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Does Speed Kill?

March 12, 2018

base & off-season, Home

DOES SPEED KILL?

It’s that all important and exciting time of the year again for all of us, the race season is well and truly done now and hopefully you have all had a period of rest and chilling out letting the body recover from the stresses of training and racing. This time of year is exciting as we are looking forward to new goals and setting a training plan up to help achieve them.

I see a lot of athletes at this time and it amazes me still that they all talk about building a solid aerobic fitness base over the winter as the first step, it really frustrates me that this idea has become so set in peoples mindsets and I see it as the main hurdle people need to get over in order to progress their fitness and really step forward towards their goals.

I truly believe at this time of year starting a program that speed and strength are the main areas we should all be focusing on. In this article I want to look at speed and take away your fear and look at how we can use speed to accelerate progression and also prevent injuries in the long run.

Firstly when I say speed people immediately think sprinting and then injury, over stretching and pushing the boundaries with speed sure does bring a huge injury risk and this is the case whenever sprinting is put into a program. When I say speed though I am not talking about sprinting I am simply talking about faster paced work.

When we are racing and training for Ironman, speed training is actually not going to be that fast at all as the race speed is so slow, I would then class anything above race pace as being speed work.

Humans really are creatures of habit and our muscles are part of that, if we always train just one speed we will get good at one speed and shock the body when we try to do something different which can easily lead to injury. Doing weeks of base training to prepare the body for faster work actually therefore is counterintuitive, all it is really doing is preparing the body to really not like speed! So if we follow the age old pattern of building base over the winter and then adding speed in the final weeks before the race season starts we are going to be in a situation where speed kills performance through injury.

I think the true sense would be to have elements of speed built into every week so the body is used to the movement patterns of going fast and the muscles have trained and adapted to speed so we are not putting an unknown stress on them suddenly as race season dawns.

Also when we train slow we only use a very small percentage of muscle fibres within a given muscle, if we are constantly training one speed we will continue to only train this small percentage of muscle fibres leaving the others untrained and unprepared. When we are racing, and especially in prolonged endurance events such as Ironman, we are going to fatigue our muscles and if we have only trained a small percentage of our muscle fibres then as soon as these get tired we have nowhere else to go. By training with speed we train a fuller spectrum of our muscle fibres and give the body something to fall back on when our endurance dominant fibres are too fatigued to take the workload.

Let’s look at some sessions that are still endurance based but have an element of speed built in that will pay back come race day.

Endurance ride with short sprints

So one way we can use speed to train more muscle fibre is to add in short all out sprints early on in an endurance ride, we can look at it this like flicking a light switch on. If we just go out and ride easy our body is lazy and will just use a small percentage of muscle fibre to perform the task. By adding in a small set of sprints we flick a switch and activate all fibres and then when we go back to easy endurance riding the load is shared over more fibres thus getting a much more productive training effect. I am sure you have all experienced this at some time when out training due to terrain, say you have a hard short hill that requires a big effort to get over – you may have been feeling tired and lethargic before the hill but suddenly once over and back on the flat you have a lot more power and energy – this is because you have switched on more muscle fibres to get over the hill and they will now continue to work to share the workload on the flat making you feel stronger and more energetic.

So if your endurance ride is 4 hours let’s look to ride 30minutes easy and then put in a short set of sprints, 10 second sprints are enough to get the muscles working without leading to any real fatigue. Ride 8×10 seconds all out allowing your cadence to accelerate during the 10s to maximum and then ride very easy for 1 minute 50 seconds before starting your next sprint. If you ride in a group or with a friend you can add a little fun to this by sprinting for landmarks, choose something close as it is all about that initial acceleration that activated the muscle fibres we want working!!

Run efficiency

While the above is an example of all out speed I also use a lot of speed work around race pace, by training slightly above race pace we can make our bodies more efficient at movement. Studies have shown that movement efficiency is the key to success in endurance performance. Let’s look at a run session that is focused on efficiency of movement. Let’s say you are looking to race at 12km per hour on the run for the full marathon distance, I would then put a set of short intervals into a weekly program that is based around a speed of 13km/hr. An example would be a treadmill session of 10×400 at 13km/hr with 60seconds easy between. This session will always feel relatively easy but resist the temptation to add speed, over time this is an invaluable session that you will appreciate come race day.

When it comes to using speed training in your program it does not always mean pushing the limits and risking injury, it can be done in a controlled way to really unlock some great advances in your fitness.

Do something different this year in your training and you will be amazed at the progress you can make over doing your regular winter of base miles!

Enjoy your training.

Coach Alun “Woody” Woodward

ironguides is the leading Lifestyle Facilitation company for athletes of all abilities. We provide coaching and training services, plans and programs, as well training education, health and fitness products to help you learn and live a healthy lifestyle. Come get fit with one of our monthly training subscriptions, event-specific training plans, coaching services, or a triathlon training camp in an exotic location! ironguides also provides Corporate Health services including Corporate Triathlons, Healthy Living retreats and speaking engagements. At ironguides, your best is our business!

Train with ironguides!

