Just Right

Sorry for the no show post last night, just a long unenjoyable day yesterday. All done now, up and at them as they say.

Tomorrow will certainly be back up and at them with the Triathlon Team from Front Runner sports. On the agenda for tomorrow will be quite a long Tempo ride, two hours in fact for those that have the time, made up of 3 x 20 minutes Tempo effort.

This session reflects just where we are at in the annual racing calendar in Western Australia. There is about 3 and a half weeks left until Busselton Ironman and Busselton 70.3 and so most of the athletes are in the middle of their last block of training. For these Ironman athletes a large amount of their time of the bike is currently spent working in the lower steady and tempo intensity zones. They will all still be doing threshold work to keep working on anaerobic threshold (and, therefore, aerobic capacity), but the bulk of the volume will be done in the lower zones. Tomorrow morning is an example of that.

These periods of Tempo work help build aerobic strength, the strength of the engine is how I like to think of it. The prescribed intensity for tomorrow is 87.5% of FTP, which is a bit above the average 70.3 race pace, and quite a bit above Ironman race pace, but it is also a long way from flat out. This distinction will be an important one for the athletes at the session to make.

Before each session I always talk to the team about the purpose of the session and the purpose of tomorrow's session is not to bury themselves in the first effort. If they do it will be an indication that they are going too hard. Certainly by the end of the 3rd effort they should all be hurting, but not too much in the first. That is the point of the session, being able to maintain that lower intensity, consistently across the hour. That is where aerobic benefits come.

This specific focus on the why of a session is a key part of the Front Runner Sports training philosophy. Any fool can train flat out all the time, but generally those people will spend a lot of time injured and won't really reach their potential. Plus, if every session is on the limit, then you will find that no sessions is, because the body simply doesn't have enough time between sessions to recover. By giving each session a point, and then helping everybody focus on that point Front Runners helps athletes work across the full physiological range, allowing them to maixmise the benefits of their training. The trick of course is getting athletes to understand what the point of a particular session is and then work at the correct intensity level. Most athletes love the challenge of pushing themselves and going hard and so asking somebody to ease back and not go flat out can seem a little counter-intuitive. However, the message that we try and sell is that by easing back on certain sessions and pushing hard in others, people will end up with a better result than if they had simply pushed hard the entire time. Just

It can be a challenging philosophy of some athletes to accept, but it is one that has been proven correct, time after time by many squads around the world.

Working as hard as they are meant to be, not any harder, and not any easier. Just right.