Coach Alun ‘Woody’ Woodward talks about the importance of taking the time to relax and recover during the off-season. His includes lots of food with sushi and pig trotters stew high on the list this year.
Coach Alun ‘Woody’ Woodward talks about the importance of taking the time to relax and recover during the off-season. His includes lots of food with sushi and pig trotters stew high on the list this year.
The Holiday season is fast approaching and for athletes this time of the year presents a significant challenge when it comes to finding the time to train and still enjoy all the festivities and family time.
As we head into December its a good time to plan for the month ahead, knowing ahead of time that a little curtailing of your training program will allow you to both maintain fitness and free up time for family and friends. Taking the stress away from trying to stick rigidly to your training program and relaxing more with family and friends while maintaining fitness will see you head into the New Year refreshed and highly motivated to get back to your plan.
Firstly we need to understand that maintenance of fitness is possible with significantly reduced training volume for a period of 3-4 weeks. We need to get away from the mentality of always chasing fitness and accept that for a short time the only focus is on maintenance. So if your regular week involves 12 hours of training then you can quite safely reduce this to 6-8 hours a week. Just think if you take into account all the commuting and preparation time for these training hours you may be freeing up 10 plus hours a week – at such a busy time of year this can be very welcome extra time.
When sitting down and looking at your training schedule the first sessions you can reduce or remove are the endurance sessions, losing your long ride and run at this time of year are not going to hurt your performance. Quality in your training does need to be maintained, your strength and speed sessions are important but these too can be reduced in volume and number, we just want to make sure in each week that we hit one of each session type. For example if your run speed session called for 30minutes of intervals then this can safely be reduced by 50%, the speed remains the same to ensure we keep hitting the muscles the same way – the focus is on keeping the muscles used to the motor patterns of the workout without stressing them for progress as we would in a regular week.
EXAMPLE CHANGE – RUN SET
ORIGINAL – 2x3k moderate + 3min easy between – 4x1km hard + 90s rest
NEW SESSION – 2x2km moderate + 2min easy between – 2x1km hard + 90s rest
Rest days are not something we normally plan into a training schedule at ironguides as we believe life will always get in the way at times and force rest days upon us but during the holidays planning a rest day or 2 can work well especially if it is following a special event or night out so you can indulge without guilt at it effecting training the following day.
Talking of special events such as a night out, meals with family and friends and drinks then this does tend to come with a certain amount of guilt for many athletes, that guilt tends to be in the form of the excess calories that will be consumed. The typical response from many is the need to train more before or after such events to compensate for this over indulgence but this can lead to problems in itself as the body is already tired and stressed and training more at this time of year can over stress your immune system and leave you more prone to infections and illness.
This guilt or fear of such events if we are honest is not focussed around losing fitness but more on gaining weight, it is typical for most to put weight on over the holiday period so this fear is very real. I think one of the best quotes and one of the only factual quotes in fitness is the “six pack abs are made in the kitchen not the gym”! No amount of abdominal work is going to give you six pack if they are covered in a layer of fat from excess eating!
The reason people experience significant weight gain during the holidays is because we make no change to our regular diet and just add to this during nights out and family events! We have to make some adjustments to what we are eating in order to enjoy the festivities guilt free. Embracing intermittent fasting is a great way to do this, a simple way to control calorie intake and avoid overdoing the calories without realising.
Intermittent fasting involves a daily period of fasting, a good starting point is 16 hours per day without any calories and consuming all your calories in an 8 hour window. For example your first meal may be around midday and last meal 8pm, this not only gives the body a longer period of fat burning daily it also allows bigger more satisfying meals to meat your daily calorie requirements. For example a typical male calorie requirement per day is around 2500 calories,
MEAL 1 – 12pm to 2pm – approx 500 calories
MEAL 2 – 5pm – 800 calories
MEAL 3 – 8pm – 1200 calories
For most of us eating 1200 calories at one meal is going to be a struggle but at a restaurant or holiday meal with all the high calorie foods and drinks available getting to this quantity will not be hard at all. If you know you have a tendency to go totally overboard at such events you can further curtail your days calories leading up to the event leaving you a larger calorie buffer for the event!
