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STANDWhen racing and training, I like to use the word STAND to remember the things that are key to my success.Strength Technique Aerobic Training Nutrition Discipline Strength:You need to be able to generate power while you are racing. Building up strength through lifting and core exercises are key to your success. A good strong core means a more efficient pedal stroke or stride on your run. In the majority of sports, the core is the one thing that is used the most but is also the area that is the most neglected. It is the center of all motion, especially in the three sports in triathlon. Your stomach and back stabilize the body and help deliver the power to the arms and legs. You also have to build up the rest of your muscles to handle increased amounts of load. Making sure that you are lifting the weights correctly and doing the right number of reps at the right speed is vital. You do not have to spend hours in the gym. My general rule is that it should never go over an hour. The only time I come close to that is when I do low rep, high weight workouts during base 2 where the time in between sets is 3-5 minutes. Don’t have access to a gym? Not a problem. There are plenty of exercises that you can do at home that will help you prepare for the season.Technique:How good is your technique? You may be able to maintain a 6 minute mile with your current running style but do you get injured a lot or take longer to recover because of your form? Making little changes in your technique in any sport can pay more dividends than hours of training. This is especially important in running due to the amount of stress it puts on your body. If you are still running with a heel strike that is in front of your body, you are wasting a lot of energy. When I switched from my old running style to a flat foot strike directly under the body, my body recovered faster and gave me a lot fewer problem during high training volume weeks. Other form tweaks include teaching yourself to spin at a higher cadence on the bike or swimming with breathing on both sides. Lance is Lance because he spends tons of time focused on these things. Spending the hours on the road training with poor form will not make you much better. Spending time in the off season or early season on these things pays huge dividends come race day. The next race that you watch, pay attentions to the different techniques and then think about yours. Are you wasting energy anywhere? Chances are good that you are you just need to find out where those are and adjust.Aerobic Training:Endurance racing of any form comes down to training your body to handle the load you are going to put on it. If you want to be a sprinter, you do a lot of short bursty exercises. If you want to be able to run 26.2 miles then you need to work on training your heart and the rest of your body to handle the load. You get this from low heart rate workouts with increasing duration early on in the season. These may not be the most fun workouts you have ever done but they are the most important ones for endurance racing. They help you establish a good pace and they train the heart through repeated sessions to become more efficient. I usually have one run that I run the same route every couple of weeks at the exact same heart rate zone. The run has the miles marked out in the road so I can tap my lap timer on my watch to see what my pace is. There is nothing better than going back to that same route a couple weeks later and seeing that my pace is faster by 20 seconds and my heart is still in that same zone. My heart is adapting to the load I have been placing on it and can now handle more load at the same rate. You have to build up the engine through very specific training sessions using target heart rate zones. These zones come from finding out where your Aerobic Threshold (AeT) is for your sport(s) and then doing workouts below that in target hear rate zones. You will do workouts later on in the season as you approach your race but if you have not built the base up properly, your sessions with more intensity are going to leave you feeling whipped and taking more time to recover than they should.Nutrition:It would be a shame to work so hard to achieve a goal and then fail to meet it because of what you ate. What you eat before, during and after training and racing should be something you pay a lot of attention to. This means trying out drinks, gels, etc while training to make sure that your race day is not spoiled by a bad stomach. It also means eating the right foods after a good workout to speed recovery and rebuild the body. You are going to put your body through some serious stress, you want to do everything you can to replenish fuels in the body or you are going to get sick or feel flat the next time you train. If you get sick a lot, feel flat while training or crash hard during the day then your nutritional intake is definitely something that you want to focus on. Just eating is not enough. Eating the right amounts of carbohydrates, protein and fat is the key.Discipline:You have to want to make it happen. I can be the best coach in the world and will not matter at all if you do not want to get out and train and take good care of your body. Discipline to eat the right food, stretch, get sleep and get up and out the door to train. You don’t have to get carried away with this, everybody misses a workout here and there due to conflicts. You just have to know what motivates you and use that to drive you. You should know that what you do each day moves you that much closer to your goal.These five areas are going to make you a better athlete if you focus on them. Most of the novice athletes that I have met get the most benefit from technique workouts and a little bit of weights. More seasoned athletes usually have a couple of these pieces but just have not put the whole puzzle together. |
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