How You Should Structure A Training Week

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Jared Donnelly. Welcome back to another episode. And one of the most common questions we get asked is how do I actually structure my training week? And most people just say, I just want someone to tell me what to do and. And when to do it. When people sign up with us, it's mostly because they want someone to tell them what to do and when to do it. So this is exactly what we're going to be talking about in today's episode. But first, our normal starting segment. Dad, what are you grateful for?

Yep. I don't want to be known as the what to do, when to do it person, but if that's what we have to be, then that's what we'll call ourselves. But my gratitude's a little bit weird today, but I'm always happy coming up with weird ones. So over the weekend, we had the the opportunity to do another event, and I'm grateful. Just going segue a bit here from that event. I got some information back from one of the people I coach who wasn't in the event, mind you, and the gratitude I've got is because he now understands almost like a coach does. He had a mate who did the marathon and he went into his results and looked up his first K to his last K and summarized to me perfectly how poorly he executed. And I'm grateful for this podcast platform because clearly we're getting our message out for anyone who wants to listen to it, about what things you should be doing come any race that you're planning on having a crack at. And he even went so far as to go into the results of the Melbourne Marathon and went into his age group, and they've got breakdowns of every runner's, you know, particular points where they pass a timing marker, what might be 7k or 14k or 25k or whatever this market. And you've got ideas from looking at all the athletes about where their pace is. And he was looking across the majority of the people in his age group. And he came out with the analysis that there was only two or three people in his whole age group that might have had, you know, between 80 and 400, depending on how many people are in your event. Two out of 400 people executed evenly or negative splitted. And he's making comments like, oh, look at these guys and girls. They're just running way too hard at the start and fading. And I just laughed and thought, that's brilliant. You have totally understood and you're looking for the right things. And I guarantee when this guy comes to do his next race and he's done, you know, a few duathlons and learn a lot of harsh lessons, like everybody does, like I did when I first started, like you did, about execution and having a race plan and. And like other people still do.

Yep.

Yeah, it was just great to get feedback. And you just go, yeah, this guy's got it. He understands. And he's gone into such detail to explain to me, you know, what people were doing and how poorly they were executing. And. And the final thing he said was, you know, they've probably. For the guys in the marathon, they've probably left 10 minutes out there that they didn't need to do. They probably were fit enough to do 10 minutes or 15 minutes or even 20 minutes quicker than they actually got. Not because they weren't fit enough, just purely because they executed horribly. And that was the good thing that I heard him say was guys are probably better than that. But they just executed horribly and got a really disappointing outcome. But the underlying thing was they made the marathon. They're happy, but deep down, you know, they're disappointed because they crept home for the last 10K and, you know, they lost four or five minutes in 5K. And it's just a horrible experience. But we know all that, but we still keep making the same mistakes. But it was really great to hear someone who's listening to the coaching advice and can analyze other athletes and come out with exactly the right analysis.

That's absolutely brilliant point. And my gratitude is sort of similar theme because I saw a lot of people running the half marathon or marathon on the weekend without a watch. And so my gratitude this week was for my Garmin watch. I just absolutely love it. And I love how much information this simple watch can give you and how handy it is just to know your pace, know your heart rate, and how important that is for what you're talking about with race execution. And no matter what the run is, even on an easy run or a hard training session, it's just so handy to have that watch there. And you're not a slave to it. And that's not what the watch is for. But for all those people that were running the half or the full with their phone in their pocket, you know, tracking it on Strava, but they're not actually able to see what their splits are at the time. It is a much harder way to perform. On a side note, on that Braden car, actually, you go, you say something.

Your cousin Dylan, he runs with his phone in his back pocket, and he's trying to get his splits off his phone, which I find hilarious. I'm saying, dylan, buy a watch, please. I know I should. I know he's more intent on taking photos as he's running and linking it to social media. He still ran a 132 half marathon. You know, for someone who's actually looking around, taking photos is. No. No mean feat, to be honest.

Yeah, yeah. That shows how much he's leaving on the table. But some. Some apps are actually quite good on the phone. If you do click start, though, and you're wearing headphones, they'll tell you each kilometer split. They'll say 1cl kilometer. And I say it, which at least is better than nothing. But you don't want to be running a kilometer way too fast. Get to the end here that you've run way too fast because the damage is done. At least you have that knowledge, but the damage is done.

It's okay, Jordan, if you've run too fast and you felt fantastic all the way to the finish line, that's actually okay.

Yeah.

That's the whole point of running a race is to run faster than you've run before. But what we're finding is people are running faster than they've run before for the first half and then the slowest they've ever run. And that's the problem.

Braden Curry, who's over in Hawaii, was posting about his last hard training session before the race for the champs, and he ended up running on the main drive. And he said there was a billion runners out there because everyone had the same idea to. To. To do their last run session a couple of days out, which makes sense. And he said, to fit in, I made sure I was checking my Garmin watch every five seconds. And he was taking the piss about the amount of people that, you know, they're checking their pace. And I thought that was an interesting comment, considering that at the World Champs, he blew up because he went out way too hard, and he completely didn't negative split. And he wrote a great article on it, reflecting on his World Champs race. And he said, I wouldn't. I wouldn't race any other way. Which does sound funny in hindsight when. When it didn't work. But his point was that he expected he would be able to hold that pace. He Just wasn't fit enough on the day. But according to his numbers, he should have been able to hold that pace. So it was a little bit different. So even though he doesn't check his watch as much and, and goes more off feel he was at the start running to the pace that he probably should have been able to, but then it didn't work out in the day. So. Interesting comment from him and I thought that's funny considering, you know, the fact that you didn't have your pace was your downfall at the last World Champs. But yeah, it'd be interesting to see, see what happens next for him.

There's a lot we can say about that, but I think we don't have time for that at this particular podcast. While we're on that and Kona, I just want to have a big shout out to the three Trivalo people, Andrew Fox, Craig Cassidy and Mark Follett, who are racing and wishing them good luck. And they're all three debutantes there. So there's some, some nervous days leading into the race, but hopefully they get a great outcome. And the message is it's like no other race. And obviously when this podcast comes out, the race will be run and done.

Moving on to what has caught your attention and before we get into the main topic of the episode, what has been, what has caught your attention recently.