So rather than seeing the solution to overeating as quite literally training your ass off look at making some little changes to how you eat through the day in order to enjoy your big meals guilt free.
Finally have some fun over the holidays, maybe throw a challenge day into your training, you are on reduced volume and you may have have a few forced rest days so your body is going to be fresh and you can use this freshness for a challenging day, maybe a crazy session you have always wanted to try or an extra long run loop. Another option is there are always a lot of fun local events on over the holidays so jump in and enjoy your fitness, Christmas Pudding runs on the 26th December are very popular in the UK and so many other fun events are out there. Locally we have a Wheelbarrow race that takes place on the 1st of December, this is a 1 mile event involving teams of 2 people and a wheelbarrow, you have to get round the course as fast as you can with one runner pushing the other in the Wheelbarrow and changing positions as many times as needed on the way round.
Make sure you take a little time to plan how your training will look over the holidays, this will allow you to enjoy the period stress free and not only maintain your fitness but you will find you go into the New Year refreshed and ready to get back to your regular training routine with rented focus and determination!
Enjoy your training.
Alun Woodward
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DOES SPEED KILL?
It’s that all important and exciting time of the year again for all of us, the race season is well and truly done now and hopefully you have all had a period of rest and chilling out letting the body recover from the stresses of training and racing. This time of year is exciting as we are looking forward to new goals and setting a training plan up to help achieve them.
I see a lot of athletes at this time and it amazes me still that they all talk about building a solid aerobic fitness base over the winter as the first step, it really frustrates me that this idea has become so set in peoples mindsets and I see it as the main hurdle people need to get over in order to progress their fitness and really step forward towards their goals.
I truly believe at this time of year starting a program that speed and strength are the main areas we should all be focusing on. In this article I want to look at speed and take away your fear and look at how we can use speed to accelerate progression and also prevent injuries in the long run.
Firstly when I say speed people immediately think sprinting and then injury, over stretching and pushing the boundaries with speed sure does bring a huge injury risk and this is the case whenever sprinting is put into a program. When I say speed though I am not talking about sprinting I am simply talking about faster paced work.
When we are racing and training for Ironman, speed training is actually not going to be that fast at all as the race speed is so slow, I would then class anything above race pace as being speed work.
Humans really are creatures of habit and our muscles are part of that, if we always train just one speed we will get good at one speed and shock the body when we try to do something different which can easily lead to injury. Doing weeks of base training to prepare the body for faster work actually therefore is counterintuitive, all it is really doing is preparing the body to really not like speed! So if we follow the age old pattern of building base over the winter and then adding speed in the final weeks before the race season starts we are going to be in a situation where speed kills performance through injury.
I think the true sense would be to have elements of speed built into every week so the body is used to the movement patterns of going fast and the muscles have trained and adapted to speed so we are not putting an unknown stress on them suddenly as race season dawns.
Also when we train slow we only use a very small percentage of muscle fibres within a given muscle, if we are constantly training one speed we will continue to only train this small percentage of muscle fibres leaving the others untrained and unprepared. When we are racing, and especially in prolonged endurance events such as Ironman, we are going to fatigue our muscles and if we have only trained a small percentage of our muscle fibres then as soon as these get tired we have nowhere else to go. By training with speed we train a fuller spectrum of our muscle fibres and give the body something to fall back on when our endurance dominant fibres are too fatigued to take the workload.
Let’s look at some sessions that are still endurance based but have an element of speed built in that will pay back come race day.
Endurance ride with short sprints
So one way we can use speed to train more muscle fibre is to add in short all out sprints early on in an endurance ride, we can look at it this like flicking a light switch on. If we just go out and ride easy our body is lazy and will just use a small percentage of muscle fibre to perform the task. By adding in a small set of sprints we flick a switch and activate all fibres and then when we go back to easy endurance riding the load is shared over more fibres thus getting a much more productive training effect. I am sure you have all experienced this at some time when out training due to terrain, say you have a hard short hill that requires a big effort to get over – you may have been feeling tired and lethargic before the hill but suddenly once over and back on the flat you have a lot more power and energy – this is because you have switched on more muscle fibres to get over the hill and they will now continue to work to share the workload on the flat making you feel stronger and more energetic.
