Triathalon training in the UK. Training Bible.

Tuesday 9 December 2008

Winter sessions, Christmas cake and my beloved Turbo trainer!

Wow.. I looked around and it's Christmas already, where have the last few months gone?!

The long cold nights are drawing in and the dawn of the new season looks a long way off! As any coach will tell you, now is the time to get into that base building that will support all the more intensive work in the build period. Sounds like good solid advice, so what does that actually mean?

Well most of us know this is the time of year (at least in the Northern hemisphere) that we build our endurance levels by longer duration or distance of sessions, controlling our heart rate and power numbers so we are not over stressing the body, but we are getting it used to developing our aerobic capacity. Its also worth considering the other elements that will provide a great return on our time investment next year. All workouts regardless of the time of year need to have a specific purpose, it will help to include a little variety to keep things interesting but not at the expense of the purpose of the session.

Quite a few years ago I had the great fortune to be coached by the athletics legend Frank Horwill, as many who have met the great man will tell you Frank is full of fantastic stories and has a fabulous way of describing what needs to be done. He was a real inspiration to me and fired my love of all things athletic. I remember an anecdote he shared with us on one frosty morning at Battersea track, when none of us were looking forward to the work ahead. It was his way of explaining basic periodisation to us. If you want to bake a Christmas cake there are certain ingredients that need to be included for it to become a Christmas cake. Miss some of them out or add something extra and whilst you might end up with a cake it probably won’t turn out they way it was originally intended. The point was well made, and 28 years I still remember it now.
So apart from developing our endurance profile there are a couple of other important elements to work on. Notably, skills and technical improvements are best worked on now. Movement patterns and the way our muscles fire have been being developed since we first began to move. These are driven by the vast neural networks in our brain and throughout our bodies, these systems take time to adapt and adjust. This is why so much emphasis is placed on developing the technique of our younger athletes. Learning the complex muscle patterns of the kind we find in swimming take longer to develop in adults. Great technique means economy of movement and saving vital energy; regardless of the distance we are racing we can all do with improving our economy.
The third element that we should be focusing on right now is developing our strength in order for us to push a bigger gear, run into a headwind or swim in choppy water. Joe calls these ‘Force’ workouts and can involve various activities and equipment simple examples of these types of sessions involve running or riding up hills, or swimming with paddles.

So the question is...What are you looking for in terms of improvement next year? If you work with a coach, one of their key roles is to help you identify the things you want to improve and set up a plan for you to go to work on them. They might also suggest a few ideas of their own to add to the pot. If you are self coached in each of these areas of development it's helpful to identify small incremental gains, which you can continue to measure. These could be a treadmill session in which you are maintaining a 0.5% higher incline whilst maintaining the same speed. Riding a hill and staying in the saddle for longer each time.

Dave Brailsford the Performance Director for British Cycling has set out a clear plan with his team of coaches and athletes and calls this process ‘the aggregation of marginal gains’. These are small discreet improvements in key milestones that build over time. What are yours? Do you know what your next running or cycling goal is? What milestone you are now aiming at?

Getting regular cycling during the winter period is one of the most challenging parts of training for most of us that work regular hours. We are constantly trying to balance out our lives as an athlete with all the other stuff we want to and sometime have to do!

This is where you turbo training can become your best friend. (I know, I really do need to get out more!) I know many people find indoor bike sessions a real chore and take every opportunity to get outside. Which is great and in many respects much preferred if you have that option. If you have or can develop the mindset that will get you out of the door with the worst of the weather that is a real bonus. Indoor riding is safe, can be very specific and controlled and if you let it, can really add value whilst being very time efficient.

Here are my 7 key tips for your winter turbo sessions.


  1. Add variety to the sessions whilst being mindful that you still want to bake a Christmas cake!
  2. Make sure every session has a purpose, a specific workout set, time goal and outcome i.e. what will make it a successful session?
  3. If you are going to add some entertainment to your ride, i.e. music, video etc. make sure it fits the session your doing. If you’re doing interval repeats on a big gear is Celine Dionne going to do it for you? Make it work for you; small things make important distinctions to the quality of the session.
  4. Join a group cycle session at a gym or health club, invite other athletes to your place for a session, the act of riding together provides a greater sense of unity and makes the time go quicker as you focus on your work out together. This also allows everyone to work at their own level unlike the usual group rides outdoors.
  5. Identify ways of measuring or at least gauging your work out intensity. This could be as simple as giving yourself a sense of how hard you are working, like a scale of 1-10 and adjust throughout the session accordingly (RE: Borg). If you have a Turbo trainer or bike with a heat rate monitor or Power meter so much the better. There is lots of current research on the benefits of using both heart rate and power (Watts) as measurement of performance (Include research paper web links in here) in aiding individual performance. The GB Cycling squad are great example of know the numbers that need to be achieved for success.
  6. Use the indoor sessions to drill technique and develop muscle memory, ‘perfect practice makes perfect’ get some feedback from other athletes or coaches, look in the mirror and check out what you are asking your body to do. What we do in training is more often than not repeated in racing.
  7. Create a positive frame of thought about your turbo trainer workouts, think about the benefits that they will deliver in a few short months, and where ever possible surround yourself with the right positive messages. Your race goals, pictures of you achieving and breaking through barriers that have been in your way in the past, finishing a tough race, beating a PB. Also spend some time to appreciate how far you have come along your athletic journey, value the process that you are using as you tick off each of your key milestones.

