How to Plan Your Offseason

How To Plan It

First of all, it includes REST. We won’t belabor this point, since we have talked about it AT LENGTH before, but you absolutely must rest. Did you do mostly Olympic-distance and sprint-distance races, or races that were under three hours or so? You probably only a need a week of ZERO training. Olympic to 70.3, with a marathon in there? 7-10 days, for sure, of NO training. Ironman or (gulp) multiple ironman races? 10-14 days, absolutely. Endurance athletes often chafe at this, but we’ll trot out our old chestnut: if you can’t take a week off you are an addict, not an athlete.

Next? Your offseason includes 2-3 weeks of EASY, unstructured training, ideally with a skill focus. Can’t bilateral breathe? This is your winter to do so (it doesn’t take long). Always skip your strength sessions? Let’s set that habit now to get to the gym twice a week. Feel like you can never get out of 3rd gear on the bike or run? Let’s do some SHORT high-cadence or fartlek work while cycling or running. If you don’t have an answer, here is what should go in your next offseason.

• REST (see above)

• Strength training, but begin with light weights and proper movement. Hire a personal trainer for a few sessions to teach you how to lift properly. That will be fun and it’ll be nice to be social in your sessions for once. Make it a habit.

• Spend 3-4 weeks on relatively unstructured, light training. I always tell the athletes I work with that they should try to do each sport 2-3 times per week, lift twice, and only do as much of each sport that is fun and enjoyable. Once your attention begins to drift, it’s time to shut it down for the day.

• All told, your offseason should take about four to six weeks, depending on how long your total rest period was. By the end of it, you should find yourself pretty excited about the upcoming season.

How To Stick With It

OK, this is the hard part. You’re a type A person. Your whole life the equation has been simple: work hard, get the result. You’ve made that work in your professional and academic lives, and your guess is that that is what happens in endurance sport, too.

We’re sorry to tell you but that’s not true. Cruelly, it did work for a little while when you started the sport, so you would be forgiven for thinking that that linear relationship (hard work + time = reward) is going to work forever. After a season or two, though, something odd happens: your improvement becomes more undulating, requiring periods of rest and rejuvenation to reach new heights, and that’s what your offseason is (you should take a midseason break, too, but we’ve written about that elsewhere). Right now you’re thinking great! I can stick with this, no problem. But think back to the last time you took a break, due to sickness, injury, or stress.

Not pretty, huh? We’re guessing that, perhaps, like most endurance athletes, you struggle to take your foot off the gas. But again, if you can’t take a week off of sport you are an addict, not an athlete. So how do you stick to something that is going to feel deeply unsettling?

By leaning into the unsettling part. We bump into this while coaching swimming, too. We’ll make an adjustment in a swimmer’s stroke, have that swimmer try out the new adjustment for some distance, and then ask them “OK, how did that feel?”

“Weird,” they say, an expression on their face halfway between confusion and fear.
“Good!” we reply. “Weird is good! Was what you were doing before working?”
“No,” the swimmer says, slightly grudgingly.
“So can ‘weird’ mean ‘trying something new?’”
“Maybe,” our athlete says, even more grudgingly.

We understand. Change is hard, and for most of us, doing it the way we were doing it, while certainly not perfect, felt…comfortable.

Is comfortable working for you anymore?

No? You’d like to get off the plateau you’re on? Then begin to embrace to discomfort of not training for 7-14 days. It won’t kill you. And it WILL make you stronger next season. So the message here is to come up with a mantra or saying, something you can push back on when the demons begin to whisper to you that you need to stop resting and blast some FTP intervals (even though your event is 8 months away). Something that helps, something real. Something that actually makes you feel in control of your training, rather than it being in control of you (sound familiar?).

“I decide when I am going to push in my training and when I am going to rest, and that pattern makes me a stronger athlete long term.”

Is It Working?

One concession we’ll make to Type A types is that it IS really helpful to know if your resting is actually working. This is a hard one to measure, but we have two ways you can do it, one of the short term and one longer term. The first is implementing some kind of aerobic benchmarking and maintaining that approach through the offseason. Aerobic benchmarking has been around ever since endurance sport has been around, and goes under so many different names: “fastest easy pace,” “aerobic decoupling threshold,” “aerobic threshold,” the “Swedish Aerobic Readiness Test or S.A.R.T.” Yeesh. Basically we are training at a very moderate effort and tracking heart rate response. You can track lactate response, too, if you have access to that measuring ability. But whatever you do, you should perform this benchmark every week during your offseason period, which is, as we’ve said, about 4-6 weeks long. The test can look like any of the following:

1. Swimming, cycling, or running at the top of your endurance zone (make sure you and your coach agree on what this means) and track your heart rate for 15-20 minutes after a solid warmup. Also make notes about how you feel subjectively. Perform this assessment every week and see what happens. It is very helpful to have a secondary metric (pace, power, speed) so you can see what is changing. Often at the end of a season an athlete is TIRED, and HR response is somewhat depressed. You will know you are getting ready for the season when HR starts low and STAYS low, and the subjective metrics are “I feel great.”

2. Swedish Aerobic Readiness Test. You can read more about this over on Gordo Byrn’s Substack, but basically it’s a short ramp test with some Tabata-like efforts at the end. In order to do this fully you need a lactate monitor, but just HR works too:

   1. 10-20’ WU

   2. 5’ @ 50% of FTP

   3. 5’ @ 65% of FTP

   4. 5’ @ 75% of FTP

   5. Get average HR for each step, and then take lactate (if using) after the 5’ @ 75% of FTP.

   6. 3’ of 30” @ FTP, 30” easy. Get average HR for this 3’ section.

   7. Write all of that information down and also make subjective notes of how you feel

   8. Perform the test every week. Ideally you see HR and lactate generation come down over the course of the offseason. This is also a good test to repeat at the start of training blocks. If you do it and HR and lactate are elevated, you are NOT ready to tackle a tough week.