So if your endurance ride is 4 hours let’s look to ride 30minutes easy and then put in a short set of sprints, 10 second sprints are enough to get the muscles working without leading to any real fatigue. Ride 8×10 seconds all out allowing your cadence to accelerate during the 10s to maximum and then ride very easy for 1 minute 50 seconds before starting your next sprint. If you ride in a group or with a friend you can add a little fun to this by sprinting for landmarks, choose something close as it is all about that initial acceleration that activated the muscle fibres we want working!!
Run efficiency
While the above is an example of all out speed I also use a lot of speed work around race pace, by training slightly above race pace we can make our bodies more efficient at movement. Studies have shown that movement efficiency is the key to success in endurance performance. Let’s look at a run session that is focused on efficiency of movement. Let’s say you are looking to race at 12km per hour on the run for the full marathon distance, I would then put a set of short intervals into a weekly program that is based around a speed of 13km/hr. An example would be a treadmill session of 10×400 at 13km/hr with 60seconds easy between. This session will always feel relatively easy but resist the temptation to add speed, over time this is an invaluable session that you will appreciate come race day.
When it comes to using speed training in your program it does not always mean pushing the limits and risking injury, it can be done in a controlled way to really unlock some great advances in your fitness.
Do something different this year in your training and you will be amazed at the progress you can make over doing your regular winter of base miles!
Enjoy your training.
Coach Alun “Woody” Woodward
ironguides is the leading Lifestyle Facilitation company for athletes of all abilities. We provide coaching and training services, plans and programs, as well training education, health and fitness products to help you learn and live a healthy lifestyle. Come get fit with one of our monthly training subscriptions, event-specific training plans, coaching services, or a triathlon training camp in an exotic location! ironguides also provides Corporate Health services including Corporate Triathlons, Healthy Living retreats and speaking engagements. At ironguides, your best is our business!
Train with ironguides!
Personalized Online Coaching: Starting at USD190/month
Monthly Training plans (for all levels, or focused on one discipline): Only USD39/months
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Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)
Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)
Ironman (USD145 for 20-week plan)
X-Terra (USD65 for 12-week plan)
Running Plans (10k, 21k and 42k – starting at USD40)
Alun “Woody” Woodward, Coach, ironguides.net
As the New year is well under way its a great time to take a step back and review where you are with your training. We all get over excited with the start of the new year and push harder in training with the prospect of racing again now much closer!
While the race season is indeed approaching rapidly in training terms it is still quite a way in the distance and now is not the time to be training all guns blazing with the end goal in sight! Most of you will be training for a major Ironman race mid summer which is likely to be around 5-6 months away still and right now your focus should still be on building the base of speed and strength before any major endurance work begins.
While speed and strength is what we are looking to build at this time of year we must remember that this building process has to be a step by step, imagine building a house we have to go one brick at a time in order to have a well structured house. The new year always brings that little bit of extra enthusiasm in some athletes and at the same time fear in others that forces us to push a little bit too hard and try to rush the gains in fitness. The results of this enthusiasm are clear to see with the body, if we are pushing too hard then breakdowns will start to occur. These breakdowns can be in the form of illness due to a compromised immune system or small niggles or injuries from pushing the muscles too hard too soon.
Sickness
Illness is inevitable at some point, there is no way we can avoid this but if you are constantly falling ill every 2-3 weeks then this is a sign your immune system has been comprised. When we train we are putting our body under stress and this stress is needed in order to stimulate progress in fitness. If we do not allow the body enough recovery when training then stress levels build up and the result is a compromised immune system than is not able to ward off sickness as easily as normal and so we end picking up more infections.
Our training programs are designed with recovery build in but if you start pushing a little harder than planned in your sessions then the recovery in that plan will no longer be sufficient to the work load.
