Working harder

Very good training session this morning. I have to say it was a little unexpected.

I had a threshold session planned with some mates for this morning, real top end effort stuff, 6 x 4 minute efforts with quite a bit of rest in between. However, when I woke up this morning I was feeling pretty tired and the first part of the session wasn't feeling particularly special, so I wasn't really expecting that much.

However, as I got going in the session I was surprised to see that I felt pretty good, and in fact I continued to feel better the further the session went.

I am not entirely sure why this session felt so good, but I have a couple of theories. My main theory is that I think the session went well because I was adequately rested.

When I say rested I don't just mean sleep, although that is a factor too, but I more mean I wasn't fatigued from a previous session. While I trained yesterday, the session was a pretty gentle ride, no threshold work, pretty cruisy stuff. That meant when I went into the session this morning I was feeling fresh and the results reflected that.

It was a good example of why we don't prescribe too many threshold workouts to our athletes per week and certainly not back to back if we can help it. These higher intensity sessions take a lot out of you if they are done properly and they also take a bit of time to recover from. Sure you can try and do high intensity sessions over and over, but generally what you find is that fatigue starts to set in and the quality of those sessions drops. In the end you find that you aren't really doing threshold sessions at all, but something less intense and, therefore, less effective.

It all comes back to what I was saying the other day, about each session having a point. The point of a threshold session is to work near, or at, your anaerobic threshold (but not above). If you are too fatigued to work at that level then you aren't going to be getting the adaptions that you are working for. You would be better off recovering a little and then nailing the session, rather than trying to back up intense session after intense session.

It is a pretty simple message, but one that we often forget in the rush to try and work harder and harder rather than smarter.