Personalized Online Coaching: Starting at USD190/month

Monthly Training plans (for all levels, or focused on one discipline): Only USD39/months

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Sprint Distance (USD45 for 8-week plan)

Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)

Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)

Running Plans (10k, 21k and 42k – starting at USD40)

Triathlon Heresies: ironguides in Triathlete Magazine

February 26, 2018

beginner, Home, various

It’s said that genius speaks its own language but seldom understands it. If you’ve had the opportunity to spend a little time with geniuses in different fields, you’ve probably noticed something else – they share the ability to master complexity to produce simplicity.

Triathlon remains a pretty small field but we can lay claim to a few technological innovations and feats of endurances that can be called inspired genius. But when it comes to the ability to develop winning athletes, the field narrows to the point that only one man merits the label of genius – Brett Sutton.

I had the good fortune to spend a good deal of the last eight years in almost daily contact with Brett. His achievements leave little doubt that he has a unique ability to generate consistent top-level results in a very complicated sport, working with the finicky personalities of professional endurance athletes no less. A quick summary of his coaching pedigree lists eight ITU world champions, over a hundred ITU World Cup wins, wins at every major triathlon held including the Hawaii Ironman, and more podium finishes than the pages of this article could list. Today a second wave of coaches around the world emulates Brett’s methods in the hunt to develop the next generation of champions in the pro ranks.

My discussions with Brett totally transformed my views on human performance, focused perseverance and human psychology. Although my days as a professional triathlete were over by the time he and I started our dialogue, my understanding of endurance and triathlon training was only beginning. Elsewhere our sport was gravitating to the increasingly generic training protocols that I used to rely on, including zone training, power targets and lactate testing, but Brett’s methods were entirely unorthodox and challenged convention at every step. The more I learned, the more I let go of my quantitative ideas and outdated notions on training and embraced the common sense of his approach.

Imagine – little to no periodization throughout the year, but instead a steady diet of skills acquisition and working on one’s weaknesses. No “key” races and generic tapering formula, but rather a flexible approach that takes into account recent training context. Weekly recovery derived from the structure of carefully designed programs that had athletes training every day, often using a strongly repetitive program. No reference to triathlon’s component sports to train, but rather triathlon-specific techniques to develop skills in each component more relevant to triathlon.

Although professional and Age Group triathlon are two very different sports, there are principles and perspective on training that you can learn and apply to your own training to make it more effective, save time, enhance recovery, all in a more enjoyable, qualitative way. No need to sift through the tea leaves of daily heart rate or power downloads, no need to spend money on expensive gadgets, and no need to plan daily training months in advance.

In this series of articles, we’ll take a look at how we’ve applied some of the principles of professional triathlon training to create a counter-intuitive approach to training we call The Method. By the end of this series, hopefully you’ll come to understand triathlon training from an entirely different, simplified and holistic perspective.

SwimBikeRun

To understand triathlon you need to look at our sport not as the sum of its parts, but as swimbikerun – a single event taking place in changing environments, requiring different skills applied at similar levels of exertion. Training in each component needs to take place in a broader context than single sport training, so when you see someone referring to what swimmers, cyclists or runners do to prepare for a race – tune out! Triathlon takes place under completely different scenarios.

We’ll take a look at specific training for each of triathlon’s components, but here’s a few examples of what I mean. In a triathlon, you’ll rarely ever find calm, flat water. Instead you’re faced with flailing arms, chop and murky water. If you’re a relatively unskilled swimmer, long distance-per-stroke glide phases open you up to “stroke interruption” every time you pause, leading to time-consuming re-acceleration at every stroke. It’s much better to adopt a short, choppy but powerful stroke that minimizes glide and maintains forward momentum with a more rapid arm turnover.

Likewise, contrary to conventional wisdom for cyclists, triathletes benefit from a lower cadence on the bike, not just to preserve fast twitch fibers for the run, but also to make maximum use of training time to generate strength on the relatively limited number of miles we ride. And on the run, it pays to train at a high stride rate (greater than 90 steps per leg per minute) because taking more, smaller steps is a more efficient way to run faster on tired, depleted leg muscles. We’ll take a detailed look at how to we structure training in each component in later articles in the series.

Five Systems

From a general perspective, fitness can be divided into five categories: Aerobic fitness, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and body composition. At ironguides, instead of viewing your training as “Zones”, which take into account only your level of aerobic fitness, we refine the above aspects of fitness further to come up with a more triathlon-specific view on training needs.

We call these categories the Five Systems and use them to classify all our training so that we can achieve a more complete training structure that stimulates multiple components of fitness consistently, shifting emphasis to one or the other depending on the time of year, race calendar, individual needs, life circumstance, and so on. Looking at training this way helps you understand how training can be structured to enhance recovery while continuing to train hard everyday.

The Five Systems we use are Strength, Speed, Neuromuscular (or Skill), Tolerance and Endurance. All of these can be combined to various degrees, but by viewing training with these categories in mind and understanding how they relate to one another, you can create a training structure that helps you become “the complete athlete” without ever having to refer to a training zone or power output. With a properly structured plan you can focus your training more specifically and gain aerobic fitness anyway!

You’re so hormonal!

