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- Welcome back to Triathlon Training Explained,
powered by Training Peaks.
Now today we're going to be talking about
training for a full distance Iron Man triathlon.
Now you might think that you have to devote up to 16 hours
a week or more to be able to train for one of these things.
- I mean, that is a heck of a lot of time,
if you are limited for time.
Say you're juggling work, family, and everyday life.
So you will actually be pleased to hear that it's possible
to train and prepare for an Iron Man,
and still be competitive,
on a relatively minimalist training programme.
- Yeah, in fact, this minimalist approach could be argued
to be better than a high volume approach for training
for an Iron Man, if you're time pressed and juggling
lots of roles with family commitments and such.
Sounds good, doesn't it?
Well, today we're going to talk about that,
and we're going to use help from
top triathlon and cycling coach, Matt Birchall.
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- Okay, firstly, let's take a closer look at the swim
and if you are a killer swimmer,
I'm afraid I've got a bit of bad news for you,
because the swim takes up the smallest proportion
of an Iron Man race.
In fact, it's only somewhere around ten percent
of the overall time it takes to complete an Iron Man.
- Now, obviously you can swim hours and hours
in the pool every week,
and you will see corresponding improvements in your swim,
but what if I was to tell you that
for 80-90% of your fastest Iron Man time,
you only actually have to spent two to three swim sessions
in the week of 45 minutes to an hour?
- [Mark] Yeah, I mean,
that certainly frees up a lot of time,
and also conserves a lot of energy for your other sessions,
but it's really important that you're training
smart and specifically when you're adopting
a minimalist Iron Man training programme,
and that accounts for all disciplines.
But if you take the swim for example,
the swim is a very technical sport,
so there's no point aimlessly slogging yourself
up and down the pool, doing pointless miles, really.
You'll get far more from actually focusing
on the technique from the swim.
- Yeah, now if you're going to be doing say
three sessions in a week,
I'd certainly recommend devoting at least one of those
purely to technique.
If of course you've not got that much time
and you're doing less sessions,
definitely try and make sure there's swim technique
at the start and/or the end of that session.
Now the idea would be to get some one to one analysis,
that would be excellent,
but of course you could head on over
and see some of our technique and drill videos
that are up on the channel.
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- Yeah, and when you team that
with an integral swim session during the week,
which focuses on a threshold pace,
something along the lines of four by 100's
at threshold pace,
with 20 seconds recovery between each rep,
and then 100 at aerobic pace,
with another 20 seconds after that.
Then you can do that whole set three to four times through.
- Yeah, and you can of course progress
the length of the reps that you're doing too,
which would be something like doing two by 200 metres
at that threshold pace, with the same 20 seconds recovery,
and then into the 100 at an aerobic pace,
again repeating that set through three to four times.
- Or, let's do it straight
and go for one by 400 at threshold pace,
then another 20-30 second recovery now,
and then 100 recovery at aerobic pace, 20 seconds recovery,
and three to four times through.
So you're following the pattern there,
and of course if you are going to be doing
a third swim during the week,
then that could be the time to really focus
on those longer reps, real endurance and aerobic pace.
- Well that's all very good and well, Mark,
but now that swim's covered,
what are we going to do for the bike?
- Ah. Well I have the perfect person for this.
(swishing sound)
It's Matt Birchall. Thanks for joining us today Matt.
- Oh no Mark, it's always good to be back on the show.
- Well, Matt has been on the GTN a couple of times before,
but just to recap you quickly, he's been the 10 mile,
25 mile, 50 mile and 100 mile time trial champion in Britain
and has since gone on to coaching
some of the best triathletes out there,
like Lucy Charles, Tim Don, and Will Clark,
but today we are thinking about minimalist
Iron Man training, which is somewhat of a specialty for you.
Could you give us a bit of help
on the cycle portion of the race?
- Yeah, definitely Mark.