So if you have found you are getting sick more than normal recently maybe its time to review your training plan and check you are training at the right levels and not pushing too hard. Pushing too hard is not only something that occurs on your hard key sessions but more often than not it is the long easy endurance sessions that are designed to be slow and steady that end up being done with too much intensity that lead to breakdowns.
I find this is a major problem especially with runners who come to triathlon with the mentality that long runs need to be done at marathon pace, we have to remember that we are triathletes and we have residual fitness coming from 3 sports so the specific requirements of certain sessions to a single sport athlete are not always the same to us! The long run in our programs is for many an active recovery session designed to deliver more oxygen to tired and recovering muscles and speed up recovery from the intensity of previous sessions.
Injuries
If your training and have a little injury or niggle going on then now is the time to get this looked at and do something to remedy the problem, all too often we think these issues will just go away and we ignore and train through the pain. What happens when we do this is not only do we make the existing injury worse and delay any healing process we also invite compensatory injuries to take place. For example of you have a sore hip going on when you run, if you do not fix this problem and keep on training your running mechanics will be altered to compensative for any lack of movement in this area and resultantly you can expect to start developing tightness in your legs and this can eventually lead to further injuries.
Pain when you move is not normal and should not be ignored, seeking professional help at the time of injury can get you back on track very quickly whereas waiting until the pain is so bad you simply can’t train anymore before seeking help will put you out of action for a long time. It may be a case of simply getting some massage or changing position on the bike so seek help and make sure you do not lose precious training time.
We all watch and read about the stars of our sport and how they train and we can read about amazing swim, bike and run sets but what we rarely see is the little things they do on the side of their main program to keep there bodies in one piece and maintain training consistency. We all tend to develop little issues such and a tight back, achilles pain, knee pain etc. These are most often caused by muscle tension brought on by slightly off perfect mechanics. The more you train the more these issues are highlighted and the more problems exist, successful athletes are not the athletes who have perfect mechanics and do not get these issues they are the athletes who make sure they look after the side effects of these poor mechanics regularly with stretching, foam rolling, massage or corrective exercises.
Patience is key right now, great results and breakthrough performances do not come from big sessions and pushing harder in certain sessions they come from consistent training over long periods of time, always remember consistency is key and sickness and injuries are the two major obstacles to your consistency.
Enjoy your training.
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By Vinnie Santana, Coach, ironguides.net
Taking a break at the holidays season and end of year is normal but this puts you in a very unique situation, you do want to race well early in the season, but feel a little out of shape from the lack of training and weight gain from the holidays.
The 6 tips below will help you handle this situation better and make the most out of your early season races
1.All athletes are on the same boat
Taking an yearly break (passive or active) is something every athlete should be doing, it gives the body some healing time and will boost motivation for the upcoming season. Even professional triathletes may take a few weeks of very little training every year.
Certainly, there’s always someone who will be targeting that early season race and will prefer to have their off-season in the middle of the year, but that’s usually not normal and you will then have an advantage over those athletes later in the year.
If you are a competitive triathlete, most of your competition is on the same boat as you at this time of the year.
2. Ignore most early season training indicators
You must understand that you don’t need to be at peak shape early in the season and most athletes tend to compare their current fitness only with their best past performances. If you have a key workout that you do year around, for example a 20km time trial on the bike, and early in the season your performance is 10% worse than what you were able to do at the end of last season, this may hurt your confidence leading into your events, but what you don’t remember are the other not so great sessions you had later in the season. Most athletes can only remember the great days and tend to benchmark against them. While in reality, on average you may be only 3-5% slower than your past average performance.
Your training goal at this phase is to build a good consistency and manage training while fatigued, this can result on a slower than normal training speed, but it’s the most effective way to get in shape in the pre-season.
3. Race Day Benefits: Build experience, gain motivation and race fitness
Have you noticed the boost of motivation you get immediately after you sign up for an event? This is a great way to kickstart your season and get you training harder and with more discipline earlier in the season which will get you stronger to your key events later in the year.
