Join D3 head coach Mike Ricci and I as we talk about how Lance Armstrong will influence the sport of triathlon, how to go from base season to build, and also what tricks you can use to stay motivated when training indoors.
After that, we have a full hour of The Training Log, where I give you tips and tricks on how to train at the Ironman level.
And don't forget, I can make you faster, too!I now coach with D3 Multisport! So send me an email at Zentriathlon at gmail.com and let's get started.
If you could know when it is time to take a break from training so that you can recover and come back even faster, that would sure be nice, right? Well, there are two sure-fire ways to do it.
First, make sure that your training has some speedwork mixed in. I'm talking about 15 minutes of ramping up and then going as fast as you can, about every few days. It is a similar effort to negative splitting a 5k run race. Do this for a few weeks and you will suddenly notice that you cannot even come close to the speeds or efforts that you were originally capable of. Bam - that's your sign. Take off a few days.
Second, your view on training will shed light on how you are doing. As you wear yourself down over a few weeks, you'll begin to feel like your training load is like a truck on your chest - like it's on top of you instead you on top of it. When you are no longer happy at the controls and instead the workouts are bullying you around the room like an 800 lb. gorilla, it's time to take off.
So when do you come back? After a while (could be a couple of days to a week or more), you'll be going crazy to work out. When you're bursting at the seams to start training again with an abundance of positive energy and strength, that's a great sign. Now, wait just a little bit more. Now, that's the right amount.
What do you do with your spare time when resting? Work on your bike! It could use a nice bath and a once-over to see if it needs any work done.
When we get injured, we spend a lot of time "fixing it," but not much time changing the cause. Just as much or more of your time should be spent comparing your form to that of the uninjured to see if it matches up. If not, then you are just putting a band-aid on the problem and it will continue to hurt.
If your shoulder hurts while swimming, taking ibuprofin might help for a short while, but the problem will get worse. Instead, you should be spending your time trying to find a friend that can video you swimming. Take that video and compare it to othe ones online of Phelps and Thorpe. If you don't have the same form, that's where you should focus your energy. Yes, you are not as fast as them, but you will NEVER be as fast as them if your form isn't better and especially if you're in the doctor's office instead of the pool.
The proper way to exercise is to always use perfect form, no matter how slow or fast. If you get sloppy while going fast, then you're just training yourself to use bad form and injury will soon follow. And bad form under the higher stresses of going faster amplifies the forces that injure you. Instead, you go as fast as you can with perfect form. When you can't go any faster, then that's your limit. With practice, you'll get faster and faster with perfect form and also reduce your risk of injury to near zero. Now take new that athlete with perfect form and no time off for injuries and tell me who's going to be faster in a few months - the sloppy one with high injury risk or the perfect execution one?
You often hear people say they don't have enough time. We even say that other people are successful at a goal while we are not because they have more time than we do.
This is a wrong view.
Time is an illusion. "Time" was invented by man to attempt to make some sense of the Universe and compare series of events to one another. But as Einstein and others have proved, time is relative. Time slows with speed, so it actually isn't a constant at all. Toss it out.
Since time is a concept and not an actual thing, now you can see that you can't make it. When somebody says they will need to make time to do something, he is actually saying he will use his series of events more efficiently to get more done than the previous standard.
Bill Gates had no more hours in the day than you did. He did not "make time" to build a billion dollar fortune. He used his time, the same amount that you had, to focus on and execute the tasks to make his fortune happen.
Craig Alexander didn't have more time than you to win the Ironman World Championships. He spent his time training, mastering how to most efficiently string together three events of physics, namely swim 2.4 miles, bike 112, and run 26.2.
When you say you don't have time to train for triathlons or eat healthy, that's not true. What is true is that you are currently living the lifestyle of somebody that has decided, through a series of choices, to not be able to string together the events and tasks to make a healthy triathlete happen. You can change this with a new series of choices on how to spend your time.
David Allen, the founder of the GTD movement, teaches about how nobody has more time than anybody else. Rather, we choose how to spend our time, and that makes all the difference. Below is a video of a talk he gave to employees at Google. Enjoy!
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 6:15PM 