(relaxing music)
- Welcome back to another Triathlon Training Explained show,
powered by TrainingPeaks, and today we're going to be
explaining how you can design and create
your very own triathalon training programme.
- Now of course you can wake up every morning
and do whatever you want, but if you want to follow
a more structured and well thought through
training plan, then we're gonna
talk to you about that today.
- Yeah, but obviously without a coach,
designing a training programme for an entire season
can be a little overwhelming.
So we're gonna help you out, we're gonna
break it all down for you, and give you
some inside coaching tips.
(upbeat music)
- Okay, it really doesn't take a genius to figure out
that heading out the door, doing what you want
is not really the best plan, and yet
so many of us still do it, and I am
definitely guilty of that in the past.
- Yeah, I've got to admit that's probably me at the moment,
however I do know that by following a well
thought through plan that's been well structured
with adequate recovery time in there,
is much much better for you.
Ultimately, you're going to improve your performance
in the certain areas that your working on.
You are gonna recover better because you're allowing
time for that, and you're gonna turn up
to that race in much better shape.
- So the first step of this process is goals, you need to
figure out what you want from your season,
be that completion or a time, a certain result perhaps or
focusing on an area within your race.
But do bear in mind that it has to be realistic
and achievable because that lays the foundation
for everything going forward.
- Yeah, and then once you've got that sorted
it's time to start planning, now at this point
I'd like to make three checks.
Number one, where are you at, in terms of your
current fitness and your experience within triathlon.
Number two, and this is quite an important one,
what distance or length race are you planning on doing
from those goals that you've made.
And then number three, what is your available time?
- So if we take each of these individually
you're gonna have to asses your current level
of fitness and experience.
If you're new to the sport, or perhaps relatively unfit,
you're gonna have to take things really slowly,
start off easy, and keep that volume
and intensity really low for quite some time.
If however you're quite experienced and have done
the sport before then you can build that up quite,
well much quicker, I suppose, certainly intensity and volume
and also if you've been doing the sport for a while
you've got that little bit of a head start
because you've been starting beforehand,
but we'll talk about that.
- Yeah, and then of course you've got the race length,
which is a really important factor because if for instance
your doing a sprint distance triathlon, that is obviously
a far different race from an Ironman,
both in therms of its distance and also its intensity.
So that will obviously really depict
the type of training you do, the length of the sessions,
your weekly total volume, and honestly also
the training zones you're going to be working in.
- We also can't forget taking into consideration
weekly schedule, everything outside of triathlon.
Be that your family, work commitment, any other engagements
that you've got going on, so you can fit
the training around about it.
But also be able to perhaps flag up days
where you can do certain things, like maybe
your long bike ride or long run, that you can think about.
- Yeah and to actually help this I've quite often
get athletes to jot this down
in a diary or a little planner,
with all their social engagements, or work, and then
you can start to see where they've got free time
and then you can start to plan your training
in around all of that.
Well, on that subject where do we plan it?
- Good point actually, and to make sure that we're planning
our training properly we need to make sure
that its written down somewhere, and that
can be hand written or electronic.
That allows us to actually plan the training more easily,
and make sure that we stick to it.
Now we both used to keep handwritten log books
or training diaries in the past, but now things
have changed quite a lot, and they're now online
in things such as TrainingPeaks.
- [blonde speaker] Yeah, I mean it really has come
a long way since we first started,
but it makes things so much simpler.
You can quickly see how many hours a day
you've done per week, what distances you've covered
in each discipline, and also it allows you to make sure that
you're not overdoing things to much
and just gradually building your training properly.
- Yes, and now lets get stuck into the actual
planning and designing of that training programme.
For that were gonna use TrainingPeaks,
but obviously you can use other online versions
or even the good old trusty pen and paper.
Now your first point of course is to input
the events that you've entered for that season,
and they essentially make the goal post you work back from.
You can kind of think of it almost like a birds eye view
and overlook of the whole year.
- Yes, so let's take a target race and we'll call that
our A race for the year, the one that
we want to do the best at.
So we'll see where that is and then work out
the time we've got from now till then
and split that up into blocks of time,
and we can take each block as
a three to four week training block.
That's the sort of distance time we like to use, and then
you would take those three weeks
out of the four as a gradual build.
You would pick up the volume and the
intensity over that three weeks.
Then you'd take the fourth week as a recovery week
where you just absorb all that training that you've done,
and then you would go again in the next block, but aiming
to push on a little bit further then you did
in that first block.
- Yeah, with that structure we now want to start
roughly pencilling it into our training programmes
between now and the big event,
but don't forget to block out any periods of time
that you're going to be away on holiday or
perhaps away with work.
Then once those blocks are in your training programme,
they're all sorted, we now want to start thinking about
what they're going to contain.
And this what we call periodisation, and this does
differ very slightly from each coach and athlete
you speak to, but as a general rule of thumb
they'll consist of a prep phase.
Where we gradually ease ourselves back into training,
and we get ourselves fitter, and we condition ourselves
for the demands of triathlon.
And this can actually be spread across a couple of
training clocks if you need to and time allows.
- [blonde speaker] Then you're going to have the base phase.
Which is another period where we can block out work trading.
That's where we're gonna focus on the aerobic capacity
that we need to build up.
We can also dove tail some strength and
intensity work as well.
- [brunette speaker] Yeah and then we'll move into
the build phase, and it starts to get quite tough here.
We start to really focus on race specific sessions,
so you start to mimic race scenarios, race distances,
race intensities, race courses and profiles.
