Often, training plans are designed to optimize the performance of an athlete at a moment of his life, to produce a peak shape for a period of competition, at the scale of a season. But none is really interested in optimizing performance over the long term, over several decades.
Sustainable training is optimizing your potential not for a season, not even for the few years of our lifetime peak performance, but over the long term, at 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 ... optimizing training at the scale of human life.
As discussed below, the concept of sustainable practice is incompatible with very high level performance: you will not get an Olympic medal or to be among the best in your country by following its precepts. However, anyone having realized and admitted that he would not become rich or famous by sport should think about sustainable training, the application of principles encouraging an active sporting life, with its share of rewards and level of performance, in harmony with its professional and social environment, and preserving his health.
Of course, everyone reacts differently, both physically and psychologically, and at the end of the day everyone will find its way, but from my too long experience (40 years of sport), here are 10 precepts for sustainable training.
1) Seek performance!
There can be no sport without search for performance. The fun of sport is the quest for performance. Everyone needs to set its objective, realistic but ambitious, depending on age, genetic capacity, availability for training ... Of course, performance levels can be very different: for one, performing can mean an Olympic medal, for another, it may be beating a fellow colleague, or make a podium in his age group, or finish in the first half. Whatever the goal, the important thing is to set a performance target and train according to this goal!
2) Race unrestrained!
No performance without racing. The race is the moment of truth, when the training proves to be adequate or not, and when performance is measured. When racing, you will feel the adrenaline rush when you put on your bib, and you will feel the mounting tension before departure, you will confront the other, and experience the elation of the fight, you will go well beyond anything you could do in training. No good race without good training, but no good training without races, because it is the only way to set real goals and maintain motivation throughout the year. Any competition is good to take, as the seasons or injuries passes, according to the tastes, capacities and opportunities: cross-country, aquathlon, duathlon, indoor rowing, cross country skiing, trail ... and regardless of whether you end in the first or last. You must try everything, for fun, to keep alive the spark of the competition. And if you did not like the competition, you wouldn't be doing triathlon, anyway.
3) Seek speed!
Over time, the natural tendency is slower and longer. Moving further and further, longer and longer, more and more slowly. With age, we tend to push our tolerance to pain, improve our mindset, and we believe to compensate the inevitable physiological decline.
We must fight against this psychological and physiological trend. Sport must not become a pure, perverse, masochistic pleasure of endurance. We must constantly fight to never lose the simple and healthy pleasure of speed. Series of 25 freestyle all out, bike sprints to the road sign, 30/30 series in running ... everything is good in order to clear the machine, work speed, and experience the sheer pleasure of speed, flying on the track or hover over the water!
4) Forget about a longer life!
Many do sports for years in the illusory hope of extending their life. Nothing could be more wrong. Top athletes die young. Practiced intensely, sport wears the body. Intense effort results in oxidation, and make us age prematurely. Just take a look at sport medicine cabinets, look at all these injured athletes. To have a long life, you just need to eat healthy food, to sleep well, to avoid smoking, and walk half an hour a day, not more. The aim of the sportsman must be to improve his quality of life, not its quantity. To put more life in his life, not make it longer.
5) Keep your training volume low!
Best for health is probably to have a daily half-hour's brisk walk - or 3-4h of moderate sports weekly.
Everything we do in addition improves our performance, but takes us away from this ideal, and undermines our health, and our social, family and work life.
The best compromise between health, performance and social and professional life is probably something between 7 and 9 training hours a week.
To optimize performance with a low volume, there is an underestimated secret: transfer.
As everyone knows, one can roughly distinguish three metabolic systems: endurance, threshold, and speed. The secret is that it is not necessary to work these three regimes in three sports.
The easiest way is to work endurance in cycling once a week, threshold in swimming (with 100, 200, 400 intervalls...) twice a week and speed in running once or twice a week.
