Getting the most from your off season
If you're living in the Southern Hemisphere, then chances are you are slogging your way through another winter. In the racing season, Ollie Allen, an experienced coach who runs the successful triathlon coaching group Tri-Alliance, is usually found at races doing what most coaches do best, drinking coffee and looking unassuming. Meanwhile the Allen mind is ticking overtime as his charges get out there and tear it up. Here Ollie gives us a few tips to help make your off season a good one.
Build a strong consistent running base
Ask almost any experienced triathlete and you will find that one of the keys to maintaining fitness in the off-season is to be consistent with your weekly run volume. This will build the small muscles, tendons, and ligaments in the lower leg, thus allowing you to run greater miles at higher intensities in the future.
For your off-season run training, try to reduce the frequency of your runs. If you are running 5 days a week for example, try just 3 or 4 runs per week.
Try to maintain some track sessions with drills incorporated into the sessions, perhaps after the warm up. Drills help you to not forget how to run fast!
Keep up with your weekly long run, as this tends to be the hardest one to develop. If you maintain a regular long run, you won't have to start from scratch when you do training closer to race season. You will already have a decent fitness level to build on.
Improve cycling and swimming technique
Cold, dark, and rainy. Yes, these are the kind of days we have been seeing of late, with 3 degree mornings in some places, placing morning rides on the back burner for many people. But fear not!!! These freezing cold mornings are good for some things, as they mean more time indoors on a wind trainer. This offers an excellent opportunity for:
Isolated leg and spinning drills.
Take the emphasis off of trying to gain swim fitness, and putting more emphasis on improving stroke technique through drills and professional opinion.
Improve your Power-to-Weight Ratio
You have two athletes of the same height, the same fitness, the same aerobic capacity, yet athlete 1 weighs 70kg, and athlete 2 weighs 77kg. This means that athlete 1 will have the greater power-to-weight ratio, and therefore be faster than athlete 2. It doesn't seem fair does it? They have the same levels of fitness as each other, it's just that athlete 2 weighs a bit more. In order for the two to become more even matched, athlete 2 needs to lose weight.
How can I lose weight? This questions seems to be the most asked question in the world these days, even though the answer is incredibly simple: Calories in < Calories out.
Burn more calories than you eat on a consistent basis and you will lose weight over time.You can increase the amount of calories your body burns by increasing your metabolism. Since it takes more calories per day to maintain muscle than to maintain fat, the best way to speed up your metabolism is to increase your lean muscle mass. You add lean muscle mass by adding weight training to your weekly exercise regimen, and perhaps adding a whey protein powder to your diet to be consumed after exercise.
If you are the kind of person that starts getting those 3.30pm hunger issues, this style of eating will also help you, as it will decrease the chances of you reaching for that overly indulgent snack every day.
We were designed to "graze" on food throughout the day, so it only makes sense to eat the way nature intended us to eat.
Positive mind set
OK, so here's the section that most people skip over. I mean, what incredible benefit could a positive mind set have on the way i train? Sure, it'll help a little bit, but not that much. Right? Well, sorry all you non-believers.....you'd be WRONG!
A positive mind set can be the difference between you actually doing a session, or remaining seated on that couch in front of the TV. It could be the difference between you doing that interval session at 80% effort like you're coach wanted you to do, or you doing the interval session at 70% effort. It really is a big contributor to performance.
Think back to a time when you've woken up on the wrong side of the bed, had a terrible day at work, the cafe that you go to for lunch had run out of chicken AND avocado for the chicken and avocado focaccia that you usually buy, and you're boss made you stay back after knock off time to do some extra work. Well, maybe that didn't all happen in one day, but it made you feel pretty crappy when it came round to training didn't it? And all because you were in a negative mind set So try to stay in that positive mind set at all times.
Be a "the glass is half full" kind of person, and it's a guarantee that your training will benefit from.