Over the journey? You always have. Oh, Covid's been a massive experience of people being sick. But, but injury, breaking collarbones, you know, getting hit by a car, you know, whatever the injury, the fact that people don't understand that no matter how much time you have off, the time that it takes to come back to where you were before you had that injury is reflective of the amount of fitness you've stored over your journey of your life. And that can never be taken away from you. So you need to actually have confidence in the fact that you will be okay. It might take extra time than you think for some people and it'll take less time for others. And that's directly correlated to the fitness that you had up until that point. And I've got so many examples of extremes for both. Like one of our guys went on a holiday to Scotland and got hit by a deer. And it's a pretty extreme, you know, unlucky circumstance to have happen. And he was out for eight to 12 weeks with fractured pelvis and hip in a wheelchair for, for quite a long time and, and returned slowly back to training. He was a really talented rider and triathlete and, and you know, about total of time from when he, when the deer hit him to 13 weeks later. He's done some PBS on courses that he's written for years that he couldn't break those PBS. Yet 13 weeks later he is in his expression, I'm almost in the form of my life. And of course he doesn't have the endurance in his run yet. And because he hasn't been able to run, you know, except for walk running. And so there's a long way back from running, but as a cyclist where he's been able to get on the bike quite early, you know, he's had five or six weeks with no riding, but, but he's really just started gradually and worked his way back without going overboard and trying to jump into his, to his training program, you know, as if he'd just finished last week. He's, he's done it the right way and being patient and trusting the process. And so what's caught my attention is people, they lose the plot. Oh, geez, I've had a week off or I've had four days off, I'm going to lose so much. This guy's had 12, 13 weeks where he's basically done stuff all yet he's riding as well as he has ever. And they're examples of, if you just think about logically that you've been training like this for two years or for six months or for 10 years or 20 years, you will be okay. You know, you'll get back to where you were quite quickly if you just trust the process. And I don't know, I've got 70 examples of the same thing that's happened where people have only been training for a short time and it does take them a fair bit of time to get back to where they were. But you know, as you've been doing this for longer and longer, it is so much easier to get back. So for all those people who are going to experience injury or illness and we are going to all be affected by it, so don't think you're immune to it, everybody's going to have something go wrong which stops them from training. And so you have to understand, and this is what's caught my attention, the people who trust the process and do the return to training properly, where they're not rushing it and they're giving their body the appropriate time to adapt and adjust the load that's being put on them from the load, which was zero for all that rest period. You can't just go from zero to hero. You need to actually Work your way slowly back in so that your body can cope and it will get the right amount of rest and recovery in between the sessions. Even though you've been resting for a long time, you just don't throw yourself in the deep end. And that's another way to get either injured again or sick again. You'll do this rotation of training, building, pushing too hard, getting sick or injured again, back to resting and then starting again. It's like you're doing 16 comebacks in a row. And look, take you for an example. You've had three really serious illnesses this year which have really knocked you around. And if I use you as an example, you did one eight week block where you've actually ended up with the fastest 10k you've ever run after having, you know, almost 12 weeks of not much training, 12 weeks of hardly any training, recovering from illness, then 8 week block and you ran the fastest 10k you've ever Run in your life. They're examples of trusting the process and working your way back into it. I wanted to get that message across in the podcast and that's what's caught my attention. I've had quite a few people who've been hit by cars or injured and they are doing everything really well and they will reap the benefits of that. And yet I've got some other people who don't believe me and then all of a sudden they've come out and done some training sessions and they've gone far out. I'm not as far back as I thought I was and it's really great to hear that, but it is hard to accept that that's going to happen when you're sitting there sad and down on yourself and injured. So it's an interesting one.

That's a really, really important point and I think it's really, really important for people to hear that because it is the worst feeling to get sick or injured when you're in a really good training block. When you're in form, you natur. You naturally get super frustrated. You naturally just so down about the fact that you're going to go backwards. And so it is a really, really important message to hear. And using my own example, not only did I run a 10k PB and was actually again in the form of my life, I got sick a week after that and then had to have time off again and then only 6 weeks later did the same time for the 10k. So it just shows that you can, you can have these setbacks and bring it back and there's, there's actually multiple examples on a pro level. And I'll just, I just want to say two quickly that come to mind. And Lucy Charles is one of them. She's probably the top two best triathlete in the world. Again, the race is actually happening today, so we'll see how she goes in the World Champs. She could be best in the world, but she had a really serious hip fracture and she had to go completely to zero because, you know, anything to do with bone is really tough to come back from. And she basically just planned to have the whole year off. Instead, the recovery went really well. She came back and won a world title in the long course championships as her first race back. So that just shows how, how much. Exactly what you're saying, that, that base fitness can give you a return to form very quickly. And then there's another, smaller example. There's a girl that runs for the Melbourne Track Club, Sarah Billings, and she's a really good runner. She's almost on the world stage as a runner and she is on the world stage as a runner. And she had years, not just a little bit of an injury, she had years of multiple stress fractures. She kept coming back and kept getting injured and she would only be able to string together a couple of months of training before she got injured again. And she was so frustrated with it and so down about it, and her career looked like it was slipping through her fingers and it was being taken away from her. And then finally she got on top of it all and within six months she was pacemaking at the Diamond League athletics, the best races in the world. And that shows the level she could get back to. So even after years of setbacks, which not many of us have to go through, most of our setbacks might be a month, a couple of months, like you're saying, eight to 12 weeks even, she was able to very quickly get back to that level. So I just find that really, really encouraging to think about those examples.