    So what are the kinds of sets that would help me love my turbo a bit more? Click here for our free resource section and see the kind of sessions that will help you build part of your base profile this winter.

    HAPPY CHRISTMAS
    P.S. not too much Christmas cake…even if does have all the right ingredients ;-)

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Power to the People or living in the dark!


A couple of weekends ago I was one of about 40 coaches and athletes to attend a 2 day workshop presented by Hunter Allen (Right), one of the co-founders of Training Peaks software platform.
Bob Tobin the owner of http://www.cyclelepowermeters.com/ had organised the event and it was interesting to see the mixture of people exploring the use of these devices for their own training or for the development of their athletes.
Going into the seminar I will freely admit I was already a fan of using power as a training tool. I have been using an Ergomo system for the last year and had read through Hunter and Andy Coggan's book Training and Racing with a power meter.
Whilst I love a good training book, I sometimes find it tough going taking in all that information and applying that to the real world situations without ready examples and the ability to ask questions. I thought listening to Hunter and chatting to the other coaches would provide some greater insights into really getting the most out of this fantastic tool.
So the main benefit from the workshop for me was taking the time to really delve into the relationships between the variables in the data. When you first get a power meter one of the first things to get used to is the reams of data these things produce, so it can become a bit of task to understand what its all telling us.
I meet lots of runners and other athletes who wear heart rate monitors, often when I ask them about what they really get out of them it turns out to be little more than a glorified stop watch. Heart rate zones are more often than not just guess work and therfore its just not adding anything to improving the performance of the athlete, in fact it often has the opposite effect.
So here is the rub, a power meter or any type of fitness monitor needs the user to spend a little time getting to undertstand what it all means and or you get a coach to do it for you. In my experience of working in business as an executive coach and with athletes our biggest challenge is working out where to place our focus oftime and energy. Where are we are going to get the the biggest bang for our performance buck.
For athletes this almost certainly means spending their valuable time working out rather than analysing data. For most beginners just getting out and working out regularly will make huge performance improvements. For those athletes with aspirations of greater things i.e. Ironman events, age group qualification etc. getting appropriate feedback from your performance tools is a real time saver.
For me before using a power meter it was a bit like working in the dark, firstly I used my intuition so I could gauge my fitness by feeling my way around, ok but sometimes I did not listen to the way I felt. Then I got a heart rate monitor, whch was a bit like being given a candle, much easier to see when the conditions were right, but lots of other things affected it so it wasn't always the most reliable. Finally I got a power meter and the light has come on! Yep, you have to consider the conversion cost and feed the meter of regular analysis but its the difference between night and day!
Having a simple guideline wattage number and coupling that up with your heartrate allows you to ride within parameters that will dramatically improve the odds of having a great race.
Now with the development of the Performance Management Chart in Training Peaks and WKO software we are able to monitor the effects of variables like, TSS (Training Stress Score) and TSB (Training Stress Balance) again improving the odds of getting right on our big race day.
So if you are considering coming out of the dark and buying a power meter or other fitness monitor get some help in getting the most out of it, if that means buying a book, asking a club mate or working with a coach it will be worth the investment of your time.
May the Power be with you comrade :-)

Season close

With the Northern hemisphere triathlon season pretty much concluding with the ITU San Francisco and 70.3 in Clearwater this month, so now is a time to review what went right and what can be improved for next season.

Di & I did some technical performance analysis with some athletes in October to see how the season has affected their technique, power, energy systems, strength and flexibility. Having put the athletes through their paces we conducted a number of field based tests with them earlier this month. From what we have done with the athletes we are able to provide information on training zones, VO2 and developmental areas.

Equally you can tell that we are in the close season with such activities as the British Triathlon Coaches & Events Organisers kicking in. I have also managed to maintain some professional development, which will invariably assist in my coaching, by attending three British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences workshops: "Putting theory into applied practice; supporting athletes and coaches", "The process of performance analysis for assessing athletic performance and coaching intervention" and "The application of biomechanics and performance analysis in strength and conditioning".

So it's an exciting time for the Training Bible coaches helping athletes get the most out of their winter training keeping their coaching skills up to date and preparing for the TCR show in February - should make for a great season.

