Cramming

I have had a few events occur this week that has bought up the topic of cramming training.

Cramming training usually looks a little like this:

• Person gets busy, or sick, or distracted and misses a bunch of training;
• Person has event coming and so they panic;
• Person crams a bunch of training into a short period to 'make up' for the missed training, sometimes in a taper. 

If you hadn't figured it out from the above, it is not a practice I particularly encourage. 

The compulsion that pushes athletes to cram training is understandable, they are conditioned to understand that training is good and not training is bad (which from a sport perspective is true). It is this conditioning that leads to behaviours such as training when sick, training when injured etc, many athletes find it hard to step away from training, even when it is in their best interest to do so. The same compulsion is what drives athletes to try and make up for missed training, even when it means doing something fairly illogical such as training 4 times in a day (which I have seen). 

The biggest problem I have with cramming training is it simply doesn't work in the way that the athlete hopes that it will. Are they training? Yes they are. Will their be benefit from that training? Yes, well sort of. So, what's wrong?

Well numerous things. 

Firstly, and this is one of the big ones, when somebody tries to cram training in they are usually training a lot more than they usually do. This means they are pushing themselves quite hard, and possibly pushing past their normal limits. When they do this the possibility of injury increases. Really it is ironic that a person trying to cram training in might injure themselves leading to more missed training. The worst case of this is when a person crams in training, gets injured, misses training, crams in more training to try make up for it, gets injured again etc. Pretty sad vicious loop.

An issue related to the above is that even if a person isn't getting injured then there is a pretty good chance that the training they are doing isn't going to have the desired effect. As mentioned above, if somebody is pushing themselves much harder than normal then are going to be loading up a fair bit of fatigue. As this fatigue builds the quality of the training is going to decrease. As a result, while the intention of the cramming is to 'make up' training, in reality that training may not be that effective and so isn't really achieving its desired effect. 

A third issue with cramming is that it disrupts the training plan. Any coach (including me) structures a week a certain way for a reason, they are spreading fatigue, making sure hard sessions aren't back to back, building in recovery time etc. I have some athletes who will re-arrange the week to fit their fluid work schedule and that is okay because we have discussed it before. However, when an athlete simply takes all the sessions of a week and crams them into 3 days it throws most of my planning out the window. Suddenly they are much more fatigued than I planned, they have loaded up their body's much more than I had intended, they haven't had any recovery time etc. Basically cramming throws my  plan out the window and means as a coach I need to go back and re-examine what I had planned for them. Not great and quite honestly plain old annoying. 

On top of the above points is one specific case of cramming which is extra annoying and that is taper cramming. Taper cramming is when an athlete panics before an event and decides that taper week is the best time to try and catch up on all their missed training. As ridiculous as this sounds it happens more than you might think. The issues with this approach probably don't need stating, however, the main one is that it throws the recovery part of the taper out the window. Rather than resting up and recovering the athlete instead ends up more tired without really making any meaningful gains in fitness. Basically it throws the taper out the window for no reason. Silly.

From a coach's perspective, what we would prefer than having athletes cramming training is instead accepting that the training has been missed and moving on with their lives. The missed training isn't ideal, but it has happened, is in the past, they should accept it and get on with the rest of the program. Yes there has probably been some fitness lost, but following the program going forward will regain that fitness in time in a controlled manner and without creating any dangerous levels of fatigue. A much better idea.