There's one point I wanted to make while you were talking, which reminded me one of the actual benefits of, and you know, how we try to find a positive in every negative that happens to us and we try to find a reason for what is happening to us. And we do that because we want to make sure that we probably don't make that mistake again. But more so it's just to, you know, everything's meant to happen for us for a reason. That's my philosophy. And one of the things I get out of this is it's forced rest. Some people will do better when they're forced to rest. And if I said to, I've got examples that I'm talking about, which I won't mention names, where they won't rest. I want them to have an off season and they'll just keep riding and they'll just dumb it down a bit, but they just won't give themselves a break. And if they have to be forced off the bike because, you know, due to health reasons they're not allowed to ride, it's actually a benefit to them to not be able to train. And that's the positive out of being in a negative situation, is you get to rest and you actually allow your body to heal and the fatigue is absolutely shed to zero. And therefore you're starting back with, you know, if we use the fitness line a lot, where the fitness line gradually progresses in an upward direction and every time you have a period off, there's a sharp drop in fitness, a sharp drop in your fatigue, and a sharp drop in your form, unfortunately. And, you know, they're the negative things. But, but, you know, if, if you've been training for years and years, your fitness is, you know, if we use a training stress score from training peaks, it might be 90 or it might be 130. If you're a triathlete training for an ironman, you know, after six weeks, it might be at 70. If you're at we're at 130, you're not at zero, so you're already at 70 with no fatigue. And your form will be through the roof because you're fresh as a daisy. So you actually start in a good position with no fatigue. So that's the reason why sometimes forced rest is really good. Obviously, the longer you have rest, the less beneficial it's going to be. I'm not talking extremes here, but just think about that. You are actually getting a positive because your fatigue is literally disappearing.

Yeah, and we've spoken about this between ourselves and on the podcast, just about. I don't like the wording of everything happens for a reason. It's. It's more what the examples you're giving are, finding a, a purpose in the event that's happened. And so it's not, I don't like that mantra of this is this was supposed to happen, this was a good thing because, like, a negative thing might happen. You know, injuries aren't good. But you, like you're saying you're finding the good in it. You know, you're finding a positive out of it where obviously the injury is not preferable. But like you said, it's a good mental break or it's a chance for you to take some physical or mental rest where you wouldn't have. And in any situation that is the goal to try and find that. But I guess we digress. We always like to go down a little bit of path of life philosophy. But we'll bring it back to the episode topic, which I'm sure a lot of people want to hear and that is how to structure a training week. So let's dive into it. So how do we structure a training week? We want to go through some of the key sessions, how to actually what order and sequence to do the sessions, which is just as important as the sessions themselves. And some key things to look out for in a training week and more specifically some key mistakes to avoid. So if we look at a training week and we are going to get specific to whether we're talking about triathletes or just single sport people, whether you're just a cyclist or just a runner. But we really, we've said this a lot, but we just want to quickly establish what are the key sessions for a week that you need to be including and how do, what are we, what are we basing our training week around?

Okay, so if we look at single sport first, it is so much easier to manage your week without having to think about two different sports. So let's just start with an easy beginning. And we're really. The structure of the week should always be based around the hard sessions and everything else fits around those days. So if you're a normal human being who has a job that goes from Monday to Friday, and I'm not saying the people, people who don't have that are abnormal human beings, it's just that that's not the normal weekly work structure that we have. So I'm going to be talking like that. So if you're a fly in, fly out, four day on, four day off, this doesn't suit you as much, but you still can manipulate your week to make it as accurate as you can. So we're trying to make the high intensity sessions with enough break in between so that you can recover to do the high intensity session that's required to for the second time during the week at the appropriate level. So there's always a lot of depends on and this depends on whether you're new to the sport and you've done very little cycling or running or swimming as an individual. And therefore you can't cope with two hard sessions a week, you can only cope with one. And so therefore you need to spread the one hard session from the endurance session. And for those who have listened to our podcast many times, you know that we push that. We each program, whether you're a swimmer or rider or a runner or a triathlete, needs to have endurance. It needs to have some sort of. Because the majority of the events we do, unless you are a track cyclist or 100 meter sprinter, this is not the audience we're talking to. We're talking to the endurance type of athlete here. So we need to have some sort of time where we're spending equal to or over the distance that we're competing in. And so that endurance session, even though it's not intense, it is massively fatiguing. And so we sort of try to measure our week around the fatigue level rather than the intensity. So the intensity is important and that creates a lot of fatigue, but you can also get fatigue from endurance. So we've got to be careful that we don't string intensity too close to endurance unless we're specifically trying to do that in that session. And that's a different story. So we're trying to spread the endurance and the intensity sessions apart so that you can cope well with both of them. And that would be what the main goal for a single sport person would be, to try to do at least one session where they are really putting their body under stress. At a high level of intensity, it might only be 10 to 30 minutes of hard, stressful training with a big warmup and a big cool down to give yourself an hour's training, or 45 minutes at the minimum, or up to an hour and a half or two hours if you've got more time. But the main set should only be that small amount of time, somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes, which is all the body can really cope with at a high level of intensity. So you want to have that session as a standalone session and everything around it needs to be able to let you recover enough so that you can, if you're able to do another high intensity session, you've at least had 48 hours in between two hard sessions. And if you're capable of having two hard sessions plus an endurance session, you need to have them spaced out well. So where are the key sessions? They need to be spread so that you can recover. And we always talk about you train easy so you can train harder. And if you don't spread these sessions out, you're going to not be able to train hard enough because you're still going to be carrying some residual fatigue left over from the hard session. And that is the big mistake a lot of swimmers, bikers or runners as individuals and triathletes overall make is they do a lot of training and they forget to do some of it easy. They're doing everything really hard. So we want to make sure that some days you're actually not stressing your legs, running and riding fashion, you're giving them a rest. If you're a triathlete and as a cyclist or a runner, you don't want to be on your feet every single session, it's okay to go and do some cross training. As a runner, I'm a big believer in cross training. It will help your running. You don't. Unless you're a professional, you don't need to be running seven days a week. That is actual a bit of a mistake. I think.

You even believe that a lot of the pro runners could benefit from more cross training. You know, so they're not just because they're doing 10 runs a week normally, because they're doing a lot of two a day.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're saying they could benefit so much by getting on the bike or in the pool.