Scott

Wednesday 8 October 2008

RMR - Nutrition and new toys!

What an exciting weekend, new toys to play with! We have just received our new VO2 gas analyser from the US…yippee! So we have been testing and experimenting with using it. It’s always interesting to get information and data that provide a new insight into your current training. Some of it reinforces what we really already know, some highlights what we may not have known for sure but suspected and some are real gems that take our understanding of our bodies to a new level.

We got hold of this new piece of equipment on recommendation from Doug Bush an exercise physiologist, who works with Joe and the TrainingBible team in the US. It’s also the same system that Mark Tickner has been working with for the past few years so we felt we had enough internal expertise to be confident in the product.

Having been an athlete and coach for many years and having both had my fitness assessed and worked with athletes in lots of different ways including lab based work using Douglas bags and all that it entails, I was keen to see this new neat, highly portable piece of kit.

I wanted to check out my RMR (Resting metabolic rate) as I have been experimenting with my diet over the past few months. Last year Joe and I had dinner together and we chatted about a book that he had written with Dr. Loren Cordain called the Paleo diet for athletes. The book was a further development from Dr. Cordain’s first book The Paleo Diet; the title is a bit misleading as it’s not really a diet as we have come to know it but more a way of eating. It means eating the foods that our distant ancestors ate or as close as we can with modern farming methods. In a nut shell so to speak, it focuses on moving from energy dense processed foods like bread, pasta, dairy products to nutrient dense foods, fresh fruit, vegetables, lean meat and fish.

I had always eaten bread, pasta and dairy products and had been interested in experimenting with how this would affect my performance in training and racing but also general energy levels and more importantly longer term health. Since using the Paleo approach over the past 6 months my weight has reduced by almost 8kgs so that has obviously had a direct benefit on my running and biking. Joe had suggested from his research and experience that for every excess pound in body weight the cost could be as much as 10 seconds per mile on a run and 3 watts extra to push on a bike. My recent running races confirm a significant up lift in performance. At 46, I had over the past 2 years been running around 42 minutes for 10k, with no major changes to my training my running has improved by over 3 minutes so no real surprises but nice all the same to be back running regularly under 40 minutes.

What I was interested to find out from using the new equipment was what affect the change in eating had on how many calories I now needed to eat to keep my weight constant and how changes to my training would impact my calorific requirement. I had been tested on the same equipment in July so I was going to have some benchmark data to work with.

My resting metabolic rate has dropped by almost 500 calories, so now I know that with out adding in any training my daily calorific intake needs to be 2168 calories to maintain my current body weight. Now having really useful and accurate data like knowing that I burn 11.4 calories per minute in zone 2 heart rate for example helps me to calculate that after an hour steady running I need to put back in 684 calories, taking a lot of the guess work out of weight management. One of the key things having the test highlighted for me was that I need to plan my meals more carefully and especially when I am in the road. I need to ensure that I am fuelling up enough particularly as I am going into my base work period of longer runs and rides. Thankfully Training Peaks counts the calories so I just need to focus on eating them

Welcome Athletes

Welcome to TrainingBible Coaching UK’s Blog, you can look forward to entries on our blog from all our coaches and support team specialists in the weeks and months ahead. Its and exciting time as we are officially going live with our website this week and that is the culmination of several months of hard work by many people.

I would particularly like to thank Rich, James and Ed the website team at Yammayap for their dedication and unstinting support to the project. When you are launching a business you want to know you have the best possible team around you and they are with out doubt a great outfit! Thanks guys!
Over the next couple of months we will be testing out our new website and all the processes that surround it so please feel free to drop us a line and give us some feedback about anything you like or dislike.

Talking of great teams, an endurance based coaching company can only be as good as the coaches that deliver its services and we have been fortunate to receive interest from some really experienced and knowledgeable coaches. One of the many things I was looking for in TrainingBible coaches is a passion for excellence, coaches that will challenge each others thinking to really bring a new dimension to our athletes. For us that means always willing to learn, share and be able to add new insights to making our athletes goals a reality.

So what are some of the things you can look forward to over the coming months? Well we will be posting up articles on the work we are doing with our athletes, so you can see the TrainingBible Coaching methodology in action. Follow the progress of some of our team as they experiment to develop their own training towards their 2009 race goals. Along with our colleagues in the US and South Africa we will be sharing the latest training research and coaching developments, our network of coaches means that we are able to tap into a huge bank of knowledge and practical expertise. When you work with a TrainingBible coach you are also getting the benefit of that wider team. We know that its difficult for one coach or even a small group of coaches to deliver the wide range of services that athletes ask for, so being part of the TrainingBible family means that we can call upon the skills and experience of some of the very best endurance coaches in the world.

I look forward to reading your comments and sharing ideas with you over the coming months, I f you have questions for any of our coaches please feel free to use the comments section or send them to us on the contact us page on our website.
Rob



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