As promised, here is the second part of my Icing your cake post. If you haven’t read part 1 yet you can do so here. Aside from ‘not enough intensity’ and ‘too much intensity too often’, the most frequent mistake which I see being made by endurance athletes is that they don’t have a structured plan when it comes to their training. There is a well-known saying, ‘if you fail to plan then you plan to fail’, and I will tell you from experience that it is true.
The human body is a remarkable machine and adapts very quickly to the demands placed upon it. If you are doing exactly the same workouts now which you were doing 6 to 8 weeks ago, you are unlikely to make significant fitness gains. This is a common flaw I see repeated time after time by athletes and gym goers alike. They have no plan, and even if they have goals the path to get there is very much what I call seat of the pants stuff i.e. a bit of this, a bit of that, no real consistency, no idea of why they are doing a particular workout or indeed what to do next.
I spent much of the first few years of my triathlon training not making the most of the limited talent which I had. At times my training would go well and I would see improvements in my race results, but then I would hit a plateau, or worse still get sick and injured and go backwards. Poor results when I felt like I was putting in the effort left me feeling disillusioned and questioning my ability, and I even got to the point I thought about giving up the sport I loved.
I can look back in retrospect and know exactly why my results were so erratic – I didn’t have a plan and was haphazard with my training. I would get up in the morning and see how I felt, ride my bike for an hour or two at whatever speed felt appropriate, nip to the pool and swim maybe 2000m, then have an evening run with a group or attend a cycle class at the gym. The next day I might do something similar, entirely different or occasionally nothing at all. I was putting in plenty of volume but it was totally random in terms of intensity, schedule and rest. Worse still, as a chronic over-trainer who mistakenly believed that more was always better, I was attempting to put my body through the schedule of an Olympic athlete with years of training under their belt, when I was metaphorically still in kindergarten!
I eventually figured out that I needed help to structure things properly, so I bought a bunch of books on training, studied hard, learned from talented athletes and experts around me, took triathlon and running coaching certifications, and started to put everything into practice. I realised that if I was to meet my goals I might have to miss out on some of those spontaneous cycle classes, occasionally run on my own at the prescribed intensity rather than with faster or slower friends, and be more consistent when training my weaknesses (swimming) and not my strengths. I never became a great athlete, but I am proud to admit that I had my fair share of silverware, and consistently improved over many years.
I learnt to sit down at the end of my racing season and spend time evaluating where I did well, when I could have done better and what I should have done differently. I would design my racing schedule for the following season, and divide the competitions into A-races (usually only 2 of these where I wanted to peak and be on top form), B-races (less concerned about the results) and C-races (no training taper, essentially higher intensity training sessions with an added bit of motivation).
Once I had that I would look at my quarterly, monthly and weekly volume, and plan my sessions to build consistently upon each other, generally within a four week cycle of three build and one recovery. I could literally look at my plan for any given week, and have a pretty good idea of the key sessions I wanted to get done, the volume and intensity I wanted to reach, my scheduled rest days, and other pertinent details. I still trained with others sometimes, but only when I had planned the session to do so, or could adapt it to my needs. No more seat of the pants training with a random outcome.
For some of you I suspect this may sound very clinical, and like it would take much of the fun out of your training. Spontaneous or haphazard workouts are fine if you just want to stay reasonably fit, never really explore your limits, and don’t want to compete or reach a specific goal. If you don’t want to follow some form of structured plan, then you must be prepared to accept inconsistency in your results and potentially no improvement. For me, if I was going to spend the time breaking my body down with the training, then I wanted to get the biggest return. Planning my workouts enabled me to provide just the right amount of overload to encourage adaptation – not so much that I become overly fatigued, and not so little that I may as well have stayed resting on the couch!
So there you have it. If you have endurance sport goals, and don’t have a structured training plan, spend the next hour or so putting something together. Feel free to e-mail me for advice, or post a question or comment on the blog below. There are a number of very talented trainers and athletes now reading this blog, and I am working on getting some subscriber-only guest content sent out soon.
Enjoy your week and train with a plan.
Beth
