- Morning, trainiacs.
I've been waiting for that recovery swim for four days,
and as you can tell by the floaty pants, it was.
It's not all fun and games, though, today.
We have a track workout later today.
On that note, we're gonna talk about how to stack
your workouts throughout the week,
'cause I screwed that up this week.
(upbeat electronic music)
Hello, trainiacs, that was just a nice,
cruisy 3600 yards,
fairly easy.
It might sound long, but it was largely
1200 meters of fin work, saltate loosening up
those legs, a bunch of snorkel band pull, again,
again, just kinda take some load off of the core,
what else do we have?
Oh, paddles, yeah, paddles.
I need to work on those paddles.
The other paddles that I used to use, easy pease,
quite enjoyable, these ones?
Def chaos happening under water, and then we ended it off
with some real snappy 25s.
All right, let me shower, put some clothes on, cover up
these nipples, bike home, get in front of a computer,
eat some breakfast, and then we will talk about how to
lay out a training week, quick as that.
All right, trainiacs, let's get into how I've designed
my training week, and how you can design
your training week.
All right, so I've shown you this before.
This is my training week right now.
But here's what I've got.
I've color coded all the green workouts.
These are the key workouts, these are the ones that
I'm either trying to build endurance, I'm trying to build
speed, I'm trying to build strength,
like I'm pushing myself.
The yellow workouts are what Matt Dixon would refer to
as the supporting workouts.
These are recovery workouts, these are workouts that are
less intense, these are shorter workouts, essentially
they are intended to facilitate recovery or just make
your training a little bit more purposeful.
What you'll see is that on Monday and Friday we have
nothing but yellow workouts.
So what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to create
two miniblocks within the week.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday feature fair bit of intensity,
and Saturday, Sunday feature a fair bit
of endurance and intensity.
On Monday and Friday is a, recover from the weekend
and b, prepare myself for Tuesday to Thursday.
Number one, people have asked why I don't have
an outright rest day.
Well, Monday and Friday are essentially rest days,
and recovery, the act of your body repairing itself,
getting stronger, happens largely with blood flow,
and when you're working out, you are increasing the
blood flow in your body, so by going and working out
at a really low intensity, and those two days aren't
really taking out any sort of, say, freshness from me.
It's really just getting that blood flow happening again
and facilitating recovery, so that's why I don't take
an outright rest day.
I'll take an outright rest day if I'm really beat up
for days and days on end, and if backing off from
a few days of workouts in a row doesn't end up making
me better, I'll take a full day off, but I like to build
this in to make sure that recovery is actually sped up.
Now the next thing that I'll point out is how I've
isolated the one key run session
of the week.
This morning, fairly easy.
The workout tomorrow morning, fairly easy.
When you start doing a really key run workout,
like a track workout, like I'm gonna do later today,
you've gotta make sure that you're really fresh
for it, you're really prepared.
This way, your form can be really good, and you can
focus on executing that run well and making sure that
your form isn't falling apart, likely leading to injuries,
so when you do a key run, you wanna make sure it's fairly
isolated, and we've got it set up in a way that you're
not gonna run on tired legs and that you can recover
really well the next day.
Now where else could you put that?
I mean, you could do something like this.
You could move this over here, so that you're prepped for it
the day before, you're recovering from it the day after.
However, I don't like to run in the morning, and I don't
want to go and smash myself with a really hard run
and then set up my Wednesday and Thursday being tired
from that run, so I like
to put it all the way over here by itself.
You will also see that there are four runs
throughout the course of the week,
but only one of them is very intense.
You can get a lot from a brick run.
That's gonna help you a huge amount in your triathlon
training, and when you get to the race, you're gonna
be prepared to run off the bike, so these runs don't
need to be super duper intense.
Doing a brick run on Tuesday, a brick run on Sunday,
it's 20, 25 minutes, nice light controlled pace,
focusing on good form, just making sure that I'm nice
and upright and running really well.
I do have one longish run here on Saturday,
but it's quite a bit slower, it's a really easy pace.
Right now, it's 60, 65 minutes, but I'm on hills,
so it's like I'm cheating the long run by making it
a little bit shorter, little bit less intense,
but I'm still getting a lot out of it
by running those hills, and this way, I'm keeping those
running movements really ingrained into my legs
by running four times a week, but I'm only adding intensity
once, and that time is really well set up.
I'm nice and fresh for it.
The other time that I'm running, which a lot of people
would say, like, "Hey, Terran, why don't you have
"a long run in here?"
I have kind of a long run, but I'm focusing more on
the structure of my body than I am on the speed
and the endurance.
You'll also see that I've got four swims in here,
and a lot of people in comments lately have been saying,
"Dude, the swim is such a small proportion of a half
"Iron Man race, why do you have so much swims?"
Because I'm backing off of intensity on the run,
I need to make up for that somewhere else, and you can
go intense and get to that red line in the swim,
without the same risk as red lining in the run,
because it's lower impact, it's less stress on your body,
so you can build that top end of fitness in your
cardiovascular system with a lot less risk.
Also, I might be able to get a minute or two faster
in the swim, no big deal, but if I can get out of the
swim a minute or two faster and be way fresher for the
bike, I can execute a much better bike, so it's not
necessarily about swimming that much faster, it's about
swimming, biking and running that much faster.
Now here's what you don't want to do.
You don't want to be doing something like this,
where you're constantly putting really
strong efforts out every single day,
and you're just every day pushing yourself
to the limit, pushing yourself to the limit,
pushing yourself to the limit, stacking on intensity
with intensity, things like that.
It's really tough to do.
Typically, what you can think of is an 80/20 roll.
You want about 80% of your work to be fairly low intensity,
either a warmup, either a technique session, either a
recovery session, and then you want about 20% to be fast,
to be twitchy, to be focusing on intensity and speed.
You know, as I get into this, I'm realizing that this
is probably a big series of videos.
I didn't intend for this one to actually go that long.
What I'll say is that a lot of these principles are
intended to be automated and built in and set up for you
in the new team training platform that I'm building,
because there's a lot of art to this, and there's a lot
of nuances that I could just keep talking for another hour,
but that would be a pretty lame video, but in the
description below, there's a link to the Kickstarter
campaign for the team training platform, and if you
like the sounds of this, a little help would be
appreciated on that Kickstarter.
Now, let's go do a big, fast run, kay?
(upbeat music)
Oh, wow!
That hurt!
So, that was a 10 minute light jog, and then 10 minutes
of drills and stuff like that.
Eight minutes of bounding strides, fast feet, strides,
just kind of getting up to speed, and then the work
started with 100 hard, 200 easy, 200 hard, 200 easy,
400 hard, 800 hard, 400 hard, 200 hard, 100 hard,
with the 200s in between.
I'ma let you in on a little secret.
After the first 200, I was thinking, "I wonder if Mel
"shot enough to convince people that
I finished "the entire workout?"
(upbeat music)
That was a slog trainiacs, isn't this attractive?
All right, trainiacs, link to the Team Trainiac Kickstarter
campaign in the description below if you want to get
awesome, team-based training together.
Support is awesome, later!