Heat Training Part One: Hot is the New Altitude

Preparing for Ironman Texas, I've been doing a lot of "heat training."  This is where you expose yourself to extra warmth and humidity to prepare the body for race day.  This thins the blood and allows you to stay much cooler than somebody who stays out of the heat most of the time.  Some people will tell you that it's even better than altitude training.  For a race like #IMTX, where people pass out left and right due to the insane temperatures, I totally agree.

There is an art to heat training.  Just like altitude training, you want to "train low, recover high."  If you subject yourself to horrible conditions while training, you won't get in good workouts.  You'll be wasting your training time and increasing your recovery time both at once.  A smarter option is to subject yourself to uncomfortably warm temps while not training, slowly increasing what you can tolerate.  For example, get so hot at work all day that running outdoors in the heat doesn't bother you at all.

You can do short to moderately long workouts (thirty minutes to almost an hour) outside or in a hot stuffy room and be alright.  It is the two to five-hour long bike or run in the heat that is very unwise.  Workouts like that require a huge recovery window.  You do not want to have bad workouts for three days because you decided to heat train on your long ride and now about as hydrated as a bag of dust.

In my next post, I'll cover when to start heat training and lots of tricks to do it right.