Treading Water: Staying In The Game During Your Off Season
Competed in an event and unsure what to do next? Deciding whether to take a break from training or keep pushing on? If you are a triathlete, should you be focussing on your swimming, running or cycling in your recovery?
A good training program is expertly tailored to gradually increase training intensity and duration to prepare you for your big event. But when the event is over, you are often left to your own devices. What should you be doing to maintain your fitness and stay in the game until you decide on your next goal?
There are two training principles that we need to consider when looking at post-event training: overtraining and reversibility. We need to get the right balance between these two principles to ensure we maintain our fitness to keep us in the game whilst ensuring our bodies have enough time to rest and recover.
Following a well designed training programme should gradually increase your training load up until your event, to ensure peak performance is achieved on race day. However, it is unrealistic to expect our bodies to continue training at this intensity for a prolonged period of time after the event.
Continuing to train your body at high intensity post event will lead to overtraining. Your body needs time to rest and recuperate following the increased stress that was placed on it before your event. Pushing on after the event can make your body more susceptible to injuries, having a longer term impact on future training and performance.
Other signs of overtraining may be elevated resting heart rate, poor sleep quality, muscle soreness and even a decrease in performance. Therefore, when considering your training programme post event, ensure that you allow sufficient time for rest to allow your body to physically recover from the stress of race day and take a mental break too. But should you stop training completely?
This is where the second training principle of 'reversibility' comes into play and explains why it is not normally wise to completely stop training at the end of your season. Reversibility says that any fitness gained can also be lost and will start to be lost as soon as you stop training. As a very rough rule of thumb, your fitness is lost at three times the rate at which it is gained. That means if you have been training for 9 months for your event you could pretty much be back to square one if you stop training for 3 months!
But there are some subtleties to this. Certainly if you have been training in a sport for many years you do seem to retain more fitness and get it back more quickly again. If you are a triathlete with a long background in one or two of the three disciplines, this is something to consider for your off-season.
UK Head Coach Adam Young: I know from my own experience as an athlete how this is the case. As a child I used to run cross country competitively and then a little later got into cycling, riding through school and university. I'm now well into my 40s but if I stop bike or run training for a while I always seem to retain some residual fitness, and quite quickly get back up to speed when I start training again. But with swimming it feels very different. I didn't swim at all as a child and only properly started swim training when I got into triathlon aged 26. If I stop swim training now, my fitness very quickly drops down to nearly zero and it takes a long period of consistent swimming to build it back up again. For me it's really important to keep some swimming training going at all times, even if ticking over at a low level in the off season.
So when considering your training plan post triathlon season, you might want to back off your strongest disciplines where you have the most training background but keep a little more going in your weaker event. This gives you a physical and mental break but leaves you best placed to start training again for next season.
Swim Smooth!
A good training program is expertly tailored to gradually increase training intensity and duration to prepare you for your big event. But when the event is over, you are often left to your own devices. What should you be doing to maintain your fitness and stay in the game until you decide on your next goal?
There are two training principles that we need to consider when looking at post-event training: overtraining and reversibility. We need to get the right balance between these two principles to ensure we maintain our fitness to keep us in the game whilst ensuring our bodies have enough time to rest and recover.
Following a well designed training programme should gradually increase your training load up until your event, to ensure peak performance is achieved on race day. However, it is unrealistic to expect our bodies to continue training at this intensity for a prolonged period of time after the event.
Continuing to train your body at high intensity post event will lead to overtraining. Your body needs time to rest and recuperate following the increased stress that was placed on it before your event. Pushing on after the event can make your body more susceptible to injuries, having a longer term impact on future training and performance.
Other signs of overtraining may be elevated resting heart rate, poor sleep quality, muscle soreness and even a decrease in performance. Therefore, when considering your training programme post event, ensure that you allow sufficient time for rest to allow your body to physically recover from the stress of race day and take a mental break too. But should you stop training completely?
This is where the second training principle of 'reversibility' comes into play and explains why it is not normally wise to completely stop training at the end of your season. Reversibility says that any fitness gained can also be lost and will start to be lost as soon as you stop training. As a very rough rule of thumb, your fitness is lost at three times the rate at which it is gained. That means if you have been training for 9 months for your event you could pretty much be back to square one if you stop training for 3 months!
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| Keep training in your off season but keep it light and fun! |
But there are some subtleties to this. Certainly if you have been training in a sport for many years you do seem to retain more fitness and get it back more quickly again. If you are a triathlete with a long background in one or two of the three disciplines, this is something to consider for your off-season.
UK Head Coach Adam Young: I know from my own experience as an athlete how this is the case. As a child I used to run cross country competitively and then a little later got into cycling, riding through school and university. I'm now well into my 40s but if I stop bike or run training for a while I always seem to retain some residual fitness, and quite quickly get back up to speed when I start training again. But with swimming it feels very different. I didn't swim at all as a child and only properly started swim training when I got into triathlon aged 26. If I stop swim training now, my fitness very quickly drops down to nearly zero and it takes a long period of consistent swimming to build it back up again. For me it's really important to keep some swimming training going at all times, even if ticking over at a low level in the off season.
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| Adam competing at Ironman France |
So when considering your training plan post triathlon season, you might want to back off your strongest disciplines where you have the most training background but keep a little more going in your weaker event. This gives you a physical and mental break but leaves you best placed to start training again for next season.
Swim Smooth!