How can you Balance Endurance Training with a Busy Life: Tips from Tri Training Harder
This article explores practical strategies for balancing endurance training with a busy lifestyle. Drawing on insights from Tri Training Harder coaches, the article offers advice on effective time management, prioritising workouts, and finding the right balance between triathlon training, work commitments, and personal life.
There is a real trend of reminding athletes they are time-crushed, time-crunched or time-poor. The reality is that most athletes are time-limited in some manner; even professional athletes lament their lack of time. No one has ever started a race saying they wish they had less time to train! Whole marketing campaigns have been cultivated, targeting athletes with this mindset, offering endurance training for these time-starved athletes, strategies to improve their time management and finding a positive work-life balance. It makes athletes feel like they are either desperately catching up and sacrificing performance or settling for the second best. In reality, there is no secret bullet, but equally, everyone has only a finite amount of time to train.
Recently, in an interview, IRONMAN World Champion in 2022, Chelsea Sodaro, stated that she didn’t believe in balance. She felt she had to go all in and be a full-time athlete. For professional athletes, we couldn’t agree more. In most working environments, not going all in will result (at best) in a performance review in front of your manager, but more likely, the end of that job! Although we empathise with her point that she has to focus on being fully committed to training (as her job), juggling "mother’s guilt” in any profession is tough. As an age-grouper, you can have both and find the balance between your hobby, life and work.
The only caveat is that you need to be super-organised and highly efficient. Does this mean you will end up doing less than what you could do as a full-time professional athlete? Undoubtedly! However, you can still be a high-performing athlete, high-performing at work and a high-performing partner, parent, or friend. You don’t need to choose one or the other; you need to optimise everything and recognise that there will be ebbs and flows in focus and prioritisation. If you only focus on one area all the time, you will end up underperforming in the other areas of your life and feel unfulfilled or burned out.
Our coaches work with each individual athlete to carve out a realistic training week that is individualised and takes advantage of each individual’s unique situation. Everyone is busy, but everyone makes choices. Going “all in” for your sport shouldn’t be detrimental to the other aspects of life that make you complete. You shouldn’t feel bad about choosing between sleep, training or your family. Being a Tri Training Harder Coached Athlete is all about integrating your endurance dreams into your life, not putting them in place of it.
Below are top tips for balancing endurance training with a busy life:
Prioritise recovery – you can’t be your best if constantly tired. Make sure you recover suitably from work, life and training before expecting to peak in one of the other areas.
Think about the long game – often, busy people try and do it all at once. Making a longer-term plan about your goals will likely make a lasting improvement.
Find your dead time – Can you fit extra training around your working day by using it effectively or spotting how to use your commute to improve your training?
Plan big training blocks – Putting a training camp in can mean you focus most of your training for the month in a block of training. The same can be true for big weekends of training that are often easier to carve into a schedule than a linear build week to week.
Use your sport as transport – Using the commute as training is one of the obvious strategies. But if you can swim or bike to social occasions, then you will have less of an impact on any work or family occasions.
Stay on top of your strength, conditioning, and physio work – You will likely be burning the candle on both ends if you are busy. However, staying injury-free will dramatically help your consistency, leading to the biggest gains.
Something is better than nothing – If time does run away from you, you may not have time for the entire session, but doing half it, or even just a few minutes, is still better than doing nothing. Often, that frequency of sessions will build layers that will lead to improvements.
Don’t rank your sessions – ranking your sessions in the week often leads to you accepting that some are more or less important. Though that is ultimately true, prioritising them in that way will mean that you may already be skipping the sessions! After all, if you are setting the week up with sessions to miss, then the whole week needs to be reviewed.
Communicate with your coach – Frequent communication can help your coach adjust your sessions and keep you focused on the main goals.
Our fundamental belief is that by nurturing the whole athlete, no matter how busy they are, we find that they improve in all areas of their life, and that is rewarding for everyone involved in the process but most of all for the athlete.
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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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.
The result is an honest, dynamic, yet simple new way of constructing an athlete’s training to allow them to reach their potential.
If you’re planning your next season, just starting out in the sport or are looking for extra guidance at the very top end of the field, we are here to help, and our coaches would be delighted to hear from you. You can contact us via the website, and one of the team will be in touch.