick on Saturday.
My intense run, which I did is a brick on Tuesday,
and that was all the running that I did.
As far as biking,
I had one really intense ride
over about 45 to 60 minutes on Tuesday,
another tempo ride of around 45 to 60 minutes on Wednesday,
then a really easy recovery ride on Friday.
and then the main ride, which was quite a bit longer
I'll explain what I did with that was on Saturday,
and threw in a strength session on Thursday.
So that was the training plan.
But let's get into the seven keys.
The key things that I did in swim, bike, run
and just overall training plan creation
that I think made it so efficient
and what we feel makes team trainee act dot com plug plug,
so efficient.
So let's start off with the bike
it's the biggest portion of a race.
And I wanted to make sure that it was
as effective a training schedule as possible.
Will not taking up so much time,
you could spend 10s of hours on the bike
and reach those diminishing returns.
But I want to be efficient.
The first thing that I did to make the ride efficient
was I knew that I needed to have one day
that was big focus on endurance
where the main focus was building endurance going long,
and building up almost all the endurance
that I need for the race on the bike.
It's hard to go for a four or five hour run
or four or five hours swim,
but you can certainly go for a four or five hour bike
and that endurance on the bike transfers
over to the entire race.
So what I ended up doing was that, one long ride a week,
I made quite long,
longer than I had ever done a typical long ride for.
So this long ride average
somewhere around 115 to 135 kilometers
like upwards of four hours.
That said, it was really easy and 8020 polarized training.
I don't wanna overtrain myself,
sometimes the purpose is to go really hard
sometimes the purpose is to go really long,
and long and hard,
isn't typically a workout that I recommend doing,
because there's not a whole lot of benefit to it
you're just suffering for longer.
So that was the first thing I did.
I went long, sufficiently long.
We call that an over distance ride
and build up massive amounts of endurance.
The second thing that I did is
when I went intense on the bike,
I went really intense.
I turned myself inside out, on the old swift setup like,
there was a lot of pain and grimacing
in these videos back then.
But it resulted in good performance,
I ended up biking in the Half-Ironman World championship
that year to 2658.
Not my best bike not even close,
but it was a very hard bike course
with really rough surface.
So that 226 probably comparable
to 220 on another course
and the benefit of that really, really intense ride
where the goal was to accumulate roughly a total
of between 15 and 25 total minutes
at very high-intensities to work on that VO2 max.
What you need to build
with a proper triathlon training plan is,
you need to build endurance
and an ability to oxidize fat as fuel
which we did with the long ride
and you need to have a nice high VO2 max.
So those two rides,
accomplish a lot of what we need to accomplish
with a well designed triathlon training plan.
It just hurts.
Benefit of it,
is that, it doesn't take as long
you can really make a nice efficient workout
in a grand total of like
most of our workouts on Team Trainee Act on the biker
between 40 and 55 minutes
for the intense and the tempo bikes, that's it.
The third thing I did with that plan
that was a real driver of success
within a short amount of training time was that
I made every run count.
Because running is so really likely to cause injury,
I ended up limiting the running
to just those few times a week.
That meant that all of those runs
had to be really, really beneficial.
So instead of just going in logging miles,
what I ended up doing was
I made the long run that really wasn't that long,
only about 90 minutes.
I made it on hills and trails
to build that proprioception, that body awareness,
that muscular endurance
that essentially strength based running
on those hills and trails.
I made the intense run, really intense,
really, really neuromuscularly top end
kind of effective sort of stuff.
And then if I ever had a second workout in the day
that was supposed to be a run
instead of doing it later in the day,
I did it as a brick run
because, a brick run in my opinion
you can basically have the time that you're going to run
and still make it as effective.
So instead of doing like a 30 minute run later in the day,
I did a 15 minute brick run immediately after a bike
which I feel is just as effective
as that 30 minute run later in the day.
Now the downside to this I gave up a little bit of endurance
in the Ironman World Championship,
I ended up kind of fading a little bit to around the
15 kilometer mark and really have to suck it up
for the final six kilometers of the half marathon.
But I still posted I think it was a 134 56 runtime.
Now the fourth key
to making that race successful with a limited amount of time
was when it came to the swim I did have
was a membership to the tower 26 training plan
which we have based a lot of my beliefs
on swim training about.
One of the things that age group triathletes battle is that
even at most we're swimming four or five times a week.
So we're just not swimming a lot.
So we have to be really, really effective.
So I would encourage you to not
just go and swim and swim and swim
and think that it's going to be beneficial for you
you've got to swim with a purpose.
And because most of us age group triathletes
aren't coming into triathlon with really good technique,
we need a well designed training plan
that ends up encouraging that good technique
while allowing us to still build up swim endurance.
The fifth key was that,
I built up a ton of low-intensity endurance training
from January all the way way up until April or so.
You know, when we talk about 8020,
where 80% of your training is at low heart rates
and 20% is at high heart rates,
or polarized training that's very similar.
Well, that's at 20 over the course of a year.
So what I end up recommending people do
is making more like 95, five, or even 100, and zero,
and then gradually, it turns from hundred and zero
in the off-season and the base building season to 9010,
then to 8020, then to 7030.
So you're gradually,
as you're able to absorb more and more intensity,
you're able to execute it
instead of just going from easy to hard.
So big volumes of low-intensity training
in the off-season and the base building season.
The second to last thing that I did was
I supported all of this training with key recovery sessions.
And not just sessions but like,
so much of the focus because I was coming off of it fear
of being overtrained and being fairly delicate
which I am now so that proves that I definitely was then
I want to prioritize recovery
and making sure that I wasn't ever pushing too hard.
So when I had an easy session, it was an easy session
we're talking like 100 watts average
for those recovery rides.
For the recovery swims,
nothing but floaty pants and pull buoys and fins going easy.
And then I made sure
that I slept seven and a half to eight hours a night.
I ate around all of my workouts
so I didn't come into any workouts under fueled
and I didn't go out of any workouts being under fueled.
Whereas in the previous season,
I hadn't really prioritized recovery at all,
and I worked harder and didn't get any faster.
All of a sudden now I was working easier and getting faster.
And then the final thing that I did
that I alluded to before is that
every workout had a purpose.
And that purpose wasn't always
just to have a good killer workout.
Sometimes the purpose
was to build VO2 max and have a killer workout.
Other times the purpose was to build endurance
and there was nothing killer about it besides I was just
on a bike for four hours, but it was super easy.
Other times the purpose was literally just to be on a bike
and have no more than an average wattage of 100 watts
and the entire purpose was recovery.
So every workout regardless of what I did,
it always had an intention.
And that intention wasn't always just to turn me inside out.
So those seven things allowed me to perform really well
without spending a ton of time.
Now is that what is going to get me to Kona
or get you to Kona,
likely not, you're gonna have to push a little bit harder
and you know, ride that Razor's Edge of
maybe a little bit too much beyond being healthy.
And then you really have to start prioritizing recovery
and sleep and making sure that your blood testing regularly
and you are doing multiple tests throughout the year
because, going beyond that 10 hours,
you end up getting into diminishing returns
and you start affecting your health, potentially negatively.
But, if that's what you're looking to do,
and you know that
that's what you're looking to do, that's okay.
But for most of us
who just want to have as good a race as we can
without spending too much time,
now you have the seven keys that I found really helped me
that hopefully will help you.
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Later trainee acts by the way,
what do you think of the new lighting?
Softbox here, colorful lighting.
Let me know in the comments.
I feel fancy.