An obscure study from 1995 entitled Blood hormones as markers of training stress and overtraining. (Urhausen A, Gabriel H, Kindermann W. Sports Med. 1995 Oct;20(4):251-76) showed that an athlete’s testosterone/cortisol ratio indicates the physiological strain of his or her training load. To understand why this matters and how you can use this information to create an optimal training structure without falling into the trap of zone training, you need to have a basic understanding of human endocrinology.

Our hormones govern how our body responds to stimuli, including training stimuli. While all training is by and large a “catabolic” process (it breaks your body down through the action of cortisol), if you incorporate short, intense training such as strength work or very fast, very short intervals (which demand high muscle recruitment), you can promote a higher release of testosterone and human growth hormone and support a more “anabolic” training response (a building up of the body). By incorporating Strength and Speed training in your weekly routine at the right times, you can mitigate the effects of more catabolic Endurance and Tolerance sessions, while still using your training time in a sport-specific way.

By categorizing training into Five Systems and understanding how training in those systems affects your endocrine system, you can structure your training to maximize training effort on a daily basis while still permitting day-to-day recovery. While one System rests, another works! In this very basic way, you can design a training program in which you can always train hard.

For example, we like to assign a set of Power Intervals on the bike (such as 10 x 60sec of very high resistance at very low cadence on a spin bike, with equal rest) the day after an athlete has completed an Endurance effort. The anabolic tendency of the interval set mitigates the catabolic nature of the Endurance effort.

Upgrade your skills!

Much of the credit for the incredible performances by single sport athletes can be attributed to the high volume of work they do performing a single or limited range of motions over and over again, which develops extreme efficiencies of movement. As triathletes we don’t have this luxury, so you need to incorporate into your training some form of skill work to really make each session count. Through the use of the right tools or terrain you can do this without impacting the quality of your training and recovery.

For example, instead of heading out the door for 40 minutes in “Zone 1-2”, take a broader view on your run training and incorporate some leg speed training using a treadmill or light downhill gradients. You’ll teach your muscles to fire more rapidly without compromising the workout because you’ll be running faster than on flat ground at the same aerobic intensity. Using the right tools and approach, you can incorporate skills training into almost any session. Swim paddles and pull buoy permit better body position in the water and help develop strength, while a spin bike can help develop your cycling strength.

Keep in mind that if you’re an older athlete, you’ll struggle to acquire new motor skills but that doesn’t mean give up! Instead, you need to train more frequently in the more technical sports (such as swimming) to maintain current skills.

Common sense recovery

Age Group athletes face particular demands that mean life often interferes with our best-laid plans. Instead of taking days off when the schedule says, why not take them when life demands it due to work, family or other commitments or unforeseen events? Training this way ensures consistency and frees up time when it’s most needed – knowing you have trained your best in recent sessions means you’re less likely to worry about missing the odd session due to other obligations.

Cyclical periodization and repetition

The basis of traditional training periodization was founded decades ago when scientific knowledge was far from complete and athletes’ workloads and demands were much lower than today. More recently, progress in sport science has reinforced the contradictions between traditional periodization and the successful experiences of prominent coaches and athletes using a more cyclical approach. The Method stresses repetition and a cyclic approach to training to concurrently develop motor skills, fitness and mental strength.

A cyclic training approach enables you to continually train all aspects of fitness while emphasizing specific components according to your needs, race calendar and other factors. As the race season draws near, you can begin to emphasize more race-specific factors. For example, our Olympic distance and Ironman athletes train in very similar ways for much of the year, but as Ironman approaches our long course athletes pick up the volume. Rather than having fatigued themselves with high mileage and unspecific training all winter long, they arrive at the final race preparation phase with a strong foundation and arsenal of skills.

And, rather than planning training sessions months in advance, we use a more repetitive training plan based on a weekly routine that you repeat. Not only does this remove the guesswork from setting your weekly routine, it also means you use your training sessions as performance benchmarks. By performing the same training session for several weeks, you can also better develop your intuitive feedback skills and learn to “ride out the rough patches” in your training, coming to better understand the effects of recent changes elsewhere, such as in your sleep, diet or stress patterns. Over time you also learn to better gauge and interpret fatigue levels so that you can better predict when you need time off, and when it’s worthwhile continuing a session.

* * *

Combined with a few simple intensity guidelines no more complicated than “easy”, “moderate”, “hard” and “all out”, you can reach new levels of triathlon performance by training more consistently, with less reliance on gadgets to guide your training, while freeing up time and putting the joy back in training.
Heresy!
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Train with ironguides!

Personalized Online Coaching: Starting at USD190/month

Monthly Training plans (for all levels, or focused on one discipline): Only USD39/months

Event based training plans:

Sprint Distance (USD45 for 8-week plan)

Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)

Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)

Running Plans (10k, 21k and 42k – starting at USD40)

ironguides Bangkok partners up with Bollox gels for the 2018 season

February 26, 2018

Home

We are extremely proud to partner with Bollox as our gel sponsor for the 2018 season!

How do our members benefit?

*Free box of Bollox gels for 12 months membership starting on 1st March 2018
*Chance to win a box of Bollox gels at our socials via the luckydraw (starting this weekend!)

