OutSeason "Get Your Mind Right" Series, Part I: Fitness is in the Muscles
While preparing some stuff in the blog for our upcoming OutSeason training plan sale I stumbled on some articles we wrote several years ago. I will be pushing this out on Facebook and on our newsletter over the next week or so, but I thought it would be valuable to bring them inside, in the General Discussion Forum, so we can get everyone on the same page regarding a number of OS topics.
So what I'm going to do is create a post for each of these articles each day, we'll have discussions about them in here, and across the next week we should be able to get everyone on the same page regarding the purpose of the OutSeason and much, much more
Please read the article on the blog here:
Heart Rate Training Redefined, Part I: Fitness is in the Muscles
Please use the tools in the left sidebar to share the article with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, your tri club, etc.
Then, circle back here to this forum post with any questions or comments you have. Remember -- the intent here to is guide a discussion around OutSeason related topics so we can get everyone up to speed, especially the new members. The OutSeason is, hands down, our most powerful tool for making you much, much faster and the new folks will find that it's about 100% counter to what the rest of the tri world says you're supposed to be doing, Oct-April. This is not our first rodeo, this is our 6th OS, and many of the vets have been here for most or all of them.
This series will be an excellent opportunity to share and capture that knowledge.
Comments
True That !
I do have a question, though. When training "fast", where do hills come into play. Specifically on the bike. When we do our VO2 max efforts, does it matter whether we go all out as fast as we can on a flat - OR - we charge up a hill as hard as possible? Or does it matter if we accomplish our set sitting down with a high cadence or we are standing up mashing the pedals at a relatively lower cadence. NOTE: I do not have power, so I'll be using HR and RPE for the OS.
Going into my third OS and my N=1 is this WORKS. I've improved year over year by following the non-HR protocol. I do at least capture my heart rate just so I have the data down the road.
Side note for another day re: run execution. This year in my third Ironman I did keep an eye on heart rate as a limiter early in the marathon and as a virtual whip late in the marathon. Totally inconsequential during the out season but a helpful tool in actual IM execution - for me anyway.
Good luck OS newbies... you're gonna be AMAZED at what you can do!
Yes using heart rate to run during the race is a different matter. Will be using it to drive my Arizona race. Seems like the best way available to get the most from your ironman marathon.
Useful for only pointy end folks versus the EN race pace protocol for other folks? Seems like racing to run heart rate may benefit all.
So we probably should suggest at least observing heart rate during training so we know what heart race to push during the racing?
Thanks for the comments. My notes:
(Sorry for the 'geeky' questions, but this will be my 1st OS and I want to do it right)
as hard as you can means different things to different athletes, which is why we use a standard set of zones and RPE, which Rich notes above.
A lot of athletes, when told to go as hard as they can, will start out in a dead sprint, 50-200 watts above their sustainable pace, and then ultimately settle in to a pace a little below what they could have if they'd held a steady wattage. This is not the goal.
After a VO2 session, you usually feel pretty worked, per Rich's description you quoted. But you should always keep a bullet in the chamber. Save emptying the chamber for racing. We're all real-life age-groupers, who probably have a hard enough time recovering. No sense going so hard as to compromise tomorrow's workout.
Deb — I have ended up in an overtraining hole in the last 2 OS (out of 2 — I am obviously a slow learner).
What I do now is track my waking heart rate, weight and a few other things (like hours sleep, the quality of sleep etc).
What I find is that if my waking heart rate is elevated 2 days in a row (by say 4 or 5 bpm), I rest hard until it's back to normal as this is a good predictor of either getting sick or overtraining.
2nd that
Personally, this "fitness is the muscles" thing was very powerful when I first started to use it, so to speak, with my own training. I saw every training session as an opportunity to recruit muscle fibers and force them to become better at what they do. Max recruitment of muscle fibers, that is by quantity, occured as a function of volume and intensity:
So I started to see that a 4hr easy ride (not that I was doing any of these, just sayin'
) wasn't very effective because it took soooooo long to recruit a large percentage of your slow twitch fibers and likely didn't touch fast twitch at all = left a lot of money on the table. At the same time I would watch my IF and TSS on rides, average pace on runs, my RPE, recovery state between sessions, etc and just had a very broad picture of what was going on, etc.
In the end, It think this is a simple and powerful way of looking at each and every training session -- not some mysterious "aerobic / anaerobic fitness" mumbo jumbo, "building a base" and other stuff. Insert ass into training session, force muscle fibers to work through a combination of volume and intensity, forcing them to get better at what they do. Recover, repeat, done.
Thanks for this - it was the missing piece I needed to more fully understand how things work. I had gleened that faster intensity recruits fast twitch fibers, and by doing so, they become more slow-twitch like. And I had obviously heard the CW that long & slow will make you faster eventually, but I was never quite able to see how, when LSD runs were using slow twitch. Guess I never thought of the idea that they eventually tire out and at that point fast twitch fibers are brought in in larger proportions. Makes a lot of sense now.