Yep. And just walking. So, you know, just going for a walk rather than going for a run or, or just rolling your legs over on a stationary bike if you don't have the equipment and you're a runner and a lot of, not a runner, not a lot of full time runners have the, the, the whiz, bang, setup bike situation that triathletes have with, you know, a smart trainer and a, in a fantastic bike. You know, just roll your legs over on a, one of those, sit on, you know, easy bikes just to get some blood flow or just go for an easy walk with the dog or just spend some time swimming at the pool. They're really good things that are going to help with the structure of your. When to train hard sessions. So. So, you know, as a swimmer, you'd be doing the same thing. You wouldn't want to be. You know, swimmers are the most intense trainers in the world of sport. So, you know, I'm a big. They should be doing more walking and stuff that's involving their legs more than their upper body, whereas it's the reverse for runners and cyclists. They want to be actually doing some upper body stuff other than the leg stuff. So you need to have periods where you're giving your legs as a runner and a cyclist a real rest. And you know, swimming, you can swim with a pool buoy and not use your legs at all. You can actually just have an easy flutter kick rather than having a big beat kick. You don't need to do kick drills as a triathlete. You can just swim with the upper body being your focus. And the cardio is okay to be doing those sessions. And that of course has some intensity, but it's still giving your legs that rest from riding and running. So the organization of your week is what we're trying to get right. And, and I, you know, training pegs. I actually used this function the other day which I haven't used for ages. And this particular athlete that I'm coaching kept moving the sessions and ended up having, you know, five running sessions in a row. And it's a recipe for injury or for fatigue or for getting themselves into a hole. So I pulled out the locked function which meant they can't move the sessions and, you know, therefore they had to tell me that they were going to probably not be able to do that session today, which is a much better system than just willingly move moving sessions. And ended up having five hard sessions in a row. So the structure is really important and that's where you need to be liaising with your coach as to, you know, I can't do this session and most of the people do it very well. It's just a quick text, I'm struggling to do this session. Where do I put it? And that's a conversation. It comes back, yep, let's just move it to the next day. Or you just forget about that session today. So there's so many answers to that one question and it's just not a matter of moving things to the next day. So that structure keeps coming back to making sure you have the right gaps between the fatiguing sessions. And we don't really want to use the word intensity, we want to use the sessions that are causing fatigue. Because if you keep training with fatigue that's growing. If you use Training stress score minus 30 or above, if you're accurate in your actual input of your data, then that is an alarm bell. You've got to be careful with minus 50s and minus 60s that they're just things you don't want to see. So you need to give yourself again. We're not dictated to by that every single day. We might intentionally want to have fatigue levels going close to that intentionally because we're going to do a seven stage race, it's going to have that impact on us. So we Want to practice that in a little bit of training. That's an example of where you would be trying to push the training stress score. So your fatigue levels are going to be high, but you want to make sure that you're not going to actually go backwards because you've put yourself into a hole in your training sessions. And when you get to the race, you actually can't even race because you're so fatigued. So the actual question you're asking is, how do we structure a training week? I'm trying to give examples of the amount of things that can happen during that time. But the key point you're trying to get across is we need to have some sessions that create fatigue, because with that we have overload and we need to allow enough recovery so you can do that again. And the longer you've been in the sport, generally, the more you can cope with. And that's not necessarily true to everybody because everybody is different in some way. Some people have been doing it for a long time, like myself, who are actually getting older, older can't cope with the load that I could cope with 10 years ago. So there are days where I'm meant to be doing my best scenario program is I want to be able to do this on Tuesday, this on Thursday, and this on Saturday. But if I get to Thursday and I'm not coping and I know my body quite well, I'll resort to not having a fatiguing session, but to have a tempo zone too, or a recovery. And people look at my program, probably on Strava, and go, well, Jared didn't do the session that I'm supposed to do, so therefore I shouldn't do it. Well, that's not what I'm saying. It's. Everybody as an individual has to understand where their fatigue levels are. And I had that question this morning from someone who said, oh, geez, I feel like my TSS is really growing too high. Should I pull back? And I'm saying, well, how do you feel? If you feel okay, then don't worry about the tss. It could actually be inaccurate. So there's so many things that go into how to structure your week. And look, the sessions that you have given to you by your coach or program, they're going to be there in an order that's 16 weeks out from your main race or four weeks out. So they're going to be targeting different aspects of am I in the base? Am I in the period where I'm actually trying to just build, or am I in the race Ready phase, where I'm really trying to hone the intensity for the race, race requirements that the actual racer asks you for. So that's determining what the sessions are. We're not talking about that. We're talking about where to put these sessions and how to get it to work for you so that you stay injury free, illness free, and you still will have an immune system that is being compromised daily because of the intensity. And it does. You know, we've talked the last podcast about intensity just doesn't mean high intensity. Intensity means doing something whether it's low intensity, medium intensity or high intensity. We use that word generally. But when you're doing something that's creating different levels of fatigue, you need to be understanding how your body's coping with it. And the coach can't tell that. The coach can only see the numbers and ask you how you're coping. And if you have to be very honest with your feedback, not be overrun by motivation to train more and more, which that is the worst type of athlete to have, the super motivated person is always going to be saying, I'm good, I'm going, let me keep going with the program. And I remember watching Lionel Sanders the other day on his video where he just couldn't cope and the session was too hard, he was too fatigued. And there's so many extremes you can have with every session. So understanding when to put the program, where to put it and how you're coping with it is the key to what we're talking about today.

I really like the distinction. It's such an important distinction between what you're saying is a high intensity session versus a fatiguing session. Because your endurance ride on the weekend or your endurance run might be as low intensity as possible, it might be zone one. Yet the endurance factor of it makes it super fatiguing and you need recovery. So that, that's really important to understand. The load on the body is, doesn't just come from intensity. And from that regard, I guess the summary is we're now we're basing our week around our one or two high intensity sessions and our endurance. And that creates the skeleton of the week. And you can look at a few examples. The example you gave was the aim would be a Tuesday high intensity day, a Thursday high intensity day, and then endurance on a Saturday or Sunday or both. Both. If you split up the endurance ride on a Saturday and endurance ride on a Sunday, or you might not be able to cope with that and you might just be doing endurance on a Saturday and Then something super light and easy on a Sunday. Or in Joe Friel's case, his example is he often has his program as high intensity Tuesday and high intensity Friday. So a really big gap because he wants to make sure that those sessions are as high quality as possible. And this is even for triathletes. And that would mean that the endurance Saturday has to be very, a lot lower intensity because you couldn't back up with some endurance with intensity inside it on the Saturday. Whereas these examples we've given and you gave just then was depending on where you're at in your program, that endurance session on the weekend might be zone one completely easy. And it's just about volume. It might be the whole thing at zone two. You're really trying to stay in the zone two range and get a fitness benefit out of that volume. It might be zone two plus intensity. You might be on a bunch ride trying to practice short bursts of sprints and having a lot of fun. And you can't do that type of session if you've trained really hard on Friday. Or it might be a race ready endurance session where you're doing long, big efforts, three by 30 minutes, three by 40 minutes, three times an hour. If you're an Ironman athlete at your race pace. And again, you probably don't want to be doing that after a hard session Friday. So we're really just thinking about these high intensity days and the endurance and then everything else revolves around that.

