HI Everyone,
I’m looking to incorporate strength training into my triathlon training schedule.
When should I hit the weights? On a day by itself? Or on a light swim/bike/run day? Example: Light swim training in the morning and weight in the evening
Thank you in advance!
Do the S&C work before your training. At the start of the season and off season, lift 3x a week. As you get more into a build phase shift it to 2x a week and then taper it off in the weeks before a race. Always take one day a week off from all your training.
Tim
Thank you very much. I appreciate your advice
When should I hit the weights? On a day by itself?
I’m a fan of Thursdays
That depends on your age. If your a older (45+) strength training should be done during the entire training year.
Lots of resources and opinions out there. This is my go to for weight training advice: https://scientifictriathlon.com/strength-training-for-triathletes/.
I think the short answer is some is better than none.
Over 40? It’s a matter of basic health and fitness. You gotta do some resistance work.
Over 30? You’ll wish you had paid attention to resistance work when you turn 40.
Everyone else? What are you, a pro cyclist climbing specialist? Get off your ass. The highschool girls JV tennis team even lifts weights. Have some personal respect.
I spent years on powerlifting so I’m biased towards barbells. But honestly you can get get 90% of the benefit and be more fit than 90% of the population on a lot less. Pick 3 movements and do them consistently. Record your results and progressively do more. 30 minutes 2-3 days a week. If you can do that consistently for 4 months maybe add a couple of movements. Consistency and progression are everything. The difference in sets, reps, splits, etc. only matters for people who have consistency and progression. Hell, if you only did one set of pushups to failure every other day for 4 months you’d be further along than 90% of western world for a time commitment of 5 minutes a week.
Also, I have found that - in the weight room - a tech race shirt is a pretty effective Invisibility Cloak
.
Hi,
I’ve been wrestling with this lately as well and the solution I’ve hit on is to connect SC with a bike or run session. Once a week, I’ll lift for 30 minutes, then do my longish (75-90 minutes) aerobic run. Once a week, I do bodyweight stuff as a warm-up before jumping on the bike trainer. When I am out running and I see a playground, I do a set of chin-ups or pull-ups. Since switching to this tactic, I have been way more consistent than I was when I tried to insert (crow-bar) extra strength sessions into my week. By the time you’ve scheduled swim, bike and run, there’s just not many free spots in a regular person’s week so connecting the strength session with a session that is already there is one solution.
Do the S&C work before your training. At the start of the season and off season, lift 3x a week. As you get more into a build phase shift it to 2x a week and then taper it off in the weeks before a race. Always take one day a week off from all your training.
Tim
What’s the rationale for before? I’ve been doing it after. My rationale is that I want my “real” training to be the highest quality. So, as a cyclist, I do all my riding in the morning, then do strength in the afternoon. That way I have a full night (at the least) to recover, and it typically doesn’t interfere with a higher-intensity bike workout.
Yes doing it before lighter B/R sessions works very well for me, and it also creates a bit of precedent for the “run on slightly tired legs” feeling which I found serves me well on race day. Doesn’t sit well with swimming on the other hand.
A training plan I used had morning ride followed by lunch / evening strength work once or twice a week. I’ve grown to really like that combo.
The 70.3 plan I’ve been using in Matt Dixon’s book Fast Track Triathlete has strength exercises included (examples, with pictures) but this year I mostly neglected them.
By neglecting them I learned from a couple late-season races that I DO need to focus on core strength, especially in my abs and hips, so I’ll be incorporating them into my training for next year’s season which will feature my first full-distance race.
In general, the s&c sessions in Dixon’s plan seem to feature as an evening/PM session following a swim/bike/run/brick session in the morning/AM.
Travis
What is it - “S&C work”?
What is it - “S&C work”?
S&C = Strength and Conditioning.
Do the S&C work before your training. At the start of the season and off season, lift 3x a week. As you get more into a build phase shift it to 2x a week and then taper it off in the weeks before a race. Always take one day a week off from all your training.
Tim
What’s the rationale for before? I’ve been doing it after. My rationale is that I want my “real” training to be the highest quality. So, as a cyclist, I do all my riding in the morning, then do strength in the afternoon. That way I have a full night (at the least) to recover, and it typically doesn’t interfere with a higher-intensity bike workout.
One potential rationale is that you can get greater strength and power improvements with less total work, if you do the strength training in a less fatigued state.
Alternatively, if you want to just stay in touch with strength training as you move into pre-competitive or competitive phases of your season, putting the strength training immediately after an endurance session can actually extend the cardiovascular fitness response to a degree, as if the strength training were actually more endurance training. Small effect, but nontrivial.
If seeking some sort of balance between “maximizing endurance performance now” and “getting the fastest possible strength improvement,” then doing the strength training many hours separate, later in the day, might offer a best of both worlds scenario.
The biggest real-world driver for these decisions for non-elite athletes is “what training organization works with my life/work schedule and doesn’t sacrifice sleep or family time to get it done?” Maintaining sleep quantity far outweighs any of my above rationales.
That all makes intuitive sense - agree with all of that.
Maintaining sleep quantity far outweighs any of my above rationales.
Good point for any kind of training.
Still be in a doubt regarding the amount of sleep that would be good enough during the build-up phase of the training
My feeling is a subjective criterion and depends on a huge number of factors, some of which have nothing to do with sleep 
I have a Garmin watch that can show me my body battery. Have no idea how they calculate it but it has one big advantage - this formula doesn’t change and give me the same result regarding the other factors. Based on this indicator I see that I get to 100% battery at about 6 hours of sleep most of the time. Despite of this, same Garmin watch recommend me 8 hours sleep every day.
Is there any recommendations?
Maintaining sleep quantity far outweighs any of my above rationales.
Good point for any kind of training.
Still be in a doubt regarding the amount of sleep that would be good enough during the build-up phase of the training
My feeling is a subjective criterion and depends on a huge number of factors, some of which have nothing to do with sleep
I have a Garmin watch that can show me my body battery. Have no idea how they calculate it but it has one big advantage - this formula doesn’t change and give me the same result regarding the other factors. Based on this indicator I see that I get to 100% battery at about 6 hours of sleep most of the time. Despite of this, same Garmin watch recommend me 8 hours sleep every day.
Is there any recommendations?
TLDR: Don’t believe Garmin for a second when it tells you how well-recovered you are or how much sleep you need. Or any other wearable tech for that purpose. If you’re feeling fatigued at all during the day, you’ll benefit from more sleep. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Longer version:
Energy expenditure is a FAR simpler metric to estimate than “how much ‘recovery’ or sleep do I need to support my training & lifestyle?”
Wearable technology at it’s best has a 10% margin of error for calorie estimations, on AVERAGE, for a population which means that for any given person it could be up or down by 20%, from reality… and that’s for the BEST of them. I can’t remember which ones have tested out the best, but they’re all essentially really good at making people over-confident in the amount of calories that they’re burning daily and lead to far more headaches than accurate diet recommendations, unfortunately.
So if we’re talking 10 and 20% error rates (enough to cause a person to dive into full-fledged disordered eating level restriction of calories if they followed to a tee, or vice versa, as happens more often, to believe they need to eat enough calories to literally be in a weight-room-style mass gain diet) then we might be ill-advised to trust them to tell us how well we’re recovered or for how much sleep we need.
i really appreciate that post and your insight into the horrible accuracy of software and smart watches. its very easy for people that are pragmatic and “ocd” about things (like myself) to need a number to chase. its nice to have someone that seems to know what they’re talking about say how inaccurate our tech really is and how unreliable those numbers are.