Bollox Ltd is a developer of affordable sports nutrition that is exclusively distributed on e-commerce platforms. Our signature product, Bollox Energy Gel, is a home delivered no-frills-energy gel with 100 Calories for half the money people spend on most established brands.
The fruit-cherry flavored gel is developed in collaboration with the school of Applied Food Science & Nutrition of Temasek Polytech in Singapore and the world-famous multiple triathlon and Ironman world champion Chris ‘Macca’ McCormack.

The combination of ingredients in Bollox provides a powerful energy boost. Significant scientific research has been carried out to prove the stimulating effects of the Bollox nutrient mix. The 3 main ingredient groups are 1) fructose and maltodextrine in a 0.8:1 ratio, 2) Na, K and Mg electrolytes and 3) taurine to delay the onset of fatigue. Bollox is simply effective and affordable and our doorstep deliveries will help endurance athletes manage their hectic daily schedules.

Bollox! No Frills. Just Energy!

Learn more about Bollox and shop it at https://bolloxenergy.com/

The Importance of Pre-Training Rituals

February 19, 2018

Home, Training

By Shem Leong, ironguides Coach

When does your training session actually start? Do you only mentally switch on as soon as you take that first stride/pedal stroke/swim pull of your main set?

To improve the quality of your training, I challenge you to tune in at least 10, or even 20, minutes before you get changed for your session. For most of us, this would take place on the way to your various training locations; in the train on the way to the track, in the car en route to the pool, walking out of the office to the gym for a quick lunch-hour workout. You likely only have this one window in the day to train so make it work for you.

Dial out all distractions and put the mobile to silent. Give yourself the luxury of being unreachable from that point onwards and use this time to daydream a little. Just what was that Personal Best time again?

Rehearse in your head the set that you are about to do. What kind of set is it? Speed, Strength, Tolerance, Endurance? What is the underlying goal of this set? What were Coach’s instructions and/or feedback from this session in the last couple of weeks? How am I supposed to feel after completing the set? What am I going to do for a quick and convenient recovery meal after?

Am I going to change anything about the way I executed this set, and if so, what? Think about how you have been executing it in the past weeks and pick out the areas that could be improved. Did you go out too hard and blow up half way through? Could you even out your pedal stroke a little more? What does a good catch feel like underwater? How do you breathe when running efficiently?

If you nailed it previously, consider how to replicate that perfect set. Rehearse the current motivations that have been helping you focus when the going gets tough. Run through your mantras, decide what playlist is going to work for you today, do a quick and honest check on current fatigue and/or stress levels. How many hours of sleep you are functioning off today?

Now is also the time to manage your expectations. If have you been on holiday, sick, returning from injury or just had a patchy phase recently, don’t expect to perform at your previous best level. Instead, shed all preconceived ideas of where your fitness might be and leave the data behind. It is better that you start with a clean slate and re-configure your perceived-effort barometer. Redefine what it feels like to go easy, moderate, comfortably uncomfortable, hard, and all out.

Trying to force it in an attempt to fast-track your way back to your previous fitness level will only work against you. You’ll push too hard and will not finish the set and/or wipe yourself out for the next day. Avoiding this is especially important if you’re coming back from illness.

Put together a pre-training ritual. Chances are you already have one; just pay attention the next time to what you do before the session and aim to replicate this every single time. Mentally it’s a process that transports you from the wider world around you with its constant demands and to-do lists to your training zone, a place where you are alone with your thoughts, hopes and dreams.

For the record, after I prepare my bottle, I sit on a certain step to strap on my shoes (to a certain tension), fold my towel in a certain way over the bike, clip in my headphones, string the chord under my top and go through my playlist, selecting the one that I feel is going to work for the day. I do all this even before climbing on the trainer. It’s simple and takes me all of two, maybe three, minutes but going through this ritual makes me aware of what I am about to embark on. It takes my mind into the present and prepares me mentally for the rigours of the next 40 to 60 minutes.

Only then do I start my warm-up … and that’s another article all together.

Till next time, enjoy your training!

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Train with ironguides!

Personalized Online Coaching: Starting at USD190/month

Monthly Training plans (for all levels, or focused on one discipline): Only USD39/months

Event based training plans:

Sprint Distance (USD45 for 8-week plan)

Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)

Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)

Running Plans (10k, 21k and 42k – starting at USD40)

Training Zones: Effort or Numbers?

February 14, 2018

Home

There is a hype around training tools that measure effort, be it in training or racing. But is this the best way to track and analyze your efforts?

Age group athletes are bombarded from all angles with tools that measure data such as power meters, heart rate monitors and portable GPS. They all provide a certain type of information that, if used in the right way, can provide you with very accurate feedback that is supposed to help improve your performance in training and racing.

But is this really the best way to measure our efforts?

Let’s start by looking at swimming, a sport in which records are being broken year in, year out. Swimmers are getting faster all the time, without a doubt. However, we don’t see them caught up in the gadget trend. Swimmers are still being coached under perceived effort, using minimalist terminologies similar to the ones ironguides use, or very basic terms such as A1, A2 and A3.

Their sessions give swimmers a lot of flexibility and freedom, since they are usually structured on fixed send-offs or rests in between sets. It is up to the swimmer to develop a feel for the session to achieve the goal and train the right system.