Yeah, and it does change. You know, it's hard to compare a triathlete with a marathon runner or an endurance cyclist or an endurance swimmer because the triathlete, he has three sports to deal with and he has to get his endurance as a runner and as a cyclist and as a swimmer up there. So you can't ignore that. So you, you know, the big problem with triathletes is you can't, in my opinion, this is just, this is just my philosophy. And there's, there's, there's ample evidence to tell me that it's a pretty good one, that if you tried to do running intensity equal to your riding intensity and swimming intensity, you wouldn't last too long. You would, you would break down, whether it's six months time, two years time. But your, your time in the sport will be very short. And that takes a bit to digest what I just said. So I've tried that way and I ran into all sorts of problems with myself and I thought that system was the only way to get myself to improve, but it wasn't it was actually counterproductive. And it's well documented that I can't run now because I push myself as a runner with so much interval training and you know, got injury after injury and I'm not going to make that mistake as a coach. And the smile on my face from Sunday afternoon, getting text messages and watching the marathon and Half Marathon and 10K results come through from the athletes that we coach is an example of how we're getting it right. Very few of our athletes do interval training on the track. I can't remember the last time I gave someone an interval training session on the track. And yet we had one guy do a 6 minute half marathon pb another guy do a 4 minute half marathon pb from his last half marathon, but a year ago, it's actually 10 minutes quicker than he was a year ago. They're just examples of people who've done no intensity on the track as a runner, all strength and endurance and yet they're running the house down. And there's an example of if you do too much intensity, you're not going to get actually the results you want anyway and you're going to break down. So there's two things going to happen. Whereas if you do it in a method that's getting your intensity from the bike, which is what we push, where the injury risk is really low and you can still get your cardio from the swim without using your legs as the main source of the energy drive where it's upper body. So we're really training smarter as a triathlete and as an individual cyclist or runner, we would be doing the same thing. We'd be doing, you know, some, some high intensity stuff as a runner, which is not based around short, sharp interval stuff on the track. If you're training for an eye for a marathon or for a half marathon now those things are really for the elite who are, who have had 10 or 15 or 20 years of, of conditioning and their body can cope. But as the everyday age grouper who wants to improve his marathon time from 4 hours 30 to 4 hours, this is the type of sessions we're talking about. Or from even from 3 hours 30 to 259, it's worked for people I've coached who have run low 240s and myself in the low 230s. That's the method I used. And the thing that stopped me was too much intensity as a runner, as an individual runner. And you know, some people are more susceptible to injury than others and others are bulletproof. But you know, we don't generalize about everybody in terms of this is only for 1 or 2%. This is something that works right across the board. And if you are in the 1 or 2% who can do some more intensity, then that's what you should be doing as well. But be aware of the risks involved. And that's what the structure and the intensity factors are, why they're so important in actually what training session to do and when to do it. And that's how we started the podcast was what should I be doing and what days should I be doing on it with what should I be doing in between.

And people might say, look at the top pros. Look at Christian Blobmenfeld who puts all of his sessions on YouTube. He's just doing track session after track session after track session. But you've got to remember that he's at the very top level in the world. He has his consistency down pat. He has his, you know, his body is so well drilled with his training load, he is trying to extract every single last bit percentage possible. And so he needs to be doing these super high intensity sessions on the track. You know, these track intervals, these short, sharp stuff. For most of us, we're nowhere near that. You know, the consistency and getting the frequency up and getting the volume right and getting your body just used to the training load without that intensity is, will result in like you're saying, multiple PBS and improvements performance without having to do that high intensity running stuff. And so if we take, if we think about that and apply it to a structured training week for an age grouper, what have we got so far? We've got the skeleton. And to keep it simple, you know, if you're looking at an individual sport, if you're just a cyclist, you'll be doing your high intensity session on Tuesday and Thursday, you'll be doing your endurance on a Saturday. And it's much easier to handle because your Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday should just be some sort of combination of zone two riding, zone one recovery, cross training. So gym work, strength work and potentially a little bit more endurance on the Sunday. But and we've spoken before about as well, if your body can cope with it and get used to it, you know, your, your midweek Wednesday ride or your Sunday ride after the endurance ride on Saturday can be that zone two effort that you slowly increase in volume, you know, and so we have a lot of top riders do a hill ride on Wednesday mornings. It's quite a nice thing that a lot of Travelo riders actually strive towards to be able to cope with, you know, a potential three hour ride at zone two in the hills and still be able to back up on the Thursday and train really hard and still be able to do that ride within their heart rate zones in their Zone 2 zones after the high intensity day, Tuesday. So that's a, that's kind of a clear single sport example. Anything you want to clarify in this?

Yeah, I think you've summarised it really well. And it also depends on how far into your journey that you are as the cyclist or the marathon runner or the triathlete. And just like we spoke about in what's caught our attention about coming back from illness and injury, the longer you've been doing this, the more load your body can cope with. Generally that's a fairly general statement. Some people will break down with too much marathon. Say someone's done 6, 16 Ironmans or 30 Ironmans or 40 marathons, they're going to be breaking down their body slowly to a point where they can't cope with a load. But generally when you're in your 20s, to 30s, to 40s, if you've been doing it since you're a young age, your body can cope. Just like Christian, they were selected as juniors to go through that program and their body has been conditioned for this for not the last two or three years of training. They've been doing this since, I don't know, I think they were selected at 14. I think you would know more about that than I, but I think I read, you know, these guys were plucked out years and years ago and been on a program since. And so they're able to absorb the load a lot more easily than a person who's only been doing it for, you know, just taking up triathlons for the last two seasons or one season or hasn't done any. So you can't compare what the pro's doing at any point, in my opinion, as to what you're doing as an age grouper and a person who just loves the sport and wants to know if they're on the right track with the structure that they're doing and the program they're doing and the days in between. And so don't think about what the pros are doing, think about how your life can be affected by. You're not a pro, so you don't have the hours, you don't have the recovery, you don't have the same focus you've got. The pros have got very selfish goals, which is what they should have single mindedness, what they should have. Whereas the people who are listening to this podcast have all got jobs and families and things on where. Where it's just part of their journey, where it's not single mindedness, it's not selfishness, but they want to have the right amount of training and the right time to do it to get the best bang for their buck. And that's kind of what if I'm searching for someone to help me, I want to know that that person understands that I can't cope with a prose program and I'm a beginner and then I'm going to be given a program that's appropriate to my level. And if I'm top age grouper and I want to improve and I've come from some other program to a program that they want to try with us, they want to know that it's at my level and I'm going to improve and not stay the same. So these are the things we're trying to get across to the people listening that one size doesn't fit all.

