How do you fit training around a summer holiday?
Do you want to know how to balance your training during a summer holiday? Coach Philip explores what to do in this article.
Many athletes will be balancing family life, social life, and training. As we go deep into the summer season, we must find a way to balance these even more. There are many pull factors requiring our time and attention. It could be a romantic getaway with a partner or two weeks of summer holidays for family. Either way, athletes will be looking at trying to do a new balancing act with this activity instead of their work doing training as well.
Many of the principles behind managing training during the festive season also hold true for the summer. This article explored many of these. However, the big difference for now is that we’re heading into peak race season. And it’s easy for athletes to feel that a week away now would be the wrong move.
However, a mid-season break could be a fantastic reset if planned for accordingly. This is easier done at the start of the season. Knowing when you are likely to be away makes it easy to prepare for the trip. For example, I’ve had several athletes who have had an early or late spring wedding in May or June and taken a few weeks off for the wedding and honeymoon; they then built very effectively into the second half of the season. Most training plans would schedule the peak training when they took off. However, with the proper planning, you can build a very effective program to deliver the athlete’s best on race day.
However, not everyone can plan that far out. They may have an impending holiday or trip. How can we balance training with a change of routine and commitments?
Firstly, sticking to your regular routine while away on holiday will be impossible. Your food, timings, and access to facilities will be very different. However, this doesn’t mean it’s not an opportunity.
The first thing to do is have that conversation with your significant other parties and determine what is likely feasible. For example, you may not be able to take a bicycle with you on holiday, in which case you have to have other plans.
Swimming training is often enhanced by a summer trip away. Many people choose somewhere warmer to go on holiday, opting for the classic beach holiday, even in the UK. In this case, packing a wetsuit or ensuring you have your swimming costume and goggles and potentially a safety buoy could increase your swimming mileage. Even increasing swimming frequency makes a significant difference. This could be swimming every day for five or ten minutes, or you can work on sculling when playing in the shallows. If you’re in the pool with the kids, there are loads of things you can do around balance, sculling and control that don’t make you look like you’re a full-on triathlete trying to blast your way through kids creating a wake. Playing around the water and being in the environment can significantly affect your swimming stroke. It is a real opportunity which you should take if you are there.
We have seen a lot of success with athletes on beach holidays, where traditionally, the focus would be to flop and drop. They can swim at least every day, and the beach may be a few hundred metres wide. Athletes could do two or three out-and-back widths daily or each time they jump in to cool off. This can significantly increase swimming mileage for many athletes, not including any of the shallows or familiarisation in the water environment. There may even be a ‘workable’ swimming pool on site where you could do more specific training. However, with safety buoys and some imagination, you can create water fartleks or mini interval sessions at the beach, which gives you a fantastic opportunity to work on fitness in the swimming environment.
With the bike taking up most of the time for most athletes, this is the hardest one to fit in. If you can bring your bike, you need to deconflict your training with social activities. There is no point in doing a family holiday away if you are off on your bike for half the waking hours of the family. You may be able to get away with it if your significant other would like to have some times themselves and you can steal a few hours here or there.
However, for many people, this might be really hard to do. Instead, you could consider hiring mountain bikes and doing more family group rides, or looking to hire a bike and just do one or two rides maximum. At the end of the day, if you can’t do any cycling, that’s okay. Again, with planning, you can build into the week where you do a little bit more cycling beforehand and then recover afterwards on the holiday, making it part of your training programme.
Running is the easiest one to fit in. Clearly, you can whack your trainers into a suitcase and do whatever running you want to do. Again, the art of managing this is ensuring that any training you do doesn’t interfere with the rest of the group experience. So, you’ll be looking at trying to fit your training around times when others are not doing anything. This may mean early morning starts and then planning snoozes and naps in the afternoon. Or you may be running at times when it’s a little bit warmer. You must consider how the additional heat strain will impact your training and recovery. This may mean you have to go slower.
As trainers are so easy to put into your running suitcase, you have to make sure that you don’t end up doing too much running. Doing a slight overload week is okay, but don’t go crazy.
Strength and conditioning can be the easiest things to fit in. It is easy to follow bodyweight exercises while away in your hotel room or apartment lounge. Many places have a version of a gym that you can jump into and use. At this point in the season, many athletes would do well reviewing their functional movements, looking at trunk control and stability and ensuring they are mobile in all the right places. Spending a week focusing on this could pay dividends later in the fees and avoid injuries.
Finally, it’s important to discuss nutrition. People are slightly more relaxed about what they eat on holiday. Indeed, as my late father-in-law said, you must have at least one ice cream a day on holiday—something my daughter continues to adhere to!
None of these things is ever a bad thing. However, you will have less control over the timing of your food, and the cultural cuisine could be different, too. Make sure you’re fueling enough for the sessions, and if you’re drinking a bit more alcohol, ensure you’re hydrated for sessions, especially if you’re training now in a warmer climate than before.
In summary, the holiday season is an opportunity for good, focused, innovative training. Unless you are planning a training camp, there should also be a time when you focus more on the people you are with than training. With proper planning, either your training will see a boost because of what you choose to do on holiday, or you will find that there is minimal impact as a result of your trip, and the extra recovery could prolong your racing season.
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 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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