Does cycling effect motor coordination of the leg during running in elite triathletes?
Andrew R. Chapman, Bill Vicenzino, Peter Blanch, Steve Dowlan, Paul W. Hodges
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I don't know if I have permission to repost the study. I was given it by a woman who was advising my wife when she was trying to make the Olympic team for Canada. So not sure about usage. This study is from AIS & University of Brisbane.
The general conclusions - and it's important to note that they were examining ELITE (!) triathletes (no discussion of what "elite" meant though) - were that:
1) there is a huge variance in how coordinated athletes are in running off the bike. I.e., some were very good, and the EMG analysis showed that they transferred from cycling-specific lower-leg muscle recruitment patterns to running-specific lower-leg muscle recruitment patterns almost immediately
2) for those that did NOT make the "switch" immediately, there was evidence of improvement as a result of targeted transition-run training. This is based off a comparison of the results of this study - which used elite athletes - with previous studies using non-elites that showed that elites demonstrated more rapid and complete changeover in muscle recruitment patterns; obviously some room here for bias, as it's possible to conclude that - at least looking only at this study and it's conclusions - that it wasn't the training, rather it was a predisposition to being able to effectively change that made these athletes elite. It's a bit of a chicken and egg. Are they elite because they naturally demonstrate a the ability to rapidly change recruitment? Or did they develop it? It's worth noting that, per #1, there was substantial variance in how quickly/completely changeover did occur.
Sample size was small, and obviously enormously biased based off self-selection. Only 16 athletes, and all of them falling into a small niche.
Looking at this in conjunction with other studies, it seems reasonable to conclude the running off the bike is a skill, and like most skills, some people have more natural aptitude for it than others but that those who do not have natural aptitude can improve it through practice.
Given the admitted variance in skill level, I think it'd be foolish (in reply to another poster) to try to estimate "time savings" from doing transition runs vs. not doing them. It's like swimming in a wetsuit in training sometimes. How much is it worth, time wise? I dunno. Some people are very comfortable just getting in their wetsuit and swimming. But *in my experience,* a wetsuit changes your stroke enough - or should change it if you want to swim in your wetsuit most effectively - and certainly loads your shoulders more vs. non-wetsuit swimming that it's worth spending time swimming in your wetsuit besides just on race day. The obvious similarity to transition running (and riding the TT bike, etc) applies - the more overall experience you have, the less important it becomes. I.e., Andy Potts needs less practice in his wetsuit than an average AG athlete. And Macca, who has been racing for 20+ years, probably needs even less.
It's important, however, to recognize when something is a skill - like running off the bike - because it's makes it easier to understand why the more you have done it, the less you need to do it, and also why it is important to practice it - because it's fundamentally different (as the above study shows) than just running (at least in certain facets).
I'd say this is the huge fallacy that the EN coaches might be making in how they came to their faulty conclusion. They look over a large "data set" of past performances and make conclusions only based on that data set and apply them universally. I.e., it would be illogical to make training advice for new triathletes based off the experiences of seasoned triathletes
if you recognized appropriately that transition running is a skill. In other words, the very reason that you might conclude that it makes no difference if someone runs off the bike or not is because that person (or persons) has done so much running off the bike over the course of their career. The absence of this rather glaringly (to me) obvious factor in the EN blog post is striking. It's folly to universally downplay the benefit of bricks for triathletes who have very little experience running off the bike because of "data" gathered that could easily be skewed by a significant presence of athletes with a large amount of transition run experience. Given that EN is not exactly a newbie-oriented site/group, I think that's HIGHLY likely.
It's much more appropriate - though hardly revolutionary - to simply say something along the lines of "frequency of transition runs offers diminishing returns," and to suggest that, after you've been doing the sport for a while, it might be time to reconsider the frequency of bricks. That's a far cry from the very black-and-white prescription which they wrote on the blog that advises never doing t-runs. And people accused me of being black and white...
Head on over to Let'sRun and read Canova's description of his athlete's training leading into the World Champs for some insight into just how "gray" training actually is.
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