How do you balance three sports and S&C?
Balance in life can be amazing. Unfortunately, not many of us can achieve it consistently. When it comes to competing in triathlons, balance in a triathlete’s life and training is essential. Coach Tim looks into how to find that balance between three sports and strength and conditioning.
Few races are more gruelling than the triathlon, the ultimate test of endurance. Although they can vary in length, achieving balance means more than just performing well in all three sports; it also extends to balancing your life with triathlon training and finding mental balance. The variety of multi-sport training can help break the monotony of training for just one sport, which helps keep the interest and engagement. However, most triathletes naturally favour one of the three sports, making them weaker in the others. Seasoned triathletes will agree that you can’t afford to overlook any of the three sports, and figuring out how to juggle all three is key to competing in a triathlon:
“Then someone mentioned the fourth discipline is transitions, so I need to practise them. Oh, and then nutrition was also mentioned as the fourth discipline which also needs to be practised during training to help formulate a race day strategy – OMG, where do I start, what do I focus on first and when?”
The main difficulty of competing in a triathlon is building up the physical and mental strength and endurance needed to finish the race. Because each triathlete has different strengths and weaknesses, achieving balanced triathlon training doesn’t necessarily mean giving each race component equal importance. Successful triathletes must constantly self-evaluate to figure out which sport they need to train for the most and ensure that their performance in any one sport isn’t much weaker than the others.
Training for and competing in a triathlon is an exercise in excess. Triathletes have to be masters at testing their boundaries and knowing their own bodies, and they also have to know where to draw the line. Train reasonably rather than pushing yourself to exhaustion. Not only does adequate rest help prevent injuries, but experts maintain that well-rested athletes can train harder and more effectively, getting more out of training sessions. Triathletes most commonly acquire overuse injuries from excessive training without sufficient rest between sessions. For most triathletes, it’s a very fine line they tread between performance and injury.
The season has just finished; it’s time to have some downtime and away from the sport to focus on the mental well-being and focus on those loved ones who have put up with us over the last few months. I would suggest a quick SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) of the season. This will help to formulate a plan for the next season together with the race plan. Be hard but realistic on yourself if you want to perform and be faster.
One of the key takeaways should be to focus on form and technique as this will give you the biggest bang for your buck in performance, with a by-product of speed and getting faster. If triathlon is a weekend hobby or you have Olympic ambitions, there can be no greater priority for an S&C programme to support injury prevention. To do this means developing a solid strength and conditioning programme from October through to January 2 or 3 times a week, bodyweight, kettlebells, TRX and maybe a yoga session. Even as the season progresses, I would suggest at least one maybe two S&C sessions per week, with perhaps the exception of race week.
Be strict with the application to ensure you are performing the exercise well to achieve the best results. Use a mirror to check your technique; when performing a squat, are you stable or does a knee collapse inwards? Are you lifting with a rounded back?
If you compare building your fitness to building a house, without good foundations, any further floors, no matter how well made, are always destined eventually to fail. This failure could be a lack of progress or potentially developing imbalances and injuries. If you go to the gym and start performing deadlifts and squat, you’ll probably make some gains but, without the foundations that allow you to perform these movements safely and effectively, those gains are fundamentally compromised and flawed.
So, now that we have agreed that a strength programme offers genuine performance gains, we must tackle the difficult question we started with; ‘What are you going to drop?’ This is often the most significant barrier to a successful S&C programme for many triathletes. If an athlete is already training to their full capacity, adding additional sessions in the form of S&C would potentially push them over their weekly training available to them and build too much-added stress. This is where the commitment to a strength training programme is really tested. This will obviously be different from one athlete to another as their current training schedule, and the ability to recover will differ.
For those of you who require some evidence, most sports scientists have compared groups whereby one performs an endurance programme and the other does the same endurance programme with one or two sessions replaced by strength sessions. By reducing the endurance work, sometimes by up to 20%, the strength groups always make improvements over the endurance only group. What is more interesting is that training programmes that have just added on a strength session on top of regular training generally have worse results than when a session is removed. Yes, this will go back to individual circumstances and hours available for training vs recovery; remember, there is a balance.
Strength training has this positive effect by increasing the strength of individual muscle fibres, making each contraction more forceful and increasing fatigue resistance. It also improves neuromuscular coordination, increasing the speed and efficiency of muscular contractions.
Some key benefits include :
Greater leg strength (Rønnestad et al., 2011; Losnegard et al., 2011; Marcinik et al., 1991; Hickson et al., 1988)
Maximal power (Yamamoto et al., 2010)
The velocity at VO2Max (Taipale et al., 2010)
Supra-maximal (>VO2Max) cycling performance (Minahan and Wood 2008)
Short- and long-term endurance performance (Aagaard et al., 2011; Rønnestad et al., 2011; Yamamoto et al., 2010; Sato and Mokha 2009; Paavolainen et al., 1999b; Tanaka and Swensen 1998)
Greater time to exhaustion in cyclists and runners (Støren et al., 2008; Minahan and Wood 2008; Marcinik et al., 1991)
Enhanced exercise efficiency (Louis et al., 2012; Mikkola et al., 2011; Sunde et al., 2010; Paavolainen et al., 1999b)
Improved blood lactate levels and the lactate threshold (Paton and Hopkins 2005; Marcinik et al.,1991).
However, it is clear the days of a top-performing triathletes training regime that just involves swim, bike and run are now over. You have to be robust enough to cope with the ever-increasing training loads to perform at the level you wish to achieve at.
Qualified as a coach in 2010, in 2014 began coaching with a local Triathlon Club, in 2018 completed BTF level 3 coaching course. Now he is still enjoying the training but now concentrating on the coaching. Tim takes a lot of time over his professional development and then aims to share this knowledge, helping and supporting athletes achieve the best they can be.
Since joining Tri Training Harder Tim has worked hard in helping mentoring other coaches and run training camps abroad.
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