Triathalon training in the UK. Training Bible.

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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