To get some races under your belt early in the season will also provide you a real race-day feedback on your fitness and may expose some weakness that you weren’t aware of, you will then have plenty of time to fix these before your main events later in the year.
Race day experience is also never a negative thing, the more races you do, more your ‘learn’ how to race, from handling pre-race pressure, to dealing with traveling and race day pacing. Better you will perform at the key events.
4.Race day: Low risk, high returns strategies
With very low race day expectations you will find yourself with two options when it comes to race day strategies:
a. If your goal is to use the event to build your fitness and acquire more experience, opt for a more conservative strategy and aim to negative split each discipline, start out slow and finish stronger. This is a bonk-proof strategy and will help you achieve your goals.
b. Another option is to use these events to try different things that you wouldn’t normally risk on major events. For example, if you know you can run well after a conservative bike split, but have always wondered how much slower your run would be after riding hard, a low key race is a great option to test this. Try pushing and doing things on race day that are the opposite to your usual strategy. Other than an intense training day, this may also provide you feedback (either from a good surprise or a terrible blow up) on your ideal race day performance.
5. Schedule events that will build your fitness to your key races
Sign up for smaller races in the pre-season that will serve as stepping stones and build your fitness and develop you to the key events later in the year. The best way to achieve that is going from general fitness to specific racing, also known as ‘reversed periodization’.
For example if your targeted race is an Ironman or Ironman 70.3, sign up for short course races early in the year as they will provide you enough speed and strength allowing you to focus on the more specific work later in the year.
If your key race is in a short course format, then consider doing a long distance race early in the year as this will also provide you several benefits that you won’t get from your short course racing, for example pacing and nutrition will be essential for your ‘training race’ success.
The key rule here is to understand that ‘base’ training means going from general to specific fitness, not necessarily the traditional long and slow to fast and short (Bompa prediodization), this idea was created on single discipline sports that are very quick, such as pool swimming events and track running.
6. Experiment with different mental strategies
Now that we’ve discussed several opportunities for your body to perform better on race day, it’s time to also experiment with something new but for the mindset. It is normal that you’ve developed a certain pre-race routine and that some stress comes with the main events of the year, people react differently to this and if you are under-performing on your key events, the culprit could be the mindset.
Many athletes have never been able to race compeltely stress-free and using low-key events early in the year is a perfect opportunity for this. Enter race week with absolutely no expectations for race day other than do a ‘brick session’, avoid using a watch, GPS or powermeter, go ‘by feel’. You may find yourself not only enjoying the race a lot more, but also having a great performance as a result of such a relaxed state.
Enjoy your training.
Vinnie Santana
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Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)
Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)
Ironman (USD145 for 20-week plan)
X-Terra (USD65 for 12-week plan)
Running Plans (10k, 21k and 42k – starting at USD40)
Your last race of the season is behind you and it is time to take that well deserved break. However you know how much work you put in to get to where you are right now, and if you would like to preserve most of your new fitness level, you should stay active in the off-season while you train certain things.
Approach it as a maintenance phase rather than aiming to improve. You know you will lose some fitness and that is part of the process as it will give your body a break and boost your motivation for next season, however, to stay fit you still need to do some work, especially if you are a beginner without a swimming background. The list below will provide you a guideline on what you should do:
Minimum once a week, ideally twice. Swimming is a very skilled sport that you lose the feel for it very fast, unlike cycling or running. Use a different pool or swim open water if you can to mix things up a little
You don’t need to swim for too long or too intensity, but just being in the water and do some laps will maintain your feel for it. Twenty minutes is enough.
Whenever you are out, do a quick set of speed or strength in any of the disciplines, these are the core of your fitness and unlike endurance if you loose it, it takes longer to recover.
On the bike or run you can head to the hills and just let the course help you with your effort, ride it hard up and run it fast down. In the pool do some casual sprints across the pool.
It’s not just physical. Your challenge right now is not so much to recover physically as that you need to give yourself a rest from all things triathlon.
Enjoy your training and have a great end of season!