So it really does get quite specific and quite tough.
- And then we're going to finish off with the peak phase,
which essentially is the shortest of them all.
A couple weeks and represents taper time.
And that means we can back off all the work that we've done
in the base and build phases, and recover from everything
that was put in there, but still keeping crucial amount
of intensity in there so that we're firing
on all cylinders come race day.
There's a lot to this isn't there?
- Yeah, I mean we never said that this is easy.
- Yeah, so we can now start zooming in a little on the
day to day stuff and template of training.
But regardless of your level or how much time you've got
available in a week, you need to be mindful of not doing
to much to little if that makes sense.
So say Monday Tuesday you do some swims don't leave it
to the following Monday to do a swim again.
It's much better to do little and often and pepper
your training for each discipline throughout the week.
- Yeah I mean, don't want to go five days without
swimming for instance, imagine that.
- [blonde speaker] Yeah.
- But yeah I mean the thing we want to focus on now is going
into that prep phase, so when you starting out in triathlon
you want to make sure everything is easy and quite light.
Then when we build from that we'll start including
some harder key sessions.
With that said, if you are starting out in triathlon or
coming in at a lower fitness level then you may not actually
want to include these harder sessions,
it may not really be necessary.
What you want to do is just do a continuation
of the work that your doing in the prep phase, maybe just
starting to include a little bit more volume.
- But if you are gonna do some of those harder sessions,
you definitely have to have some consideration as to where
we're gonna put them in our weekly training.
What we've done before, what we're going
to be doing after as well, that all
needs to be taken into account.
- Yeah, I mean this is an endless topic
so to help us out here we're actually going
to bring in a pre-made plan and run you through
why things are where they are.
Now before we start looking through this training programme
you might notice its quite a lot of hours,
we've got 18 hours here, so don't panic
thinking that you need to be doing that much training.
This is quite a good, accomplished age group athlete
that I used to coach, who has podiumed at Kona.
But lets get stuck into this and
take a quick look, so Monday.
- [blonde speaker] Looks like you've got aerobic ride and
a bit of a swim in the afternoon.
- Yeah so quite an easy day planned in for him there.
Who tend to have a bit more time over the weekend,
so he really makes use of that, so longer rides,
harder sessions there so Monday tends to be
almost like an active recovery.
- And that's quite a common thing for a lot of people
to do the training, isn't it?
- Yeah, I mean, make use of that larger proportion
of time that you have available and that does
tend to be obviously on a weekend, on the non working days.
- So that actually means by Tuesday we'll start
getting into some harder work.
- Yeah, exactly, so on Tuesday we've got
a run session planned in and actually
here he's focusing on the top end sort of speeds for work.
And actually that's all he's got planned that day.
Then at two on Wednesday we've just got a steady easy run,
obviously an easier run because he's just done
a hard run the day before.
He would quite often do two sessions per day, but just here
way things worked, perhaps with work this week he just did
one session Tuesday and Wednesday.
- But then back into Thursday you can see you know
got three disciplines that's clearly a bigger day for him.
- Yeah, that is, so he's got a long aerobic swim
in the morning and then actually in the evening after work
we want quite a punchy session.
He hasn't got masses of time obviously with it being
after work, so we're really trying to get the most
bang for your buck, so he's got a hard bike session,
sort of top end power.
And then he's actually doing a run straight off that bike,
quite a short run but he's managing to hit
sort of half marathon pace in that session.
- Yeah, and that's a really time efficient way of getting
a good quality session in.
- Absolutely, and then when we move into Friday
we're doing quite hard swims.
So we've got a threshold swim, and then given that
he's just pounded the legs for the last sort of few days
he's not doing any cycling or running,
he's just doing a strength and conditioning session.
- But that sets us up for what I can see is a big weekend.
Exactly yes, so on Saturday he's got a very long ride.
Sort of prepping for his Ironman racing this year.
He's doing some big sweet spot efforts within that ride,
and that's all he's doing for Saturday,
where we were currently during that block.
And then on the Sunday.
- [blonde speaker] Oof.
- Yeah, I mean he's got a long run, but that was
mostly steady with a little build towards the end,
and then quite an easy and short
open water swim in the afternoon.
And I actually used to almost make that optional
if he'd like to, cause he's already by that point
done three swims.
so that's quite a chunky training block.
- Yeah so obviously this is right bang in the middle
of a proper build into an Ironman.
- Yeah, absolutely, I mean this could be I'd say this is
either mid block or towards the end of the block, and then
obviously gonna take a recovery week pretty soon after this,
because this is a lot of training to accumulate.
- Getting a run like that done means I would hope he wasn't
really doing anything longer than that.
- Exactly, and obviously the way that we progress
the sessions is trying to almost accumulate
longer sustained efforts at those race paces.
So we're building that in gradually and that's what those
recovery weeks are there for, so you can
adapt and absorb that training.
- Well we hope that you've enjoyed this video about how to
plan a training programme, but like we've said
this is a huge topic, and there's so much more
that we would've liked to have covered,
so if you've got any specific questions or comments
then please drop them below.
- Yeah and one last thing to consider is fitness testing.
Now these are really valuable for making sure
that you're training in the correct set of training zones,
and also for making sure that you're working
at the right intensities and speeds during a race.
Now to find out a little bit more about fitness testing,
then you can see our five preseason fitness test video
by clicking just down here.
- And remember if you've liked the video
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And if you're doing your first triathlon
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