Hey, what's up, Motivators Taren? Here.
This one today is for all of the brand new endurance athletes out there that are just
getting into the sport or thinking about doing their first race.
What we're going to go through are
the seven things that I think apply to absolutely any endurance athlete out
there, whether they're training for just getting over the finish line or
performing, whether they are looking at going for an Ironman race or just
training for a local five K, whether they're going for fun or seeing
what they can possibly do with their physical limitations.
We are going to go through the seven
things that I think are universal to every single endurance athlete out there to make
it more enjoyable and perform better at the same time.
My name is Terrence Gazelle. In my twentys,
I was overweight unfulfilled and couldn't even run to the end of the block.
Over the following years.
I found endurance sports.
Lost £65, won age groups, race world Championships, growth records,
and trained and learned from some of the best athletes and coaches in the world.
You, too, can use endurance sports
to change your life and accomplish your fitness goals.
You just need a system, a system that's meant for us amateurs
who want to be our best while feeling our strongest and healthiest.
My company, Mottiv, offers that system,
and I want to share some of the tips from it today.
Welcome, Motivators. Let's get you started on the right foot.
As an endurance athlete,
these seven things are going to go in order of what you need to nail down
first and then what builds after that in sequential order.
The first thing that I would say to any
new endurance athlete thinking about doing their first race, or maybe you're trying
to train for your first race is believe that you can do it.
And I know that this might sound a little bit like, all right, Terrence,
I didn't come here for a motivational speech, but I think that most people do
need a motivational speech to believe in themselves.
I think we all do need a little bit of a cheerleader sometimes to understand
that we are capable of so much more than we think.
And even if you think, you know what, hey,
I can do that half marathon, it shouldn't be a problem.
Well, push yourself into doing something
that you are a little bit scared of and is a bit of a stretch.
You're going to find that it's tremendously, Motivating.
You're going to accomplish more than you thought, and it's going to build
confidence in you when you actually do that thing that historically scared you.
So whatever it is that you think might be a little bit doubtful,
believe in yourself and try to accomplish that little bit of a scary goal.
And that's where the growth as a person happens.
The second thing to get nailed down is your nutrition.
Nutrition is the fuel that lets us go out there and execute good workouts.
It's the recovery juice that allows us to actually absorb all of those workouts.
It was years before I nailed down my nutrition well,
and I even thought that I had it nailed down when it was just figuring out, okay,
well, I need to take a certain amount of calories during certain efforts.
Well, there's a little bit more to that.
You do need to have the right amount of calories for every single effort.
We'll actually put a link
in the description below to a nutrition calculator that will give you how many
calories you should have in your training and your racing.
And that's going to give you the basics of a good nutrition plan.
But also timing when you take lots
of carbs to hit really peak efforts, when you hold back on carbs to make sure
that your body can adapt to burn fat as fuel and build a lot of endurance.
We outline all of this in our book Triathlon Nutrition Foundation.
There will be a link in the description
below to where you can get that, or if you want to go to a video where we
outline a full system on this, we'll link it over in a video over
my shoulder at the end of this video, and it will also be in the description below.
But getting that nutrition nailed down
with how many calories you need and what types of macronutrients you should have
in every single workout are going to allow you to get the most out of every single
workout that you do so that you can perform well in the workout and get
the right adaptation based on what the intention of each workout is.
The third thing to understand as a new
endurance athlete is that you really need to polarize your intensity.
You should do probably about 70% to 80%
of your total, trading at a very, very, very low intensity level.
And I'm not talking an intensity level
where you say like, oh yeah, it feels kind of easy.
We're talking you should feel guilty
and awkward about how easy it is because this is going to build up
the mitochondrial density in your muscles, the energy producers of your muscles.
This is going to keep your stress levels low and allow you to easily build
endurance because you'll be metabolically very fit.
On the other end of things,
about 20% to 30% of the time should be burned the house down really intense.
What happens is most endurance athletes
come into the sport and they quickly start training this middle Gray zone that feels
really good because it feels like you're doing a workout,
but it's not really intense enough to make your body adapt and it's not really low
intensity enough to build a lot of mitochondrial density and endurance.
So you just end up kind of slogging it
out, putting in a bunch of hours, not really making yourself any better
at the sport, and it's also not really improving your health outcomes.
So polarize your training really intense or really low intensity.
The fourth thing that I would say you need to nail down is if you have performance as
the goal have a physiological purpose for every single workout.