Let's go through a potential ideal training structure for a triathlete or multi sport athlete. And again this can apply whether you are doing single sport or multi sport. And this isn't what you should just go out and do straight away, but this would this is what we found to be pretty ideal for a triathlete and we've already based the week around two high intensity sessions and we aim for Tuesday Thursday. If someone can't back up on the Thursday from their Tuesday then it could be pushed to Tuesday Friday like we gave with Joe Frugal's philosophy. But that day, like you said, the high intensity is mostly coming from the bike. The options then if you want some intensity in the run, you can overload that day. So do a double, do a double high intensity bike and run on Tuesday, which we do for some athletes. Or you can just keep it as a bike and keep your running. Just getting your running volume and frequency up and not worrying about tens intensity moment on the weekend. For our endurance we like to split that up between a long ride on Saturday and a long run on Sunday. Again, you could overload it all on a Saturday, but most people don't want to be training for four to six to seven hours every single Saturday. That's why we split it up. Especially if you're training for an ironman where your long run ends up being two, three hours plus you don't want to be doing that until it was six hour ride On a Saturday, again, possible. But this is the way we like to split it up and it ends up being somewhat ideal. And that leaves us with Monday, Wednesday, Friday and where we can fit the potential swims in. So we like to put the swims on a Monday and Friday. If someone wanted to do an extra swim, they could do that on a Wednesday or the weekend. We've spoken plenty of times on this podcast about the fact that we think two swims is sufficient in the sport of triathlon. A lot of people disagree with that. That's okay. And that leaves the Wednesday where, depending on the athlete, you would keep that as some sort of recovery day to a zone two day, whether it's a zone two ride or run. And potentially you like to give some tribal athletes some strength work with running, but you've got to be really careful about how you build up to that because the Tuesday and Thursday are high intensity. So that's how we break down how we think about an ideal week. And you can see where you can manipulate and change things and have some variation depending on your level, what you're aiming for and what you need.

Yeah, it's a great summary and there's many variations to that and depending on where you are in your build up to your A race. So the variations, of course, when you're in the base period, you wouldn't want to be, you know, flogging yourself with a lot harder runs on the Wednesday. You want to be doing that as just a building an aerobic base where you're just running comfortably and you're progressing the endurance time. And when you get closer to the build phase and the race ready phase, you would then be doing some specific stuff where you may be doing absolute. No brainer is that we do hill repeats. We're not sprinting up these hills, but we are certainly running differently to what we'd be running in our strength session as our endurance run on the weekend. So they're quite two different sessions even though they're both involved strength training, one strength training easily and the other one strength training with purpose. But they're variations about where you are in the program at week 20 or week two. So that's the variation that you would have to. You don't get a program that's got 26 weeks in it and it has basically no variation in duration, intensity or frequency. You need to vary that so you're getting some progression, some overload and some recovery in between all of that. So. So it is a lot to take in. And you wonder yourself where do I fit into this? Well, you've got to ask yourself, you know, really, what level am I at? And that's the main thing that you would need to be asking yourself, where am I to cope with the load that I've just heard these guys bang on about for the last half an hour? And once you establish where you think you are, honestly, then your experience of how much training you've done in the last six weeks, six months, six years, comes into the question that you've been asked. Ask yourself next. And that's what I'm asking everybody who comes. What is your longest ride? What is your longest run? What's your longest swim? And you start from there. If your longest ride and you're trying to train for the Ironman, your longest ride up till that point is 30 minutes. That's what your longest ride is. You don't go out and do your first ride on that weekend for three hours. You go and do it for 45 or for an hour. They're the things that you need to understand about yourself and ask yourself honest questions. And if you get those. Those questions right and the answers will be very clear, you won't make too many mistakes in starting too high at a level that's unsustainable. And you should get the feeling that, gee, this program's not that difficult. And that's what we want. We want the load to be gradually building, and then you can cope with more in week six than you could in week one and more in week 20 than you could in week six. And. And you don't realize that except for when you look back at week one and week six to see, far out, I could only push 200 watts for five minutes. Now I can push 240 for five minutes. You know, it's an incredible progression that I've been able to do, but it just seems natural that, you know, 205, 212, 215, 220 over a period of weeks doesn't seem much. But when you look back, that's why historic information is really good for getting perspective. And I was actually talking to someone about that today. Exactly. That topic is. I didn't think I'm improving that much. But then I look back at my week one compared to, you know, week 15, and I'm actually 42. What's better? But it didn't feel like that. And I know I've trained, you know, reasonably solid, but all I've done is follow the structure in the program.

Absolutely. And I want. I don't want People to underestimate the potential range that we're talking about here. Because, look, the nature of this podcast is, is we're talking to most people who aren't complete beginners. If you're listening to a triathlon podcast, trying to improve yourself, most all people that are looking for coaches or looking for this level of structure have some experience in triathlon. Most people that get to this point get here because they've had a crack, they were a beginner at one point, and maybe they're three months into the journey or a year, or they're hooked on triathlon and they're getting past those levels. But sometimes we get an absolute beginner coming in and. And this stuff is just way, way too much for an absolute beginner. And I experience this a lot just with a lot of friends who want to start running and have basically never ran before. And the potential range that you could be talking to for someone could be way lower than you anticipate. So when you said the example before about you need to find where you are in this, you need to be really realistic with where you're at. Because most people that start running can't actually just go out and go for a run. They need to do walk running, and they need to do really, really conservative walk running. And people say, I give them examples. I say, you can run for 30 seconds, walk for five minutes, you could run for one minute, walk for five minutes, you could run for one minute, walk for two minutes, and do that for a total time of 20 or 30 minutes. And in that 20, 30 minutes, your total running time might be five minutes, might be 10 minutes, depending on what structure you go to. And they say, well, where should I start? And I say, well, it's really hard for me to know because I really don't know what you can handle. You might only be able to handle 30 seconds of running at a time, maybe one minute with two minutes walking, maybe one minute with five minutes at one walking. And so for those people, I've actually seen friends start with 30 seconds of running and a few minutes of walking. And that was actually too much for their body. They just, they had poor biomechanics. Their body had never ran before, and they needed to be even more conservative than that. And some people found one minute of running, two minutes of walking very easy. And so they could progress a lot quicker. But you do have to try and be really realistic about where you're at and know that that is the conservative level that some people have to be at. And that's okay.

