I’ve read Gordo’s (and others) concept of totally consistant training and not taking easy rest and recovery weeks every month or so. I think I understand the reasoning, but is seems to me the human body responds better to slight overload and then some “rest.”
I’m doing a swim emphasis to work on my weak link and even with this, I am backing off this week after 3 big and hard weeks (12,000+ yards). I’m hoping this might reduce the risk of shoulder injury that seems pretty common with pure swimmers.
I’m wondering if there are folks out there who don’t take regular R&R weeks?
'It seems to me the human body responds better to slight overload and then some “rest.” ’
You get a new job that pays more and you’re really motivated to do it. You start working and the workload is much higher than before. You’re tired but you keep going, just putting in the hours of work. After 3 weeks you feel tired, but you’re handling it.
Do you go to your boss’ office and ask him “Can I have a rest week in order to adapt to my new workload?”
I think that it is entirely individual as to how often a RR week is inserted into training. I can remember reading some of Gordo’s stuff when he was in Boulder for a little bit, with Dave Scott I think it was. Seems he said to Dave that he was going to take an easy week. Dave asked why…Gordo said because I’ve been going at it pretty good for a few weeks. Needless to say, I don’t think that Gordo ended up taking the next week easy.
All that is just to say that you may find that you can go 2, 3, 4, or even 5 weeks without any real downtime. One of the biggest variables will be what you have going on outside of the triathlon training. What I have found is that many times busy people will easily be able to get in 2 good weeks, but then something happens the third week so that it becomes a forced easy week. Others may find that after 3 weeks they just don’t have the energy to keep the volume/intensity up for a week.
Something else to try is to have a pretty solid week after your RR week. That way, the need to be completely progressive (which many think is volume only) can become secondary. Instead of trying to go 10, 12, 14, 8 hours and something happens so you miss your 14 hour week, consider trying 14, 10, 12, 8. That way you are still getting all of your weeks in and you can still feel good abot getting in your big week of training.
If you consistently train pretty low volume (6-8 hours maybe), then there may not be a need to take much of a rest week at all, and just maintain the same volume but cut out some of the harder stuff. So, that’s a long answer to say that it depends. The last thing that you want to do is say I’m pretty sure I can keep this up and then end up really burnt out or overloaded. So, err on the side of caution.