Why should you Integrate Physiotherapy and Nutrition into Endurance Training
This article explores the science behind endurance training, focusing on the crucial roles of physiotherapy and nutrition. With insights from Tri Training Harder’s expert partners, including physiotherapists and nutritionists, we highlight how their expertise is integrated into training plans to enhance athlete performance and prevent injury, underscoring the importance of a well-rounded approach to endurance training.
The aim of our coaching pathway is that our coaches are the best prepared to deliver high-quality, informed coaching advice at the right time to the right athlete. This requires levels of emotional intelligence and psychology and exceptional knowledge of athletic development and movement. One of the prominent considerations is that athletes are all developing, which means that their training programme will always adapt, too. You can give the same session to the same athlete at two different times, and the session will have a different impact based on their recovery and physical readiness.
The Importance of Movement
When we look at athletic development for endurance athletes, we are looking at optimising their VO2 max, Lactate Threshold or Efficiency. A big part of improving their efficiency will be reducing the chance of injury and enhancing movement function. Therefore, coaches must have a proper grasp of biomechanics and functional movement. An extensive part of nurturing our coaches’ knowledge of this topic is our integration with expert physiotherapists. This often benefits the athlete in a couple of crucial methods. Firstly, any initial niggle or issue can be picked up early by a coach and potentially diffused before it becomes a real issue. Secondly, any conversation with a physio allows that dialogue to be significantly more in-depth than a superficial level of knowledge, facilitating a better return to play programme and a more appropriate rehab and training programme for an athlete. Our coaches actively engage with athletes’ physios to ensure that the athlete gets the best possible programme beyond just the physio exercises – it should spill into other sports, too. We are very fortunate to have several expert physiotherapists within our support network who have helped develop our coaches and also are on hand for our athletes to prevent any niggles from becoming anything more significant!
Refuel to Recover
The other component of adaptation is the recovery. Nutrition plays a massive part in our ability to recover from hard sessions. Sleep is impacted by how well-fuelled we are; the less fuel we have, the longer it takes for our depleted system to refill. Optimising nutrition for performance in a race and on any given day needs an excellent base diet and approach, which coaches and nutritionists can work together to provide.
Our endurance race performance and delivering the outcome we feel our training deserves is linked to how well we recover. Again, having a coach with a strong understanding of endurance nutrition and applying an evidence-based, scientific approach to training means that further interventions with a nutritionist focus on developing performance rather than seeking reasons for poor performance. In other words, using a coach effectively to help you identify and work on the lower-hanging fruit allows you to invest in the much more individual approach to fuelling and nutrition that a nutritionist can provide.
To use a metaphor we quite like, a coach should be a catalyst to enable the experts to work. If an athlete is a leaky bucket, the coach can stop the bucket from leaking, allowing the experts in their field the opportunity to fill it up rather than waste your time and money on experts plugging holes! This can only work with a fully integrated and connected coaching system which is how all our coaches, physios and nutritionists operate.
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.