You know, there's a number of ways of getting fit,
and I think a lot of people, they have this way,
when it comes to cycling part of triathlon,
they think that like, I'm an endurance athlete,
I've got to go out there,
complete hour after hour on the bike.
They'll train two, three, four, five hours,
but they're not really thinking about
what they're completing within those sessions.
- Okay, so rather than going, right, it's 180K,
I'm going to go out this weekend and ride 180K
just aimlessly, actually break it down,
so maybe doing shorter distances to start off with,
but it's really specific intervals within that.
- [Matt] Yeah, definitely.
And it's having specific sessions where you incorporate
these like, it can be threshold work,
it can be micro bursts, it can be sweet spot work,
but it's just having small portions of training
that you're putting some stress on the body.
- Okay. So what's the idea of doing those kind of intervals?
What's it going to do physiologically for us?
- [Matt] If we look at our session
like we're going to do today, like a micro burst session,
we're gonna complete a number of efforts
for a specific duration, so a micro burst effort generally
is anything between 10 and 30 seconds,
but the idea behind that is,
we do these with short recovery,
probably about three to five minutes,
depending on your fitness,
so we might do these in blocks of 20 minutes,
or we could go up to the duration of one hour,
but say, if you were to analyse this in training peaks,
if we went from the first effort to the last effort,
the intensity factor of that session's going to be around 90
which is 90% of your-
- FTP. Yeah.
- Your threshold.
And there's a lot of research into actually
working at 90% of your FTP is,
it allows you to recover fast,
but it's also a great way of pushing that top end power up.
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- So that's really interesting, and I guess it's kind of
the same for running, right?
- Exactly. Each one should have a real focus to it,
and in the same way we want it to be really time efficient
and looking for sessions with the most bang for their buck.
For the run, have you got any good examples?
- Yeah, I guess I do, there was a session I always like to
do, be breaking it down into 30 seconds of the right
Iron Man pace, or just up above that,
and then dropping down to 30 seconds nice and easy below.
Really, just trying to build up to,
well, maybe as much as an hour.
- Yeah, that's a really good session,
and mine, my favourite one I like to do all the time
was a build run, so say I was going for a 45 minute run,
I'd do the last 30 minutes of that
building through to say Iron Man pace,
or slightly above that, and what that does is,
like this back end fatigue, very similar to an Iron Man
when you start to fatigue towards the end,
and it really focuses on that.
And you can really team that quite nicely
with brick sessions, so running off the bike,
again, you're going to be fatigued from the bike,
and then you barrel through the runs,
really, really accumulate a lot of fatigue.
- And another type of brick session, I suppose,
could be combining a run, say,
when you've done a swim at the pool
and you've got a little bit of spare time,
and just throw on your running gear and go for one after.
It doesn't matter whether it's bike to run or swim to run,
it's still a brick, right?
- [Mark] Exactly.
It's any discipline really.
It's that fatigue, and at the end of the day,
minimalist Iron Man training approach,
you're trying to be as time efficient as possible,
so any time you have available, and that leads us on really
to accumulate and finalise this video,
because every session needs to have a focus.
We've drilled that into you now.
Say you're going out for a four hour ride.
Make sure it's really focused and you really know
what you're trying to get from it.
You can get a lot more out of a four hour focused ride
than you can say go for six hours and stopping at every cafe
and free wheeling all the time.
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Finally, be flexible.
Stuff happens.
Don't stress if you have to miss a session or two.
Just do what you can do.
- Yeah, I would recommend if you can
scheduling three swim, bike and run sessions,
if you can, but of course if that's not possible,
then dropping one of those out
really isn't the end of the world at all.
Now hopefully you find this video
about minimalist training useful and interesting.
If so, please hit the thumb up like button,
not forgetting to click on the globe and subscribe
for all the other videos on our channel.
If you want to see another video that we also did with
Matt Birchall, then you can get that here.
- Yeah, if you'd like to see more of our
Triathlon Training Explained videos,
then just click down here.