Using a Summer Training Camp to improve your season.
As we reach the summer racing season for triathletes and other endurance sports, Coach, Philip discusses why a training camp at this point in the season can be beneficial for athletes. Tri Training Harder offers several summer camps, as well as winter and spring season ones too, but what makes the summer ones extra special?
All training camps offer athletes the opportunity to submerge themselves in an effective training environment and surround themselves with other athletes and coaches to get the most out of every single training session. Additional benefits or environmental stimuli, such as altitude or heat training, can be linked to any training camp at several points during the season.
It is well known that training camps in warmer or better environments create an opportunity to do more training, volume or intensity, which can sometimes not be done at home. However, a training camp environment also allows athletes to focus on the sport, so their nutrition, fuel and recovery can also be improved, facilitating more training load and better adaptation.
A training camp in the summer, though, offers additional benefits when chosen in the early racing part of the season. Athletes with major races in the second half of the season, for example, qualifiers in the early part of the season for world championships later on, or looking to have an extensive season late into autumn, can use training camps to do a mini build and recovery block before starting the final phase into a late season event.
Summer training camps offer the opportunity to rebuild motivation and focus and check in with an athlete's performance metrics. Given that most athletes start a training camp in the summer after a prolonged period of training leading into it, there is an opportunity under the watchful guidance of a coach to do more intensive training or extensive sessions based upon the type of event that an athlete is targeting. For example, our Norfolk camp at the end of May focuses on extensive sessions to improve the athletes' fatigue tolerance. This can be a real mental boost going into competitions as well as the physical advantages.
Our July camp, held in the Alps, France, is integrated with an event. Again, part of the aim is to increase an athlete's tolerance to fatigue and offer the fitness boost of working in Training in an endurance athlete's playground in the mountains. However, here the event raced on tired legs is a great test for athletes to hone their training and nutrition, fuelling and compounding their fitness on top of a training camp effort. This taps into the second and third aspects of performance:
Holding form
Holding form under fatigue
Holding form under fatigue and pressure
Most winter camps can focus more on Phase 1 and sometimes Phase 2. However, summer season camps can focus more on Phases 2 and 3 because of the work done earlier in the season.
Furthermore, for many athletes changing their training environment can be an invigorating opportunity to see things from a different perspective. So many athletes start training around Christmas time after an off-season, then they begin a build phase through to spring, where they can develop technical cues and build on their form. This is when many athletes do a training camp to prepare for the upcoming race season. Spring in the northern hemisphere arrives, and athletes are able to do more training in different environments. For example, the lakes open up, or we can start riding in short sleeves.
If you want to try and continue training effectively until September or October, a training camp in the summer can be a great way to change training environments and help bring that new lease of life to training, as it might otherwise get slightly monotonous. Additionally, the summer can be filled with other social events. Blocking out some time to focus only on training is a fantastic way to ensure that you can still make a balance with all your life commitments as well as your training ambitions by ring-fencing some specific training time and allowing you the other times to ensure that you don’t lose a track of life.
However, if you decide to build your training season, plan it in advance to avoid the natural slumps and lows. Remember, many people have 28 days of allocated holidays and weekends from work in order to ensure that thy don’t burn out. The same is true for training and summer training camps, and the resultant recovery weeks after them are perfect for managing these.
****insert as a button*** Find out more about our training camps here: https://tritrainingharder.com/triathlon-training-camps-homepage
Philip is the founder of Tri Training Harder LLP. He’s a British Triathlon Level 3 coach, and has been coaching for over a decade and is involved with mentoring and developing other coaches.
Philip has have coached athletes to European and World AG wins, elite racing, many Kona qualifications, IRONMAN podiums and AG wins.
Alongside the conventional development through many CPD courses, he has also been fortunate enough to work alongside experts in the fields of Physiotherapy, Strength and Conditioning, Nutrition, Psychology, Biomechanics, Sports Medicine. Putting this knowledge into practice he has worked with thousands of athletes to various degrees, from training camps in Portugal and around Europe, clinics in the UK and online coaching.
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Tri Training Harder are one of the leading Triathlon coaching providers in the UK, using our wealth of experience to unite scientific and technological research with already well-established and successful best practices, to create a formula for triathlon and endurance coaching that works.
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