TigerBlood wrote:
I wonder how many people have read this entire thread (as I have), and are still not swayed either way by the arguments; but have lost a measure of respect for some of the posters therein.
I think there might be more than a few readers that agree with you.
But since a few others have gotten side-tracked into other topics, perhaps I can offer an explanation. It's not 100% black and white, but there is evidence to suggest that bike-run (and, actually, swim-bike) workouts do have benefits for triathlon, but there are some big caveats regarding exactly how you execute them.
So, about the article, I know little about EN, but the main issue is that their argument skirts the issue of training specificity, which has some evidence to back it up. But what is specificity? It is a training principle that essentially says that the best way to
train for 'X' is to
do 'X'.
As an analogy, training specificity says that the best way to learn to run a 10-miler as fast as possible is to train by running many 10-milers at the fastest pace you possibly can. However, while there is little disagreement that this is in principle correct, there are also some practical problems with this approach. For most athletes in most situations, while you would get a somewhat effective and highly specific training adaptation from running this way, the recovery penalty is just too great. You would need to spend too much time recovering from your many all-out 10-milers that your training progress, while it would be substantial, would not be as rapid as it could be.
And that is where the idea of interval training comes in. Basically, interval training allows you to get
nearly the same (but not
exactly the same) training adaptation as you would from running multiple all-out 10 milers, but the modified structure of interval training allows you to spend more time running faster with less time needed for recovery (during the workout, and after).
For triathlon, "bricks" are effective in getting training adaptations. But, much like running an all-out 10-miler, doing a tough brick session can also be very hard on your body. So should you do any brick training? Well, if you need to be fast off the bike, yes.
But most bricks should be treated like high-intensity training sessions. Because if you do a lot of brick sessions or do long distance and high intensity bricks, you will have a big recovery penalty. So there is little reason to do that. Instead, like interval training, you should do brick training selectively and, depending on your target event distance, you typically should do them in shorter combinations and distances than your actual race distance.
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