- Morning trainiacs a very atypical kind of workout based
off of the new training plan that I've laid out
with periodized weeks, rest days and things such as that.
This is how it's gonna be on the weekends,
you know what I think I'm gonna share with you how those
weeks lay out probably a lot easier than you think.
(upbeat theme music)
Woo that was an hour and 10 minute swim going 3400 meters
somewhere around 3800 yards and the run actually the longest
run that I've done probably since Austin half Iron Man
57-ish minutes 11K of all hills quality.
Let's save ourselves some jibber jabber and just get into
what you came for the half Iron Man training.
All right so let's get into what I designed
on the old iPad sketched out for you.
And let's start by talking about what we have
to accomplish with triathlon training.
When you're training for a triathlon you need
central fitness, you need your heart and lungs to be fit.
You need peripheral fitness that's fitness in your arms
and legs for each sport, for swimming, biking and running.
Your core and your arms and legs have to be fit enough
to endure the distance of the race.
So you need peripheral fitness,
spelling is awesome because I have a Canadian
education thank you very much.
We need endurance, we need to be able to do the length
of the distance for as long as the distance takes or longer.
We wanna go fast, Ricky Bobby and we have to be strong
enough to keep our body upright and not start failing
and losing technique towards the end
of the race so we need strength.
Now let's set up a week and we also have to keep in mind
that over the course of a training week we can't just
go out and smash ourselves over and over and over.
Within the course of a week we need to have times
that we can recover and absorb the training
so in this training week that I've created,
there's essentially two little blocks within each week.
On the weekend Saturday and Sunday are pretty big,
during the week Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are pretty big.
Monday and Friday are almost reserved for recovery.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna color code what
the workouts are so you can see how it breaks down.
Red is hard cause there's gonna be blood,
green is technique and form, yellow is recovery.
So let's start with the swims in just about each discipline
in particularly swimming you don't want anymore than two
days between each session if you're looking
to improve your times like I am.
I'm not looking to just finish,
I'm looking to improve so from the Tower 26 program
I'm going to do two A swims really key big swims.
We're talking hour 15 to an hour 30 that are really
difficult and one B swim a recovery swim.
Next the bike it's obviously the biggest portion
of the race, encompassing up to about 60% of the time
that you are going to be out on the race course,
so you want to put a lot of focus on the bike.
I'll show you how I set that up.
So what I wanna do is I wanna have two hour ride
on Friday and the three to four hour ride on Sunday
to really overload the long endurance bike riding
within a few days of each other.
That way when I get onto the race course and I'm shooting
for that two and a half hour ride within three days,
I've put in basically two to three times the distance
of the race in just a few days.
So that 90K race and a half Iron Man isn't really
gonna feel difficult at all but I don't want
to go smash myself constantly.
So that's why you only see one intense ride,
that's the group bike ride that I do that has
four sprint sections that are building up over
the course of about three to seven minutes.
All the way up to a full sprint so that's making me fast.
That's increasing my top end without trying to do it
every single time and what I'm doing here
that you can see is I'm keeping the intense sessions
really intense with that intense short group ride
and I'm keeping the endurance building
sessions long and less intense.
So when we build endurance we aren't building intensity
when we're building intensity we're not building endurance,
I'm separating the two let's get to the run.
This is where a lot of people go wrong,
running is the cracker jack box
of where you're gonna get injured.
If you are gonna get injured odds
are it's going to come from running.
Now what I'm trying to do here is back off of the running
and increase everything else to make up for it.
That means it has to be really purposeful,
so that's why I've included one brick workout.
We gotta have a brick workout in there somewhere
but because the bike ride before it is so intense
we're making that brick run only about
20 minutes and just a nice easy pace.
What we're looking to do is accomplish getting
our legs used to running off the bike.
We're not looking to accomplish going faster,
going long it's just that little
bit of running off the bike.
On Thursday, we want a fast session,
we've got to accomplish speed somewhere in the week so we're
gonna do a track session of anywhere around 60 minutes.
Because the bike ride earlier in the day is a lot less
intense we're gonna be a lot fresher for that track session
and the next day we're not gonna be running
on tired legs because it's a recovery day.
Saturday the steady hills that I'm doing there
is happening after the main swim and because I'm tired
from the swim I don't want to go into a long run.
I don't want to go into a fast run,
I just want to be on my feet for a fair bit and kind
of a hack to get something out of it is to go and do hills.
So I'm just doing steady running like I did today
at about five minute per kilometer pace,
way slower than I will be going in a race but I'm getting
hill workouts so I'm making my body more durable.
Now strength this is where things get really important,
okay now because I'm giving up a bunch of my running
I've got to make sure that I make up for that by holding
whatever run pace I start out right until the end.
I've got to be able to hold good form and a big,
big aspect of that is making sure that my body is strong
enough to stay upright and not start falling apart.
And how I do this is with those steady
hill runs and with the strength work.
So the strength work only takes about
25 to 35 minutes and it's not like big, massive,
deadlifts like I was doing all winter.
Now that we're close to race season
it's more just activating that little bit
of strength and mobility that I've got.
So I've got that on Monday and Friday
and what you see is that Monday and Friday totally yellow.
Full on recovery, it's recovering from the weekend
getting ready for Tuesday to Thursday or recovering
from Tuesday to Thursday and getting ready for the weekend.
On Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday I have some red in there
I've got some intensity but it's only in one sport
because I wanna make sure that I can get a really intense
bike, a really intense run and a really intense swim.
The other workouts on those days are more
supporting those intense workouts.
So now I'm going back to what we want to accomplish
on the bottom endurance, we're taking care of that
with the really long over distance bikes, check.
Peripheral fitness we're doing enough intensity
in each discipline in really specific ways to get
our arms and legs ready for each discipline, check.
Central fitness by having a little bit of intensity
in each of the disciplines going up to that top end,
pushing our cardiovascular system, we've got that.
Speed we have a fast day in each of them, check
and strength we are good there.
So now here are some of the key aspects of that training
week that I haven't talked about at all
and those are for other videos but it's how do we balance
then the strength within a workout and the recovery.
The intensity within a workout so that we're not overloading
ourselves but I'm also not short changing myself.
That training week is about 15 and half hours
total work you don't need to do that.
That's what I've built up to and something to really
keep in mind is it's 15 and a half total hours
but 60, 65% of it is either just a recovery workout,
it's a supporting workout,
it's a technique workout.
So it's not like I'm going out there and smashing
myself every single day, what I was doing last year
was almost every single workout was really
challenging and I just couldn't keep up.
I didn't have any recovery,
I was pushing too hard too fast,
easy wasn't easy enough and fast wasn't hard enough.
And I was getting to a race feeling very flat.
The idea with this is to go really
hard and purposeful three days.
Take a day that's just supporting go really hard
and purposeful two days and then recover from that.
And the idea is that if I go through all of these mini
cycles and I'm never really giving myself a day where it's
like so overwhelmingly intense or a series of days
that are so overwhelmingly intense that I can't recover.
I'm always gonna be fresh but I'm always gonna be just
challenging myself enough to make little bit of improvement.
There is a ton that I didn't get into
with the details of all that but that's how
I've structured the training week.
Why don't you ask your questions below about how and why
I've set it up that way and what your questions
are about how it's designed and like
what is going on within those workouts.
Ask them in the comments below
and if you're not yet subscribed,
make sure you're subscribed so that when I start
answering those questions in future videos
you see the videos when they come out.
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Oh and check out the triathlon terrain podcast
it is the most reviewed triathlon podcast in the world.
Don't forget!
Did my phone ring, no, not popular, later trainiacs.