This is an excellent guest post by good friend and triathlon coach Mikael Eriksson. There are some golden nuggets in here- so make sure you don’t just read it but pick out at least one new strategy or tool to implement right away!
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The winter months is when the foundations for a good summer racing season are built. Still, it’s common to see athletes have no other plan or purpose with their base training than it being a filler of whatever training they happen to be doing when the goal race is still a long time from now.
If you want to train smarter and get better results this summer, read on for a better way to structure your triathlon winter base training.
Different types of base training
You may have heard terms like “traditional linear periodisation” and “reverse periodisation”.
Proponents of any specific type of periodisation structure will prescribe very different types of training in the winter months.
- In traditional periodisation, you do primarily easy aerobic exercise. Technical skills and sport-specific force (like hill sprints) are also often included here.
- In reverse periodisation, you would do it the other way around, and do high-intensity training (like lung-busting VO2max-intervals on the trainer) in the winter, and then decrease the intensity but increase the duration (like long tempo or race-pace workouts) when you get closer to the race.
Whatever the periodisation methodology, strength training is rightfully so often included in the winter months of training.
Both reverse and traditional periodisation have advantages and disadvantages. And the fact of the matter is, there is no research-based evidence saying one method is any better than the other.
So as is often the case, the periodisation structure, and therefore winter training, must be decided on an individual, case-by-case basis.
That said, I’ve found some common patterns in what tends to work the best for different athlete ability levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Let’s cover these next.
Beginner triathlete (and general) winter training
For the beginner, the objectives of winter training are almost always the same. And in fact, in many cases, these very same objectives apply to intermediate and advanced athletes as well (with slight modifications):
- Improve aerobic endurance
- Improve technique
- Work on maximum strength and explosive strength in the gym
- Include very short bouts of intensity, that work on sport-specific maximum strength and neuromuscular power
- Gradually transition into more demanding endurance training.
Since even a sprint triathlon is a 98% aerobic event, the bulk of your biking and running (swimming is a bit of a different beast) should be conversational-pace, Zone 2 type training. For beginners, there are huge gains to be made just by doing training like this consistently.
Improve your technique and you’ll become more biomechanically efficient and economical. In simple terms, you’ll become faster without needing to get fitter!
There’s no better time to focus on technical skills than now, when you’re fresh for your sessions so you can get the most out of them, and you’ll be able to maintain focus on incorporating your improved technique in normal training.
For almost anybody, getting swimming technique lessons this time of year is one of the best investments you can make. This will give you a set of drills to work on that is specific to you, and not a random collection of drills that you read on the internet. On the bike, work on varying cadence, and isolated leg drills. And on the run, strides and hill sprints are great for improving technique.
Something that triathletes often shy away from is strength training. But time and time again, it has been shown that doing triathlon-specific maximum strength (high-weight, low-rep) and explosive strength (including plyometrics) can greatly increase both bike and run performance (to the tune of ~5%, which is massive in endurance sports), and reduce the risk of injuries.
Knowing that you should focus on maximum and explosive strength (not medium-weight medium-rep, or low-weight high-rep) takes you 80% of the way there already. I have a detailed blog post and podcast episode on the topic that covers more of the details if you want to learn more.
Sport-specific strength (and technique, for that matter) through very short bouts of intensity in the base phase take the shape of:
- Swim: all-out sprints of 25 meters or shorter (typically 15 m or shorter for beginners)
- Bike: all-out sprints on a trainer or appropriate hill, from a standstill, for 10-15 seconds. Repeat 3-12 times (can be split into multiple sets), depending on where you are in your progression.
- Running: similarly to the bike, you can do hill sprints (usually 8-12 seconds per rep) or strides, which are accelerations to ~95% of max speed, which you then hold for 10-15 seconds or so. The entire stride lasts 20-25 seconds. It is critical to stay relaxed and focus on good form.
In all of the above, it is critical that you take a full recovery before starting the next rep. For example, for a running hill sprint or stride, the rep is 8-25 seconds long, but the recovery is 1 minute to 1:45 long.
Finally, bear in mind that you can’t suddenly jump from doing just easy, aerobic training and technique work to banging out threshold intervals all day long as soon as you hit day one of the Build phase. You must make the transition gradual, so if you will be doing harder workouts later on in the year, the gradual transition will start by including lightly intense workouts several weeks before that.
In the chart below, I have included the annual training plan of one of the beginner triathletes I coach. As you can see, for him, the Base phase (Base 1, Base 2, Base 3) covers 6 months (!) of the year, and only 3 months are the Build, Peak, and Race phases.
You can see that the weekly training hours (grey bars) increase slowly through the base phase (with regular recovery weeks). For example, from the first complete week of February the weekly hours of this athlete are 4:00, 5:30, 6:45, 7:30, and then back to 4:00.
