Went to the Joe Friel seminar at Oakland University on Sat. For those of you that missed it, it was well worth the price of admission. Turn out was smaller than expected, about 25 people. Joe’s first comment was to the effect that “a lot of people must have used this morning to get their long bike/run in”.
Joe started wwith a topic that he says most athletes especially, self coached athletes, tend to ignore, mental preparedness. Joe stated that in working with elites this is usually what is holding back an otherwise world class athlete from achieving their goal. His advice was to have confidence in yourself and to set out knowing you can accomplish your goals.
Joe then moved on to actual physical training theory. His “training triad” consists of three points on a triangle, Endurance, force, speed. Triathletes need to train all of these. Then the three sides to a triangle, which are combinations of the points, muscular endurance, power, anaerobic endurance. Of these three only muscular endurance is of real benefit for triathletes, the other two are very necessary for a cyclist.
We then moved in to training theory and periodization. I had read the book and understood the principals but actually applying them to my own training had been a little confusing. Joe’s explanation and examples cleared up much of my confusion.
One of the most interesting tidbits of information that I gleaned from the day had to do with how you vary your workouts. Basically there are three things you can vary in a workout, frequency, intensity, and duration. Joe cited several studies that pointed to the fact that once you have attained a certain level of fitness you can mantain that level by varying your frequency or your duration but if you mess with your intensity you start to lose fitness. So I can either cut back on my run length or cut back on the number of runs I do but I can’t drop the pace down. Very interesting as i was trying to find more time for the bike and maintain the early gains I have made this year on the run.
We moved into how to set up your yearly, monthly, weekly, training plans very helpful. He agve us an overview of what training bible.com does which is basically assign you a weeks worth of workout according to your needs and available time then you plug it into your schedule. I may try this.
Joe did a nice section on field testing your fitness level to guage improvement. Presenting several ideas on testing requireing no more than a stop watch, HR monitor and a healthy dose of respect for the variables involved in doing this type of testing. Much simpler than I thought it would be.
Spent a decent amount of time talking about balancing stress and recovery. Showed us a neat chart that another coach uses to encourage his athletes to balance the two. I will attempt to recreat it here.
**BALANCING STRESS AND RECOVERY**
EXPENSES 1=low 10=high
Physical ______
Emotional ______
Mental ______
Total-______
INCOME
Sleep ______
Rest ______
Therapy _______
Total______
Balance + __________
The idea is to have your positive out weigh your negative over a weeks time.
We moved on to nutrition with Joe giving us a preview of his new book on nutrition coming out probably next year. He did sum up the whole book by saying follow the eating for recovery chart for training and racing and for normal meal time lean protien and fruits and vegtables. Below is the Eating for recovery page. I hope., Nope it’s a powerpoint page and I can’t open it. I will attempt to get that posted at some point. It was one of the more informative things at the seminar.
I conclusion, a great seminar kudos the the Oakland tri club for having it. If you missed it hopefeully he will be back. Joe left some things out that he would have liked to include because of time constrants. I have no doubt he could have talked for days on this topic.