Reading another thread today, dealing with the old brick vs. run first debate, I realized I have a nebulous problem that I’ve been trying to understand for the last five years (a sign of my physiological ignorance), and I thought I’d try to draw out some discussion/argument.
What’s the best way to schedule workouts for three sports during base training?
I’ve seen three basic positions:
- smear together lots of longish days with some extra long ones, and one or two days to rest the legs.
- a push day/easy day schedule. This seems to make more sense for single sporters–I’ve never totally understood this for bike/run, unless you’re only getting three decent push days per week between bike and run…not optimal for a FOPish athlete or faster, I think
- some sort of hybrid: eg day 1: hard run, med bike; day 2: med run, hard bike; day 3: recovery run/bike
There’s another possibility I’m coming to: bike a lot, almost every day, and then use an alternating schedule for running?
Does a hard swim interfere with recovery in bike/run, assuming it’s not kick-intensive?
Underlying this seems to be some controversy about whether base adaptations happen from a single hard day, or from the cumulative fatigue of multiple endurance sessions. How does this change with regard to the three sports? Different coaches I’ve had have had different philosophies, and now that I’m back on the self-coached plan, I feel obligated to understand this better.
Thanks all!
Get rid of the term “base” first of all, and think “general to specific”
Underlying this seems to be some controversy about whether base adaptations happen from a single hard day, or from the cumulative fatigue of multiple endurance sessions.
Physiological adaptation occurs from all workouts you do. Each may have a different stimulus, but one hard day will cause adaptations (maybe that hard day is doing vo2 max workouts), endurance (Aerobic) sessions will cause aerobic adaptation (increased use of fat as a substrate, increased mitochondrial density, etc).
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Long days are good. What do you mean by “Rest” - an easy spin, maybe really short run, you still get frequency + consistency without much stress. It’s a couple more aerobic miles.
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Think about what you need to get in for key workouts during the week. Long run and long ride are probably two of those. You might also have some run or bike workouts… and you’d best have some swim workouts… I think you’ll wind up with not alternating easy day hard day but maybe one day you do intervals on the bike and the next day you do a long run (or vice versa). Two key workouts on back to back days but doable. Second workout of the day for me often = recovery (example: ran 3 x 2 mi @ 10k pace this morning, rode 1:10 easy later)
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I think I addressed this above
Does a hard swim interfere with recovery in bike/run, assuming it’s not kick-intensive?
In that a hard swim will add to fatigue, suck more glycogen out of your muscles, take mental energy, I’d say yes. But it shouldn’t do too much damage to your legs. I have the opposite problem swimming, legs are usually too fatigued from bike and run to kick well.
Did that help?
OK, this is my issue: I think I’m confused about having early season goals. Should they be workout specific, volume/week specific, or both?
What are your goal races for the season? Then work backward when you’re making your training plan.
Goals: I mean training milestones, not ultimate goals.
For instance, before I start VO2 training, I’d like to, either
a) run 40 mi/week for four weeks
b) have a long run of 2:00 and a second med-long run of 1:15