Training Hard without Risking Injury

As I was catching up on my reading of the new Triathlete magazine I stumbled upon an awesome article entitled " High Intensity Training without Overexertion". This sounds like a tough concept to support. However, the author, Marc Becker writes about some great stuff. Ultimately his article hinges upon the belief that you don't want to overexert yourself during training in ways that would require longer recovery than from the actual race. When training in such a manner, the risk of injury is reduced because you are getting adequate rest and recovery as well as training in such a way that when you think you are giving it an all out effort your usually doing this at the end of a tough base training set so you really aren't "maxing" out, thus there is less strain and pressure on your body, which in turn is a preventative measure to protect from unnecessary injury in the off-season. That might sound a little bit confusing. It even confused me as I was trying to write it. Nonetheless, some examples will help get the message across. So the goal is to get a kick ass training session in with a lot of hard work but at the same time you want this workout to not be as aerobically demanding as say an all out 5k or an all out Time Trial. These are saved for testing purposes and races. To go about this type of workout, Marc Becker gives the following cycling workout as an example: "A set of maximum-resistance, short efforts on a spin bike, or turbo trainer is an all-out effort when performed correctly, which means completing each interval at 100% muscular effort against a resistance so high that you cannot generate a cadence higher than 45 rpm (give or take 5 rpm)". Marc goes on to add that it is importatant to be properly warmed up for a workout like this. So, moving on with this workout...for starters you want to look to do about 1 minute of the demanding 45 rpm spinning and then recover for at least the same amount of time..you would then repeat this for say about 5 times. What happens is that by doing this you are really taxing your muscles in your legs and in turn not over using your aerobic system since the time of exertion is relatively brief. The beauty of this type of training is at the end. When you finish your determined sets of low cadence work and move onto to say some endurance to cap the workout off, you are now pre-fatigued. Your legs are now a little tired and when you start to up the cadence, the fact that your legs are tired prevents you from red-lining your aerobic system. Thus you have essentially trained very hard yet have avoided injury and overexertion by pre-fatiguing your body and creating a "bumper" of sorts. Why is this important? Well because training for triathlon is a long process. Our bodies just would not be able to keep up if we red-lined our effort every day. Rest is necessary and injury prevention is critical! Triathletes spend so much time on training and getting prepped for races that an injury is just devastating. Another training session for cycling that will give you this type of benefit is a long ride. During a long ride you can really fatigue yourself. Then at the end of this ride you can give an all out effort and really push yourself while still maintaing a HR that is on the low side. Essentially this all out effort will be done once your already tired so once again you have created a natural "safe zone" that enables you to not take your training to levels that are so high that it will take a lot of recovery to come back from.

So that's some food for thought. Hope you enjoy, and Happy training during the Holidays!