Good Endurance Training Habits
Always have a bottle on deck during your swims!
It’s late fall, and only a few months remain in the 2021 racing season (if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, of course). Some athletes have started their end-of-season break, while others are closing in on their final races. Those who finished up their races in September and October are looking for coaches right now or planning out the 2022 season, dreaming of the successes they’ll experience next year. We just had several new athletes sign up, and it made us realize something: there are a set of habits we consistently attempt to ingrain in each of our athletes—why not make it official and give you a listicle, that highest of journalistic forms?
Fuel Before, During, and After
We can’t think of something that athletes get more wrong, more often. Endurance training requires effective fueling, no matter what you think your body composition goals might be. Even if you and your coach have decided, with the help of a nutrition professional, that losing some weight might help your performance on the race course, you should never, ever, ever skimp on calories before, during, and after sessions. If you fuel your workouts and then recover from them effectively, your training will just be better. If your training is better, you’ll get faster or more economical. Once you’re training better, body composition goals will be more realistic. If you starve yourself, though, you won’t accomplish any of your goals. Set up your life so there are ample calories around to support your training.
Update Your Training App, and Communicate with Your Coach
Why hire a coach if you’re not going to talk to them? All of the legitimate training apps (TrainingPeaks, Final Surge, Today’s Plan) provide easy ways to communicate with your coach. USE them. Your coach WANTS to hear from you. If they don’t hear from you, they’ll wonder what’s going on, and might even doubt that you’re invested in the process. Any good relationship succeeds on regular, open, and honest communication. Leave your coach a comment and schedule a call regularly. What kinds of comments? Three or four sentences is usually enough to give an update on the workout just completed—your coach hates silence, but also can’t read a novel for every workout.
Stretch Cords Before Every Swim
Just five minutes of stretch cord work before you swim will make a HUGE difference in your swimming. You will move better, you’ll be warmed up, and you’ll have worked on a little strength before diving in. Just try it once and see how much better you feel as you start your next session. What should you do? Really anything that looks like swimming, but we’ve always liked double-arm pulls and single-arm pulls in sets of 30-60 seconds. PRO TIP: if you do this regularly and take your swim cords to races, you will have a way to warm up when you aren’t allowed into the water before race start.
Set Up Your Devices for Your Desired Information
It’s never fun to start a workout and realize that you’re looking at all the wrong data. OR to upload your workout and discover that you’ve handed your coach a bird’s nest of almost unusable information. Talk to your coach and find out what data they would like to see. Here at CBCG we don’t like auto-lap (turn if off! Unless you’re racing—then you can turn it on), but we do like heart rate and cadence. Agree upon a set of shared metrics and then make sure to keep supplying that information to your coach.
Learn How to Use a Pace Clock
We really don’t like it when athletes use their smart watches in the pool—it alienates swimmers from the experience of swimming, and there’s all this button pressing. Even worse, most smart watches subtract the rest from the session, stringing together your intervals as if you did them continuously. That’s like doing a bike session and not recording the recoveries between intervals and then trying to convince your coach you rode continuously at 120% of FTP for 18 minutes. The pace clock is a great training device, because it associates you and your brain with the workout at hand, and it doesn’t let you off the hook. Here’s how to use it. You may see workouts written something like this:
10x50 on :50
5x100 on 1:35
OK, what does that mean? That means that, for the 50s, you leave every 50 seconds. Swim a 50 in :40 seconds? Awesome, you get ten seconds rest. Swim it in :49 seconds? Well, you get one second rest. You’ll quickly learn what intervals are “makeable” for you and which ones are stretches. Usually intervals that constrain your rest stimulate your aerobic system, and those that allow you lots of rest help develop speed. That triathlete who says she’s working on “speed” because she just did 50x50 on a tight send-off? That wasn’t a speed workout.
Please, please do your strength work
Make Strength a Habit
In the words of a giant multinational brand, just do it, OK? Find a way to make strength training fit into your life and get it done. A weak muscle will eventually be a tight muscle, and even if your tight muscles don’t end up injuring you, they may constrain your mobility and affect your performance. Also, few coaches will dispute the benefits of core work, and if you’re over 35 you’re already beginning to lose muscle mass (this counts double for female athletes). Remember that this sport is for life, so figure out how to incorporate this sometimes tedious discipline into your existence.
A clean bike is a fast bike, but it also means a committed athlete
Clean Your Bike, and Learn Some Basic Maintenance
When budding Euro-pros start riding at age five, no one cleans their bikes for them. They learn to keep their machine clean, and in doing so they discover all sorts of things they’d miss otherwise: a fraying brake cable, a missing bar end, a cracked shifter. In some cases they discover issues that might become catastrophic. If you work on your own bike (even for just the basics) and clean it, rather than outsourcing it, you’ll be a more self-reliant athlete, able to fix your bike when something odd happens.
Conclusion
These seven tips are only a small smattering of good habits for endurance athletes, and you and your coach will probably agree upon several more. But since improvement at this type of sport relies upon consistent training, you will want to attach good habits to those training routines. This life-structure offers one of the best benefits of endurance sport, and you probably didn’t pick up the sport simply because you loved exercising so much. Use the training structure to improve your habits, and you may find yourself enjoying the sport more, achieving more, and just generally feeling better, which fits with that whole Happier, Faster, and Healthier thing.