Vinnie
ironguides is the leading Lifestyle Facilitation company for athletes of all abilities. We provide coaching and training services, plans and programs, as well training education, health and fitness products to help you learn and live a healthy lifestyle. Come get fit with one of our monthly training subscriptions, event-specific training plans, coaching services, or a triathlon training camp in an exotic location! ironguides also provides Corporate Health services including Corporate Triathlons, Healthy Living retreats and speaking engagements. At ironguides, your best is our business!
Train with ironguides!
Personalized Online Coaching: Starting at USD190/month
Monthly Training plans (for all levels, or focused on one discipline): Only USD39/months
Event based training plans:
Sprint Distance (USD45 for 8-week plan)
Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)
Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)
Ironman (USD145 for 20-week plan)
X-Terra (USD65 for 12-week plan)
Running Plans (10k, 21k and 42k – starting at USD40)
By Coach Alun Woodward
At ironguides, our whole philosophy is based upon improving one step at a time or, as we like to call it, brick by brick. As coaches we are here to guide you in your fitness journey and take you to where you want to go.
The first thing we need to know from an athlete, though, is where it is that you want to go—what do you want to achieve? Once an athlete, and her coach, knows the key goal we are aiming for, it is time to get to work.
As we head into the off-season, now is the perfect time for novice and experienced athletes alike to sit down with their coaches, family and friends, or simply by themselves, to determine the goals for the coming year.
Off-season is always an exciting time for many athletes; the race season is finished and we are looking ahead to the future and all the big improvements we will make over the coming months. We see ourselves being more dedicated than ever, following routines that we failed to follow this year; we promise ourselves we will not be lazy this year; we will not have that cheesecake so often; we will not stay in the office so long; and we will not press the snooze button so often in the morning and miss swim practice.
We all see how we can improve, we all believe we will improve but habit is habit and after just a short few weeks we all fall back into our lazy routine. Never forget that this is human nature. We are born lazy. We are created to feed and survive—once that’s done it’s time to rest! Take lions, for example, once they have caught their prey and eaten their fill, they will literally do nothing until they need to feed again. We are not really all that different, primarily speaking.
So, is there a way around our natural laziness? What can we do to make sure we stay on path and fulfill our goals?
The good news is that there are many ways to do break our habits and make sure we stay focused on pursuing our athletic dreams. Looking at the top athletes, we find some great examples. Let’s look at some ideas about how to make this coming season the best ever.
PUBLIC HUMILIATION
This has to be one of the most motivating of all methods, which is quite simply stating publicly what you are going to do. There are many ways to do this, either via a blog, at the office, within your local tri club. No matter which public avenue you choose, this will have an amazing effect.
When you’re tired one morning and the thought of the cold swimming pool is not going to get you out of bed, you will remember what you said, you will remember why and what the consequences will be if you just roll over and go back to sleep as maybe you did the year before.
One classic example of this strategy has to be two-time Ironman World Champion Chris McCormack: we always hear about his goals, what he is going to do and who he is going to beat as he publicly announces it as often as possible. It’s the fuel he needs to get out there and train and, needless to say, it works amazingly well for him.
IN YOUR FACE
Put your goals on paper and stick them some place you will see them every single day. Put them on the mirror in the bathroom, on the wall in your toilet or in front of your dining table. We can all set goals and most of us do. We also write them down but, honestly, once that’s done most athletes will never see that piece of paper again and the goals simply do not become reinforced or important.
WE NEED TO SEE OUR GOALS EVERY DAY
Once we start seeing our goals every day, we make sure that we take steps every day to achieve them. Visually reminded of our goals on a daily basis, we subconsciously make better decisions throughout the day. Say, your goal is to reduce body fat. A visual cue by way of a note on your desk reminding you of this every day will make you think twice before taking the doughnut offered around during lunch. If you did not see or think about the goal for a few weeks, it is much easier to cave in and grab the doughnut—after all, what difference is one doughnut going to make?!