Another example comes from my own experience, when I was racing an Ironman in 2007. In preparation I had done heart rate zone training and my race strategy was based on either heart rate or pace (splits).

Once out of the water and onto the bike, I realized my bike computer wasn’t working. If riding 180km in itself wasn’t stressful enough, I now had the worry of not knowing if I was riding at my goal pace. I either felt too quick, or too slow.

I made the decision to just forget about my heart rate and my pace, and use perceived effort to guide me through that race instead. I tried to remember how I’d felt on my training rides and just hoped for the best since I’d so far been a slave of numbers. With a broken bike computer, I had no statistics to chase.

Little did I know that it was the perfect opportunity to learn how we can improve when we listen to ourselves and our bodies.

Until that day, my best Ironman bike split had been was 5hr 50—in this race, guided by perceived effort, I managed a 5hr 15, and an overall finish time PB to boot.

When we stick to the numbers alone, we run the risk of misreading our fitness which can result in either an under performance race or going faster than we should be. Let’s say, you are used to running at 12km/hr in your race efforts. However, there will be days that you simply won’t achieve that speed—yet the aerobic load remains the same, regardless of your speed. On the flip side, you might not be training hard enough if you are having a great day with fresh legs—you could have been training at 13km/hr.

Heart rate is no different. If you test yourself and set your anaerobic threshold zone at about 170 beats per minute, you might be under-performing when training at that rate, since it was based on only one day. On a day that you are feeling great, you perhaps should be training at 180bpm. And when you feel tired, training at 160bpm will give you the same benefits of the original zone.

You see how we can limit ourselves by using the numbers?

Most age groupers face a lifestyle that does not allow the human body to work as a precise machine. Fatigue, lack of sleep, improper diet and, most importantly, levels of stress (including personal, financial, work) have an impact on your physiology and on your motivation. They will also impact the numbers you’ll read on the gadgets you’re using to guide your training, including heart rate and power output.

Try to do your next bike ride or run without the heart rate monitor. Stick to that for a couple weeks and you will soon understand the benefits of being able to listen to your body, to train by effort and to detach from numbers.

Enjoy your training!

Rodrigo Tosta, Certified ironguides Method Coach Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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Train with ironguides!

Personalized Online Coaching: Starting at USD190/month

Monthly Training plans (for all levels, or focused on one discipline): Only USD39/months

Event based training plans:

Sprint Distance (USD45 for 8-week plan)

Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)

Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)

Running Plans (10k, 21k and 42k – starting at USD40)

Video – Technique Short Cuts

February 9, 2018

Home, Uncategorized

Training to perform is hard enough without poor technique getting in the way, poor technique costs us in efficiency of movement but also costs us with increased injury risk. By working to improve technique we can gain time in our races and also make our training a lot more enjoyable.

A good step to starting any change in technique is by studying the top athletes in our sport, if we want to mimic a style then we should be looking at someone doing our sport, by this i mean look at an ironman athletes run technique to copy rather than looking at a pure marathon runners technique. The same would hold true for biking, we want to look at top athletes in our sport and there position and cadence styles rather than looking at a position and cadence of a tour de france rider. We have to take into account the demands of our sport when looking for the best technique to follow.

From this stage we then need to look at our own technique and see what we are doing, the availability of video on phones and the booming sports video market with products such as the GoPro camera’s have made taking sports video very easy and accessible to us all. From this point we can watch video’s of the technique we wan to mimic and see what we need to change to achieve this.

I like to break the movement down to make 2-3 drills/ movements that need to be perfected in order to move from a bad technique to good technique. I am going to use running as an example for this.

If we look at a great runner in ironman i think Craig Alexander is a great example of good form. If we look at how Craig runs compared to your average runner the main thing i see is

Feet land always directly under centre of gravity
Leg is not driving forward from the hips
Movement is hamstring dominated

When i look at other runners i see them driving legs forward from the hip bringing the foot high in front of the body an landing in front of the body. They tend to run using quads and hip flexors and significantly over stride and runner with a lower cadence/ turnover than Craig.

So it is quite easy to highlight what needs to change now we just need to go about doing it, most of us are pretty impatient and want fast results, i have found it is possible to accelerate the learning process using resistance bands to ensure correct muscles are working an by performing small movements repeatedly. By doing this we build new muscle memory very quickly and can then go about putting this new memory to use in our sports.

One of the biggest errors i see with most runners is that they do not use the hamstring muscle as it should be used as the main driving force in running. Essentially our foot should impact the ground directly under centre of gravity and then rebound off the ground pulled by the hamstring directly under the body – the movement of the leg is controlled then simply by our forward movement through to the next impact.

A good test to do is stand 30cm away from a wall facing the wall with both legs together. Now try to pull one foot up directly under the body – this is what should be happening when we run. The foot should come up staying inline with the supporting leg, for most the foot will go straight forward into the wall as the hip flexors are the muscles used not the hamstrings.

So we want to develop the ability to pull the foot up under the body using the hamstring muscle. If we attach a short resistance band ( a great example of this is produced by Perform Better) around both feet we can add resistance to this movement which will allow more muscle fibers to be activated and accelerate the learning process. Using the band we can perform 3×30 pulls per foot to really get the muscles firing correctly. See video for exercise.