Thanks to the power of transfer, speed training in running will benefit cycling and swimming, endurance training in cycling will benefit swimming and running, and threshold training in swimming will benefit cycling and running! Of course, this is a basic scheme, and nothing prevents from time to time to do some threshold work when cycling on a hill, or having a long, slow run, or doing some all out 25 freestyle!
By working this way, 7 hours of weekly training are enough to get a respectable performance - say an age group podium at a local race.
6) Avoid Ironman!
Whatever you can read, human beings are not made to swim 2.4 miles, ride 112 and run 26.2. Racing an Ironman is extremely harsh for the body - it can take months to recover. The motivation for doing an IM is often murky: most often, one will just want to prove something to himself, or to other people. It is conceivable to race a few of them, to win a lifetime finisher bragging right, but once the inferiority complex has been resolved, and once you made it clear to yourself that you have nothing to prove to yourself or to anybody, stop doing it. You cannot do IM and comply with the precepts of seeking performance and minimizing volume. Performing on IM requires too much training: too much damage on health, too much impact on family and professional life... Of course, you can train moderately, without looking for high performance, for the simple sake of being a “finisher” ... but in this case you could make a nice mountain hike, walk or bike as well: it's cheaper and it is more beautiful! In addition, preparing an IM requires such an emotional, physical and financial investment that the slightest failure takes on dramatic proportions since it questions of a whole year preparation (post-IM depression), and that the precept of unrestrained racing cannot be applied. So: no IM - or at most one every 4 or 5 years to satisfy your vanity.
7) Listen to your body!
Young people can do just about anything, their body will react and accommodate. If you push too hard, you will get hurt, of course, but you will heal quickly. As we age, this is less true: injuries tend to become more frequent: muscle tears, cartilage cracks, tendinitis .... and injuries take more and more time to heal. I have come to consider that the most limiting factor for master performance is not reduction in cardiac capacity or strength, but the ability to support intense training without getting injured. Fortunately, experience can partially compensate for this. According to the ancient aphorism "Know thyself", you will know your weaknesses well, and listen to early signs of your failures (the light pain in the calf barely perceptible before ripping...) to anticipate and avoid injury.
8) Reduce running as much as possible!
Running is by far the most traumatic of our sports. Repeated impact can only damage our cartilage, tendons and muscles. Doctors are drowning in visiting runners victim of early osteoarthritis.
It is imperative to minimize the amount of running. For my part, I stick to 1 or maximum 2 hours per week. Tunning has of course become a major weakness in competition, but this is a price to pay to stay healthy. And luckily enough, transfers help me keep an acceptable level. So work hard on the bike and swim, that will help you keep a strong enough run, without having to train more than 2 hours a week.
9) Avoid stretching!
Some people still believe that stretching prevent injuries. But numerous studies have shown that in our sport, stretching can actually decrease performance and increase the risk of injury. Having long been a victim of the usual prejudice in favour of stretching, I feel much better since I stopped stretching. Losing flexibility is part of aging, we must accept it and live with this fact. Unless one is considering a career in ballet, he needs to accept that flexibility is not really needed, and will however eventually disappear.
10) Prioritize health, family and job!
Just look around you to understand that athletic performance comes far behind health, work and family life as a factor in happiness. There can be no sustainable practice of athletic training without some level of acceptance and even approval of the home environment. It is therefore necessary to prioritize things based on this observation: performance can only come after family and job, and cannot be built at the expense of health.
The best course is to share your sport. Do a triathlon family relay for fun for example. Of course problem may arise because of the fitness difference with a less trained partner, but it is possible to have very valuable workouts, in accordance with the precept of performance, with very different levels. In swimming: cross the bay together while your spouse wears fins and paddles. When running, warm up and cool down jogging together, then do some interval training jogging back during rest time. In biking: teach your spouse to draft properly, work on your aero position opening the road gently on the flat, and climb hard every hill twice to catch up, etc. etc...
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