Just re-posting to bring this one back to the top ;-)



and would welcome any remarks from readers besides Fleck as well.



if I'm gonna try this approach I need to start planning!!!

I have seen this sort of approach work when it is applied over an entire training block. For example, dramatically increasing your riding miles for three weeks, the decreasing for a recovery week, then repeating with the run miles for a month, swim yardage for a month, etc. This approach allows the athlete to keep a moderate level of fitness in the other two diciplines while really stressing the third for an extended period of time. Focusing on only on dicipline a week doesn't really allow the athlete to stress the dody enough to effect a change other than some overtraining. When you do a camp, you're effecting all three diciplines at once, stressing the body in a maximum way, then recovering. To similarly strss the body in one sport, you would need to do it over a more extended period of time.

tommy

The book Time Saving Strategies for Multisport Athletes (or something like that) advocates the "go hard on 1 sport for a block" strategy, rather than just for 1 week, mentioned in the post above.

Chip - sorry for the delay in posting. Been sick in bed for the last few days with a head cold.

I have no experience with the program that you have suggested - go hard for one week in each sport, essentially. I have seen Dan Emfield extolling this advice. Perhaps Dan has some direct experience with it that he could share with us.

You are right that the concept of true periodization is lost on most triathletes. Why?

1. They don't know what "going easy" is.

2. With three sports on the go it always seems to be a challenge to squeeze it all in in one week, thus the tendancy to go overboard a all the time(see #1)

That being said, I will say it again, that if there is a silver bullet to any endurance sport training -and in absolute truth there is no such thing - but if there were it would be to truely periodize the training. To go really hard when it is time to go hard and go really easy when it is time to go easy. This concept is completely lost on many. The concept goes back to basic muscle physiology - overload a muscle and then let it recover and it comes back stronger. The problem is that many never recover enough thus they never get the full benefits of the training.

If I stepped back from my training over the 15 years that I was at it seriously, the one pattern that was evident was that there was at least one big week almost every month of the year. There was also one week every month of the year when I would do next to nothing.

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

I read an article on the training done by the Norwegian x-c ski team. An analysis of the team overall said basically the same thing. It was that they went too hard and not long enough on their easy days so they never could work hard enough on the hard days.