Question: LSD? Tempo?? Steady State??? What to do!!??
Rich Strauss: As I see it, the issues are intensity, the appropriate intensity, and the appropriate combination of volume and intensity (when, how much, etc)
- Intensity: Two points:
- “Functional” and relative intensity: whenever possible we encourage athletes to use the functional metrics of pace on the run and power on the bike. Intensities are therefore described in relation to what you’ve actually proven you can do in testing or training. For example, a prescription to run 1 mile at 9:00 pace is based on your tested ability to run a 5k in xx:xx. Much less guesswork, in other words. Similar on the bike and, if you don’t have power, there are still many lessons you can learn about training with heart rate from the power-training world.
- “Fitness is in the muscles,” that is, when you move from z1 to z2 to z3, etc, what is happening is you are recruiting a larger and larger percentage of available slowtwitch fibers, then fast twitch fibers, etc. Think of it as a tug of war team, with Slowtwitch guys on the rope and Fastwitch guys on the bench. As the requirement to pull harder increases, more and more slowtwitch guys are put to work and you eventually start to pull fast twitch guys off the bench and put them on the rope. Two things:
- You need to recruit a muscle fiber to get it to improve it’s ability to pull on rope or pedal a bike. So if all you ever do is ride or run z2, for example, you’re leaving a good bit of your ST squad, and all of your FT squad on the bench. They won’t improve.
- At z4, you’ve now got all of your ST squad on the rope, becoming better ST fibers, and all/most of your FT squad on the rope, becoming better at what they do and, some of them, even begin to take on the characteristics of ST fibers.
The net is that by exercising at z3-z4 we are getting all of the tasty, go-longer, z1-2 adaptions as well as the very tasty z3-4 go-faster adaptations.
Appropriate Intensity: should probably put all of that functional jazz down here, I suppose. Jack Daniels Running Formula and VDot offer us a very proven structure within which to prescribe appropriate intensity, given an athlete’s current tested fitness. Power training offers us the same opportunity on the bike and these tools can be easily transferred to heart rate based training. In addition, I’d like to point out that, in all my years of Ironman coaching I’ve never seen an athlete become injured on the bike by riding too hard…unless they ran into something
I firmly believe you can’t start too soon to get fast on the bike by…riding very fast, a lot. The question is the proper combination of intensity and volume, see below.
Appropriate combination of volume and intensity. This is where people screw it up. We recommend that rather than thinking in terms of Base 1,2.3, Build 1,2, etc, you think of the movement of training through the year as from General Preparation to Race Specific Preparation:
General Prep: I want to get fast and prepare myself for the race specific training that happens later. I do lots of high intensity cycling and an appropriate amount of high intensity running, while keeping the volume low. Volume is kept low primarily because, as an age group athlete, I owe it to myself, my family, and my sanity to keep it as low as I can for as long as I can. So I keep the hours short but put a lot work in those hours, making myself faster and preserving SAUs (Spousal Approval Units) for when I really need them, in the Race Prep phase
Race Preparation Phase: ask yourself “what are the requirements of the race?” I focus on Ironman training so my answer is “I need to be able to lock myself in the aero position and be very comfortable, while eating and drinking at my z2 effort. Then I need to come off the bike and run, a long time, at my z2 effort.” So I do more of _that_ and less get-faster training. Along the way I sort out things like race nutrition, bike fit, hydration and sodium needs, etc. In other words, the volume goes up because volume is a requirement of the race. I turn down the intensity to accommodate the volume and to ensure I’m working within race specific intensities.
The key, and this is a big one, is that by thinking in terms of General Prep and Race Prep, you separate high intensity, get-faster training from lower intensity, get-longer training. This separation is absolutely critical. I like to say “Build FAST, then put FAR under it.”
Traditional Pitfalls:
- Focusing on volume as the primary training input, with intensity always kept low: see my tug of war dealio above. If all you ever do is ride 18mph, how do you ever expect to ride 21mph on race day? If you want to ride fast you have to ride fast. If you want to run fast you have to run fast. Yes, you can make yourself run faster by running more and more often, but I’d rather figure out how to keep someone healthy and make them faster with 4hrs of running per week than spend weeks build up to and sitting on 7-9hrs of running per week. It’s simply more time efficient.
- “I spend months and months putting in the time at z1-2, earning permission to do the harder work later in the season to make me faster.” However, later in the season = closer to the race = requirement for volume increases = trying to do intensity + volume at the same time = sleeping under your desk at work.
Additional notes:
- Swimming: most people can tolerate high intensity for every swim workout. Very low risk, in other words.
- Cycling: with proper integration into the training plan as a whole, most people can tolerate, and do well, with a good bit of intensity. During the offseason we prescribe our workouts as main sets only, with only volume “suggestions,” which is to say you’re fine to warmup 5′, drill the main set (20-40′ total) and get off the bike. In general “the shorter the ride the harder the ride.”
- Running: yes, there needs to be a period of consistent, injury free running to adapt the lower legs for running, and prepare them for harder running. However, in my experience, most people asking themselves the question “how do I get faster” are usually doing so after a (long) period of typical z1-2 type work, ie, they’ve made those adaptations.
Finally, everything depends on how all of this stuff above is mixed into a training week: Monday works with Tues works with Wednesday, etc. The biggest mistake I see with Ironman athletes, from a weekly template perspective, is the Saturday long bike followed by a Sunday long run. At some point (usually around a 3.5hr long bike and 2hr+ long run) the combination of the two begins to severely impact downstream workouts until Monday and Tues are basically a wash.
Hope this helps,
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