I always like to follow a drill with a short run so we can use the muscle in full sports specific motion, so maybe 3×30 pulls with one leg and then a short 50m run before repeating with the other leg.

To build a complete new run technique look at the other areas where changes need to be made and find how to get that movement drilled into the body and you will be running with a new and improved technique in no time!!

Enjoy your training!!

Alun Woodward – ironguides Coach, Austria.

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Train with ironguides!

Personalized Online Coaching: Starting at USD190/month

Monthly Training plans (for all levels, or focused on one discipline): Only USD39/months

Event based training plans:

Sprint Distance (USD45 for 8-week plan)

Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)

Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)

Running Plans (10k, 21k and 42k – starting at USD40)

“ALL OUT” means “ALL OUT”

February 5, 2018

cycling, Home

By Shem Leong

“ALL OUT” means (slightly more) “ALL OUT”

I recently had my eyes opened by Matt Fitzgerald’s article in Inside Triathlon- “You are a Quitter”. He references Marcora’s ground-breaking study that suggests that our decision to pull the plug on any strenuous endurance effort, weather in training or racing, is a voluntary decision that originates from an “off” signal in our mind, a psychological phenomenon, and not a function of any bio-physiological determinant of our potential maximum exertion effort.

Immediately after a high intensity endurance ride to exhaustion, Marcora’s research subjects were able to triple of their power output in short 5 seconds bursts. (Similar to having a sprint finish at the end of a marathon). According to the conventional model of endurance fatigue, that proposes an involuntary decline in performance when some physiological limit is encountered, this would not be possible.

In short, this new theory states that our mental tenacity to “hang tough” and endure discomfort, rather than our ability to clear lactic acid/ absorb and carry oxygen/ store glycogen is a more significant determinant of true maximum potential performance.

This information plays special significance when training by perceived effort, as ironguides athletes on The Method do. As we have experienced, our ALL OUT efforts are not defined by wattage or speed or even heart rate. Instead, our efforts are entirely determined by the intimate communication between mind and body and this is a powerful realisation to make. Here’s why:

An ALL OUT effort is just that- whether on your 1st 25m sprint of a swim strength session or a 10 min time trial effort at the end of a 4 hr ride, “ALL OUT” should describe your mind set and attitude more than a certain speed or lap split. It should imply a readiness to pull your body and mind to a slightly new level of discomfort. That place will be somewhere you have never been before, somewhere that requires the sprouting of new blood vessels and recruitment of dormant muscle groups, somewhere that forces gaseous exchange at new maximum levels. More importantly, that someplace will cause you to redefine your perception of effort. It is here that you learn to handle new levels of discomfort. It is here that you force yourself to hold perfect running form/ a powerful pull through on your swim stroke or a smooth, even and powerful pedal stroke.

The question is how you respond when you’re there- “in the moment”? When every ounce of energy you produce is begin channelled to forward propulsion and you’re tethering on the verge of blowing up. Mental attacks rain down in the form of split second thoughts to let up and catch your breath or to get off the front of the pack; thoughts that- once you give in to them- bring a flood of relief and comfort. I challenge you to override these signals- like carrying a bowl of hot soup- your fingers are burning, yet somehow you resign yourself to holding on until your broth is safe and sound on the dinner table. You flick your fingers to cool them down. They’re a bit red but everything is alright. Your body’s reflex to let go of the bowl is a feed forward safety mechanism that kicks in way before any real threat to your physical make up materialises.

In the same way, those invading signals to your brain telling you that holding this pace is too tough or that one more ALL OUT repeat is too much are just pre-emptive safety mechanism signals that, given the right practice, can be dealt with effectively and positively. So resign yourself to finishing that ALL OUT effort your coach may have set you, as best as you can.

In our quest to go even more ALL OUT, it helps to break it down into the smallest little portions. Here are some tips to help you out with this:

1. Break it down into even smaller bits. When you are in “ALL OUT” mode, dissect your pedal stroke- think and feel. Are you applying power all the way round through 360 degrees? Which part of the circle needs evening out? Play around and feel the difference between activating the different cycling muscles involved- your glutes, hip flexors, hamstrings. A tiny shift in your saddle can help awaken under-used muscle groups. It’s a great feeling to “find” and develop a new set of muscles that will eventually help you pedal more efficiently. Don’t doggedly sit in the same position mashing down over and over again, as hard as you can until your quads cramp. When you eventually develop a coordinated pedal stroke with all the involved muscle groups firing in the right sequence with the right timing, you’ll find yourself flying along in the big gear, with your HR sitting comfortably low and your legs churning out smooth, even circles.

2. When running, towards the end of a tough intervals/ hills set, you’re close to your limit- break it down. Don’t think, “How hard is this?” Or, “I’m dying…” Instead set your focus on just 1 thing- could be simply driving your elbows to maintain a high stride rate, or breathing that tiny bit deeper to get in more air, or reminding yourself to “Run tall… Run tall or focusing on picking up your heels quickly for a faster foot strike. Whatever proprioceptive cue you’ve called upon, bearing an ALL OUT effort when it’s unbearable, breadth by breadth, second by second, lifts the ceiling of what you had previously thought possible. The next time your body is under the same physical duress, your mental “ALL OUT” signal is only going kick in a little later, or at a slightly higher pace.