If health and fun and enjoyment is the purpose of you taking up endurance
sports, then just train with whatever ends up giving you the most jollies.
Maybe it's peloton, maybe it's going for a group ride with your friends.
Maybe it's a group run.
Don't really stress a whole lot about it if all you're in it for is a good time.
But if you're in it for actual
performance, you want a physiological intention for every single workout.
You want to know if the workout is to build mitochondrial density
and endurance and metabolic function be able to go longer?
Is it to build race intensity?
Is it to build comfort with that race intensity kind of pain?
Is it to build Vo two Max or neuromuscular power?
Or is it just to allow your body to absorb the training that you did the day before
and prepare for the few days that are coming up?
And there's a lot that goes into this
and understands physiology and when you should rest and when you should push.
Fortunately, we have an app for that.
We'll talk about it at the end of the video.
The fifth thing is to train with your
friends more, but make sure that you all have the same intention.
Training with your friends is excellent for pushing you.
I remember when I was once doing a five times 1 km workout in Lanzarotti and I was
there doing some work with Lucy Charles Barclay and her husband
Reese Barclay, and we were doing five times that one K around a track.
They were doing the intervals at about 305
310 per kilometer C really fast and I ended up knocking them out at 330 /km
never before or never since have I gone that fast.
But the reason that I was able to go that fast is because I was with friends
friends that made me push myself to be a little bit better.
The flip side of that is that quite often
you can end up going and training with friends and it becomes this pissing
contest where everyone just goes a little bit faster and a little bit faster
and a little bit faster and before you know it, you're doing a tempo effort
and that big low intensity zone that we talked about goes out the window.
So I would really encourage you to train with friends as much as possible,
but make sure that everyone is on the same page about when you're going to push hard
and when it's a low intensity day where we all agree that we're all going to hold
back, we are going by the slowest person dictating what low intensity is not
the fastest person the 6th thing is to be weary of best methods.
There are a lot of training methods out there that do definitely create
performance enhancement and they are going to result in you getting faster.
But what I find is a lot of these best methods are fairly extreme to one end
of the spectrum and they don't allow for balance and long term progression.
What I see in the coaching industry is that there is a lot of best methods out
there that create performance enhancement over the course of three to six months.
But over the course of years, those performance enhancements really
taper off and there's a lot of beat up athletes out there.
You're probably at this point,
if you've done all of these methods, going to achieve 95% to 98%
of the performance that you could possibly achieve.
But at this point, I would urge you to step back.
And as opposed to thinking strictly about PBS and always racing longer and doing
more, think about what you're going to have the most fun with.
For about nine years, I raced whatever I wanted to race,
what I got most excited about, what I would find most fun with good
training methods, but having a lot of fun doing it.
But then there was a year or two when this channel grew and I felt pressure to be
the person out there that inspired everyone with better and better times.
And I focused almost solely on PBS and building up and going longer.
And that's when the fun got taken out of the sport for me because it became work.
It became a job.
Probably my best race performance ever.
A 428 half Ironman wasn't a successful
moment to celebrate, even though it was six,
eight minutes faster than my all time previous personal best.
At the distance, it was how much better could I have done?
I could have gone four or five minutes
faster had I done more, and it was more of a disappointment.
So a lot of the fun got taken out of it
because I was putting my self worth on a time.
And I would encourage you just to explore
what you're most curious about, what you're most excited by.
If that's going fast in sprint triathlons,
don't feel the pressure to go and do Ironman triathlons.
If you are historically a runner, but you really want to dabble in swim,
run or cycling because it's fun to you, but you think that you might get a little
bit slower in the field, but you're really excited by it.
Go for it.
Doesn't matter what your time is, it matters.
Are you fulfilling yourself and are you
challenging yourself with something that you're going to find exciting?
Do this and you will have a very long, very successful,
very performance oriented, but also health oriented and health
improving journey in your endurance sports.
Believe in yourself. You can do it.
You can have fun and you will do it.
And if you need any help along the way, let us know.
We have a great app for that. Thank you for watching.
Motivators if you're looking
for a training plan that incorporates these methods that is as good as a oneon
one coach but as inexpensive as doing it yourself, check out our Motive training
app that covers triathlons, running races, dothlons swim runs and cycling events.
The link in the description below where
you can check out your customized training plan for free.
Also if you rather listen to these tips,
we also publish these videos in podcast format on the Terrain's Motive Method
podcast so you can check that out and if you don't want to do either of those
things that you found, this video helpful hit us up
with a virtual high five by smashing the like button below later motivators.