Focusing in on the first half of the Base phase, January through March, this is what a typical week might look like (~5 hours):
- Swim: one technique-focused swim, one speed-focused
- Bike: two aerobic/technical bikes this week (due to it being an easier recovery week), but some weeks will have a slightly more intense session, like sweet spot (high Zone 3 or low Zone 4) intervals
- Run: two runs (one as a brick run). Both aerobic, Zone 2 runs, and one run every week will include either strides or hill sprints.
- Strength: one gym session focusing on maximum strength (high-weight, low-rep) or/and explosive strength. Additionally, one or two core and mobility sessions are always included.
Intermediate and advanced triathlete winter training
In many ways, base training for the intermediate and advanced triathletes follows the same principles and has the same objectives as for the beginner. So if you skipped past the previous section, go back and reread it.
There are, however, a couple of additional considerations, that may change the way you train in winter slightly.
Improve your weakest discipline
If you have one sport that is significantly weaker than the others, you may want to put additional focus on that sport during winter. For example, you could very well bike and run twice per week, and swim 4-5 times per week if swimming is your weakness.
If you include a focus-block like this, you shouldn’t be afraid to make one or two of the weekly workouts a harder interval or tempo workout. So this goes against the general guidelines discussed previously, but when looking for big fitness improvements, we need to bring out the heavy artillery.
Always keep in touch with intensity
Especially if you didn’t have a long break with no training after the end of last season, you already have a decent base fitness. To make sure that you maintain as much as possible of that fitness, including the more high-end intensity, it’s good to regularly include workouts with efforts at threshold and VO2max intensity.
However, the total stress of these workouts shouldn’t be too large. A great way to include intensity in moderate amounts like this is through non-structured fartlek workouts. You don’t need to have an exact pace or power target here, but just do the fast intervals at an effort that feels “fast”, but not all out, and recover for at least as long as the work interval lasted.
As an example, in summer, you might do a 6 x 3 minute VO2max workout on the track, with 1-3 minute recoveries. In winter, to hit the VO2max system without adding too much stress, do 10-15 x 1 minute at roughly VO2max pace or effort, but still with 1-3 minute recoveries. And don’t do them on the track, but on the roads or even on the trails.
The purpose of including these kinds of workouts is to make the transition to the really demanding workouts later very smooth and start from a better level of high-end fitness. But the workouts should still be light enough that they don’t compromise your ability to achieve the other goals listed in the previous section, like working on technique and strength.
If you already have a good base fitness…
…then the time spent doing primarily aerobic endurance work becomes significantly shorter. You can start working in hard workouts pretty soon in your base training to kickstart the transition from base to build.
Bear in mind that if you are very strong in one or two disciplines, you may apply this principle to those disciplines, but do more classic base training for the third discipline. You don’t have to follow the same training pattern for all three disciplines.
Here’s an example training week from the end of January of an advanced short-course athlete that I coach:
- Swim: one threshold session with technique work, one light speed session with technique work, and one squad session with mixed intensities. This athlete is a very good swimmer, so no need to hold back on quality work on the swim for him. However, we still do a lot more technique this time of year than we will later in the season.
- Bike: one hard threshold interval workout, and one long ride with some tempo work in it (moderately hard, not too taxing).
- Run: two zone 2 endurance runs (one of them with strides) and one easy recovery run (zone 1).
- Strength: one gym session focusing on maximum strength (high-weight, low-rep) or/and explosive strength. Additionally, one or two core and mobility sessions are always included.
This weekly schedule is a good example of some of the main principles I typically stick to in coaching. It’s easy and relatively risk-free to add intensity early in the season for swimming. But, for weaker swimmers, consider whether a larger focus on technique may be more beneficial at this point, although intensity and technique training can and should co-exist.
For cycling, it’s much the same, and in fact, it’s often volume that (somewhat unfortunately) has to take a backseat, since spending long hours on the trainer just isn’t that much fun.
The run is where I’m the most conservative with adding in intensity in the base phase. This athlete will start doing some of the VO2max fartleks now, after 1-1.5 months of mostly aerobic training, and some light Zone 3 intervals and tempo runs just to shake the legs out.
Summary
One size does not fit all when it comes to how to train in the winter months. Rather than giving you a ready-made recipe, I hope that the principles, though processes, and examples in this article illustrate how you can start planning your own triathlon base training.
Keep training smart!
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About Mikael Eriksson
Mikael Eriksson runs the website Scientific Triathlon and hosts the top-rated That Triathlon Show podcast. He is a full-time triathlon coach and a competitive short-course triathlete himself. His background in engineering and medical physics is one of the primary reasons he is very invested in the science of triathlon and believes in using science and data to train and race smarter, without losing any touch of listening to your body and learning to go by feel.
Read your beginners book Dan , wife got me it for christmas, I turn 50 this year and hope to do my first (sprint) triathlon this year. Some great advice ,especially around injury prevention , Iwish i had of read it before I hurt my achilles before christmas.