You can imagine my disappointment, on urging one of my athletes to “Think about how you want to run the next hill rep”, when I got the sarcastic and uninspired answer “Uphill.” : )

3. It’s the same with swimming- when your arms go cold and are filled with useless deoxygenated, lactic acid blood, when you want to stop in the middle of the pool and just cruise in- Dig Deep. ALL OUT means you’re reaching for more water at your fingertips, ALL OUT means your focusing on thrusting water back with your triceps because your Deltoids and Lats gave up 10meters ago, ALL OUT has you exhaling 3% more air so that you can inhale 3% more.

My advice is that you heed this subtle shift in endurance training paradigms that has us moving away from a pure numbers game, towards a “Brain Training” approach, and tune into what you’re thinking and feeling the next time you are ALL OUT. Always look to redefine perception of effort and go slightly more ALL OUT.

Here I am, doing just that…

Shem Leong is our ironguides coach in Singapore. He has been hooked on triathlon ever since winning his age group in his first Olympic-distance race. Many top performances later, Shem still enjoys the challenges of training and racing at a high level, while balancing this with work and family. He is a firm believer in the benefits of an active lifestyle and loves being able to positively affect his athletes’ lives in this way. In the four years that Shem has worked as an ironguides coach so far, he has helped more than 60 athletes achieve their goals. They range from newbies hoping to complete their first sprint race, to 70.3 podium contenders, to seasoned Sub 10-hour Ironman athletes. Shem’s care for his athletes and his attention to detail set him apart. He completely understands the varied pull factors of life’s demands as well as the fiery motivations that drive everyday age groupers and is able to craft sustainable, effective training plans for their time-crunched schedules. An Honour’s Degree in Health Science has given Shem the knowledge to explain and expertly administer The Method. This, in turn, helps his athletes understand how each session contributes towards their ultimate goal; as a result, countless personal bests have been improved upon as his athletes continually get fitter and faster.

Train with ironguides!

Personalized Online Coaching: Starting at USD190/month

Monthly Training plans (for all levels, or focused on one discipline): Only USD39/months

Event based training plans:

Sprint Distance (USD45 for 8-week plan)

Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)

Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)

Running Plans (10k, 21k and 42k – starting at USD40)

Ironman Training – Time to review and listen to your body

January 26, 2018

base & off-season, Home

Alun “Woody” Woodward, Coach, ironguides.net

As the New year is well under way its a great time to take a step back and review where you are with your training. We all get over excited with the start of the new year and push harder in training with the prospect of racing again now much closer!

While the race season is indeed approaching rapidly in training terms it is still quite a way in the distance and now is not the time to be training all guns blazing with the end goal in sight! Most of you will be training for a major Ironman race mid summer which is likely to be around 5-6 months away still and right now your focus should still be on building the base of speed and strength before any major endurance work begins.

While speed and strength is what we are looking to build at this time of year we must remember that this building process has to be a step by step, imagine building a house we have to go one brick at a time in order to have a well structured house. The new year always brings that little bit of extra enthusiasm in some athletes and at the same time fear in others that forces us to push a little bit too hard and try to rush the gains in fitness. The results of this enthusiasm are clear to see with the body, if we are pushing too hard then breakdowns will start to occur. These breakdowns can be in the form of illness due to a compromised immune system or small niggles or injuries from pushing the muscles too hard too soon.

Sickness

Illness is inevitable at some point, there is no way we can avoid this but if you are constantly falling ill every 2-3 weeks then this is a sign your immune system has been comprised. When we train we are putting our body under stress and this stress is needed in order to stimulate progress in fitness. If we do not allow the body enough recovery when training then stress levels build up and the result is a compromised immune system than is not able to ward off sickness as easily as normal and so we end picking up more infections.

Our training programs are designed with recovery build in but if you start pushing a little harder than planned in your sessions then the recovery in that plan will no longer be sufficient to the work load.

So if you have found you are getting sick more than normal recently maybe its time to review your training plan and check you are training at the right levels and not pushing too hard. Pushing too hard is not only something that occurs on your hard key sessions but more often than not it is the long easy endurance sessions that are designed to be slow and steady that end up being done with too much intensity that lead to breakdowns.

I find this is a major problem especially with runners who come to triathlon with the mentality that long runs need to be done at marathon pace, we have to remember that we are triathletes and we have residual fitness coming from 3 sports so the specific requirements of certain sessions to a single sport athlete are not always the same to us! The long run in our programs is for many an active recovery session designed to deliver more oxygen to tired and recovering muscles and speed up recovery from the intensity of previous sessions.

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Injuries

If your training and have a little injury or niggle going on then now is the time to get this looked at and do something to remedy the problem, all too often we think these issues will just go away and we ignore and train through the pain. What happens when we do this is not only do we make the existing injury worse and delay any healing process we also invite compensatory injuries to take place. For example of you have a sore hip going on when you run, if you do not fix this problem and keep on training your running mechanics will be altered to compensative for any lack of movement in this area and resultantly you can expect to start developing tightness in your legs and this can eventually lead to further injuries.