MINI TARGETS
Set goals along the way so that they are in the here and now, rather than only for six to eight months down the road. Having a target so far away is rarely productive as it’s easy to lose sight of that in the short term. We always think we have time before we REALLY need to focus. This is the most common situation with athletes and they are so relaxed until they realize it’s too late and they only have a few weeks to get fit! These are the athletes who cram their training and get injured as a result, these are the athletes who you will always hear saying NEXT YEAR, NEXT YEAR is when I will be more disciplined, prepare better and earlier, this will never happen again. But it happens every year.
So let’s see what you can implement from all this to make next year your best ever.
First, let’s set some goals. Maybe your swim has always let you down as you spend most of your time focussed on the run and the bike. Let’s make swim the primary focus for a while. Maybe add one extra swim session a week or a couple of swim camps (4-day swim-specific blocks) over the period of the next two months.
On top of that, set a performance target to achieve at the end of this block. If you can swim all day, but speed is your limiter then set a target to work on speed. Maybe a simple set of 4×100 ALL OUT beginning on a 5-minute start time with the goal of hitting all below 1:30. On the other hand, if you can swim very fast but struggle with race distance then we can make endurance the target. Push the boundaries and target a 5km continuous swim as your goal. Once you achieve your goal make sure it’s maintained. Test once every two or three weeks to make sure you’re not losing all your hard-earned advances.
TAKE CARE
Old-school training methods coming out of Germany had athletes divide the winter into 3 blocks with 2 months of swim focus, followed by 2 months of run focus and then ending with 2 months of bike training. The aim was high mileage for the blocks in the chosen sport and just very minimal maintenance work in the other sports.
What this achieved, unfortunately, was amazing swimming in January, amazing running but a fading swim in March and then, as the season approached, an amazing bike performance with a terrible swim and an average run.
Never forgEt, we train in 3 sports and key sessions need to be there every week. We should focus more on 2 sports at any one time as we practice with The Method to advance in performance but we never neglect development in all 3.
Always remember, goals are individual and what will make one athlete faster may significantly slow another down—make sure the goal is significant for you and will help you move forward.
Let’s make 2014 the one where we show what you really can do, one where you do not get in your own way and end up following your normal path to destruction. Sit down with your coach, family and friends and have them tell you your weakness, have them tell you where you need to improve, and write it down and then display it so you see every day.
Make your roadmap of where you want to get to next season and then start on your way, building
brick by brick toward the new you.
By Alun ‘Woody’ Woodward, Certified ironguides Coach – UK/Hungary.
* * * Your best is our business.™ * * *
ironguides is the leading Lifestyle Facilitation company for athletes of all abilities. We provide coaching and training services, plans and programs, as well training education, health and fitness products to help you learn and live a healthy lifestyle. Come get fit with one of our monthly training subscriptions, event-specific training plans, coaching services, or a triathlon training camp in an exotic location! ironguides also provides Corporate Health services including Corporate Triathlons, Healthy Living retreats and speaking engagements. At ironguides, your best is our business!
Train with ironguides!
Personalized Online Coaching: Starting at USD190/month
Monthly Training plans (for all levels, or focused on one discipline): Only USD39/months
Event based training plans:
Sprint Distance (USD45 for 8-week plan)
Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)
Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)
Ironman (USD145 for 20-week plan)
X-Terra (USD65 for 12-week plan)
Running Plans (10k, 21k and 42k – starting at USD40)
Coach Alun “Woody” Woodward
ironguides is the leading Lifestyle Facilitation company for athletes of all abilities. We provide coaching and training services, plans and programs, as well training education, health and fitness products to help you learn and live a healthy lifestyle. Come get fit with one of our monthly training subscriptions, event-specific training plans, coaching services, or a triathlon training camp in an exotic location! ironguides also provides Corporate Health services including Corporate Triathlons, Healthy Living retreats and speaking engagements. At ironguides, your best is our business!
Train with ironguides!
Personalized Online Coaching: Starting at USD190/month
Monthly Training plans (for all levels, or focused on one discipline): Only USD39/months
Event based training plans:
Sprint Distance (USD45 for 8-week plan)
Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)
Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)
Ironman (USD145 for 20-week plan)
X-Terra (USD65 for 12-week plan)
Running Plans (10k, 21k and 42k – starting at USD40)
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