It'S a great point. And it's always easy. As we say, if you start a session too high, the only way you can go is down. If you start your training program too hard, the only place you can go is to go down. So starting. And if you haven't heard this philosophy from me, you haven't been listening very well. I am super conservative in trying to make sure that people are in it for the longest game. And I get a little bit frustrated when I get an email or a phone call saying, I've got this event in six weeks. Can you help me? Well, I can help you, but it's not enough time to give you the result you're actually looking for. You need to give the body the appropriate time and whatever your A event is, work backwards. Is it a year away to my next marathon? Or if hear the people who've just done the marathon on the weekend saying, right, I'm going to do that better next year. Well, you've got a year. So, you know, this is the time to start planning that sort of stuff. And the guys who finish the Ironman or the half Ironman or whatever event they've just done, you know, that's the time to reconsider giving yourself the appropriate time so you can build up without creating the stress that we're actually talking about. You know, today in the podcast is how would, how should you structure your training to get the best outcome when it counts the most, which is the day? You've waited for eight months or in some people's cases, six weeks. So, you know, you're trying your best to prepare your body for the experience it's going to have on race day and giving yourself more time. And starting conservative is no different to actually doing each session that way. You know, giving yourself enough time to do the session, not being rushed in with no warm up straight into the main set, then get off because you can't warm down and then get back to what you were doing before. You need to give yourself appropriate time for the whole program and for each individual session and not having unrealistic expectations about yourself. I love it when people set goals. But you know, I've just had a text message from one guy saying, I'm doing the next marathon in June. And I and I'm asking him, what's your goal? And straight away he's sending back his time goal, which is great, I want that. And so therefore my next sentence is, well, now you need to do some work to create that time that you want. And that's the message I'm sending have those goals. They may be unrealistic, they may be perfectly realistic, but they're not going to happen by just talking. You need to get yourself structured and organized and planned, and you need to have a program that's going to help you along that journey, where you're not going to miss chunks of it because you've got a ridiculous program that's too hard, that's got intensity followed by intensity and no recovery. You need to have a program that's actually going to be beneficial for you to get you to the start line in the first place. We've said so many times on this podcast, getting to the start line is half the battle because the programs are too difficult for the load that the person's able to cope with.

One final thing we wanted to touch on in this topic is potential signs of overtraining and the actual warning signs to look out for and to make sure that you're avoiding this. Exactly what you're talking about, dad, is making sure that you're able to cope with this training load and you're not doing too much. And we just really wanted to make this point so that people are aware that these things aren't normal and they shouldn't be happening in your training program and because of your structure. So the things, the signs to look out for, the warnings to look out for, obviously injury or even just constant niggles that are happening, sickness, constantly getting sick, the inability to hit training targets. So if you're just too tired to hit the targets in the sessions and you know something's not right, that combined with performance plateaus or declines, you know, if someone's just repeatedly just hitting a plateau in their results. And this is why testing is so important and practice races are so important because it really gives you constant indicators about how you're going. If you weren't doing these practice races, you wouldn't know how your performance is and whether it's. Whether it's plateauing or declining. And I know, dad, you've hit some plateaus this year and you've had to stop and reassess what's actually happening. Why is this a sign of overtraining? Is this a sign of a poor training structure? Is it just a sign of fatigue in other areas of life that you need to be aware of and you've had to ask yourself those questions?

Yeah, it's a really good point to finish off on. And there's so many variables that can contribute to that. And if I have to be self assessing of myself. And it's a really good example because I don't want to be a person who just seems like I'm telling people because I'm experiencing the same thing. I'm experiencing highs and lows in my own personal performances. And the correlation for me between me not paying attention to my structure and my performance is massive. The minute I pay attention and, and I get involved in the everyday running of my actual sessions, unbelievably, I start to perform better the minute I have an attitude, which is okay because I'm quite busy dealing with making sure everybody else is doing the right thing in their programs. If I forget about my own program, my performance is correlated to poor and, and it's because I'm paying no attention to how I'm feeling. Am I fatigued? Should I be pushing today? I'm just going, right, I've got 45 minutes now. I've just got to get away from the desk, get on the trainer and go and do that session and I'll just look up what I'm supposed to be doing and off I go. I put no thought into it. How am I feeling? What's my resting heart rate? How did I sleep last night? How did I recover from the last session? What are my numbers from the last session? Session? What am I trying to achieve here in this session? How do I feel in the warm up? I'm not thinking that way. So these are things that I need to be concentrating on. And that's an example that would be happening to everybody going around the world, I'm sure. The things I look for, obviously my resting heart rate, is that something that's now out of whack with what it normally is. It's normally between 40 and 45. All of a sudden I've had two days of 52, 53. That's a sign to me that I need to actually look at what I'm doing. Ask myself, am I feeling okay? My heart rate's 53. I feel fine. Don't worry about it. The minute I don't feel fine, then I need to think. Well, that's an indicator to me. Am I restlessly sleeping? Am I sleeping beautifully? They're really good signs to me about if I'm restlessly sleeping, it's because I'm thinking about something that's worrying me or I'm training too hard. They're the two reasons why I know over the journey why I don't sleep well. And so they're signs that I'm looking for that are going to Keep me from being sick or injured and more so sick. And I've done a good job over the journey of not being sick very often because I'm looking for all those signs all the time.