Pain when you move is not normal and should not be ignored, seeking professional help at the time of injury can get you back on track very quickly whereas waiting until the pain is so bad you simply can’t train anymore before seeking help will put you out of action for a long time. It may be a case of simply getting some massage or changing position on the bike so seek help and make sure you do not lose precious training time.

We all watch and read about the stars of our sport and how they train and we can read about amazing swim, bike and run sets but what we rarely see is the little things they do on the side of their main program to keep there bodies in one piece and maintain training consistency. We all tend to develop little issues such and a tight back, achilles pain, knee pain etc. These are most often caused by muscle tension brought on by slightly off perfect mechanics. The more you train the more these issues are highlighted and the more problems exist, successful athletes are not the athletes who have perfect mechanics and do not get these issues they are the athletes who make sure they look after the side effects of these poor mechanics regularly with stretching, foam rolling, massage or corrective exercises.

Patience is key right now, great results and breakthrough performances do not come from big sessions and pushing harder in certain sessions they come from consistent training over long periods of time, always remember consistency is key and sickness and injuries are the two major obstacles to your consistency.

Enjoy your training.

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Train with ironguides!

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Personalized Online Coaching: Starting at USD190/month

Monthly Training plans (for all levels, or focused on one discipline): Only USD39/months

Event based training plans:

Sprint Distance (USD45 for 8-week plan)

Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)

Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)

Ironman (USD145 for 20-week plan)

Running Plans (10k, 21k and 42k – starting at USD40)

More info at www.ironguides.net

An Example of Progression via The Method

January 19, 2018

Home, various

The Method sets up a training plan for your ability level and provides a framework for your consistent improvement over time. The program’s structure and specific order means athletes improve aerobic conditioning quickly while also training more specifically for the demands of triathlon — which are different than swimming, cycling and running as individual sports. Here’s a little insight into what an athlete is telling me, and why his improvement demonstrates exactly why The Method is so effective:
• Sustainable training over time
• Framework for monitoring response to changes in life circumstances (sleep, work, travel, etc.)
• Realistic comparisons of efforts over short and long term mean it’s easy to track progress
• Focus on the current workout only lightens “thinking” overhead and reduces stress
• Framework that enables monitoring of increases in training load — no random changes to the schedule, no random “new workout” — just gradual additions, slight changes, shifts in emphasis between the Five Systems as training phase demands.
From an email:

Swim: Generally going well, on Monday I improved my 40x100m time again – 1:09:01, didn’t swim on Tues as had to travel. On Wednesday I did only three long efforts in the pool and was feeling really tired during the third one (probably travel and lack of sleep). Yesterday I was good again swimming with the club and during 8x 100m set on 2min I was swimming comfortably around 1:31-33, on last rep we were supposed to push harder and I did 1:19 and it didn’t feel that hard. I couldn’t even break 1:30 last year!!

Bike: Long ride in again windy East London – first 2 laps felt hard despite I was going easy but than it was OK, last 2 laps (hard) I was going quite fast and on the last one I improved my pb by some 20sec. Run off the bike was feeling at the beginning (first 2km or so) hard on legs but not lungs/heart but than it was much better and last 3 km I run between 4:20 and 4:30. Didn’t do the Monday session as had to go to the airport but yesterday’s session was feeling comfortable.

Run: The hard rep session on the treadmill – you should like it – completed again but faster, at 13.2 kmph. I started with longer warm-up – 30 min and continued running at this pace for another 10 min after completing 8% 2 min rep – including warm down I spent 2 hours on the treadmill and run 25.3km – I was v happy when I finished this set. I did the intervals in Como and ran each one between X and Y time – started a bit too fast at X but then settled for comfortable Y – HR around XX and YY. On Wednesday did the descending split session and run at 13.5/14.0/15.5kmph – was feeling much easier than last week. Also did some weights but not too much.

* * * SELECTED PORTIONS OF RESPONSE * * *

NICE WORK on that long treadmill session!!! 🙂 That is what we like to see — listening to the body, pushing it as you can and coming out of it with a best-ever effort. A great week, all in all. Note how the work is getting harder – but you are still getting faster.

What are we learning here?

Answer: That motor skills overcome aerobic fatigue.

And on race day, what will you be experiencing?

Correct – a lot of aerobic fatigue late in the race. And what’s going to carry you through then?

Correct – motor skills!

Summary: You will be very aerobically tired late in an Ironman REGARDLESS of your training – everyone is. The winner is he or she who slows down least. But if you enter the race ill prepared having fixated only on aerobic conditioning, you will not have the motor skills late in the race to translate that conditioning into improved results. Instead of training yourself in one dimension only, you can train using The Method to train multiple dimensions of fitness simultaneously.

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Train with ironguides!

Personalized Online Coaching: Starting at USD190/month

Monthly Training plans (for all levels, or focused on one discipline): Only USD39/months

Event based training plans:

Sprint Distance (USD45 for 8-week plan)

Olympic Distance (USD65 for 12 week plan)

Half Ironman (R$95 for 16-week plan)