Yeah, it's really an interesting point you make about your own structure and when you don't pay attention to it and that correlation to poor performance. And the Norwegian head sports scientist, the genius that is, has revolutionized training around the world. Olav Alexander got asked recently, can people coach themselves? And he said absolutely. He said there is a small percentage of people that can coach themselves. He said it is a small percentage, but you're definitely in that category. You've always been basically self coached, even as a professional. But the difference was you were meticulous as a professional in your structure and really planning out your weeks and you had to be because it was your job. And I know that when you haven't put your own training sessions in training peaks for the week, you're going to end up like those examples you just said, where you're just ad hoc doing things and it doesn't work out as well and the performance is poor because of it. Whereas when you set your own training week like you would for an athlete, your training as a whole, your structure and your performance improves because of it. So it's very interesting to think about it from that regard and how beneficial it is just to have a training structure in front of you that you can be confident in. In.

Absolutely. And I know that all too well, and I know it's happening to myself, but, you know, I'm getting into a position where I'm, I'm not that bothered about it. And that comes back to I don't have actual race goal. You know, if I'm, if I'm thinking ahead and looking at, okay, I want to be super fit by March next year and I work backwards from that and that's my focus. Whereas if I don't even actually have anything to train towards, I'm really floundering as to what am I doing this, what am I doing this week, what period? Am I in my in base or am I in. You know, so there's that chaos that's going on and that's why all the things we talk about in the podcast about having a race goal to start with, and it doesn't have to be a race, having a goal, that means I, I will be able to ride for three hours by four months of training, a goal that I'll be able to run for an hour, a goal that I'll be able to make 15k in training in the pool. They're all great goals to work towards. Doesn't have to be a race. I'm just saying find something that you're going to work towards which will give you the motivation to keep the consistency in the structure. Find the structure that the program is going to give you that's best working for you, and then you'll find that the journey will be so much easier. It's the analogy I use is like in the middle of a 70.3 90k bike ride, I've got a group of people telling me, I'm so bored in that ride. It's 90k. It's two and a half hours, three hours of riding. When is this ever going to end? And they're the people who have no understanding about what's happening around them. Where are they on the course? Is it a headwind? Is it a hill? Is it downhill? Is it uphill? Am I in the right cadence? Is my heart rate okay? Have I had enough nutrition? Is my power in the range? It should be for this particular part of the course. And the people who are doing those things, the race goes by like that. The people who are not concentrating on anything about their pedal technique, they're just bored because there's no goal in what they're doing. They're just trying to get to 90k as quickly as they can. And that's like the person who has no structured program with no set times between each day's training intensity and endurance. And you will perform exactly like that. And I've experienced it myself as much as relatively in the last six months.

Yeah. So to finish off like you touched on some, just more signs of overtraining that we do want to avoid when we're thinking about training structure. Poor sleep is definitely a big one. Or difference in sleep patterns. Just consistent tiredness or low energy fatigue. Lack of motivation is a really big one. If you're finding you're just not motivated to train, you might just be training too hard. And all these things, things have to be. You have to think about them in the context of your life. You know, just. You might not have motivation one day and it might be nothing to do with overtraining. You know, you've got to really ask yourself these questions. Low mood, stress, depression, irritable. They're all signs of potential overtraining. And I keep using the word potential because it's not like if you're irritable, you're 100% over training. It's just these are potential signs to look for and to think about in your own training. And I guess we want to finish off there because we want to help people get an idea of how to structure a training week well, but also how to make sure they're not making mistakes and potentially over training when in your pursuit of getting the best training week possible.

I suppose in summary, it's never going to be just one thing and we've said this about every topic we've talked about in the last 150 podcasts we've done is it's always a combination of things. And one thing could tip you over. It could be that you're training too hard, that you're, you haven't given enough time between high training sessions and last night you didn't get any sleep and that was the tipping point. But that's not the only reason. It wasn't the lack of sleep, it was because you didn't have the right structured training, you were training too hard combined with the lack of sleep or you didn't have the right nutrition that day. And these are things that you have to take into consideration. It's never one thing. It can be a combination of all those things. And that's why being focused on doing the 1% as well will give you the better outcome. And no matter how good a structured program you have, if you're not thinking about all those things then you could end up with a poor outcome even with the best structured program. But the bottom line is you need to have a good relationship with yourself about how you're coping. And if you can be honest with that with yourself and not be over motivated so that you're going to ignore any signs that things aren't going so well and you're just going to just put them out of your mind, that is a good way to ruin your next build to your next day race. So you need to actually be in touch with yourself in terms of understanding. Am I really tired or is it just my mental side that's tired? Am I physically and mentally tired? So you've got to keep asking yourself this over and over again. When I wake up I'm thinking, how do I feel? I'm asking myself that question every morning, how am I feeling? Because today I'm meant to be doing something hard and I'll almost inevitably get that right. I can't do that hard session today. I need to do something easier. And as soon as I start the warm up, that's confirmed to me that this is not going to happen today. And I'm okay with that now. But years and years ago, when I first started as a young, motivated athlete, I would not listen to the that one bit that was like someone sitting on my shoulder who I thought was the devil and telling me to do things that weren't good for me. Because I need to train hard today. No matter what I feel, the session says I need to train hard. That's just not true. You need to be in touch with how you're feeling. And if you've got a great relationship with yourself, then you will actually end up a better athlete. And I think that if we're going to talk about how to structure a training week, I think the program is really important, the spacing is really important, all the things we talked about. But if you're not in touch with how you're feeling, it won't matter.

The word we use for that is calibration. And the more calibrated you are with yourself, the better decisions you can make. That's why we use data. It's all about calibrating it to you knowing yourself and you knowing what you can cope with. And. And like you gave plenty of examples in this episode. Um, you're looking at heart rate, you're looking at numbers, you're looking at all these things. But then you're saying, how does that compare to how I feel? You know, you're looking at your training stress score and training picks, you're looking at your fatigue level, but how does that compare to how I feel? And so that's what calibration is. And the better relationship you can have with yourself, exactly what you're saying, the more accurate you'll be with your own calibration and the better decisions you'll make. So that's a great way to finish. It's been a lot. Another long episode. We can't help but talk about these topics in depth. We hope you enjoyed it. Thank you very much as always, for listening and we'll see you next time.