Does each training week look the same?
Does each session in your program have the same weighting?
Are your training sessions a grind physically and/or mentally?
Does training often feel like a chore?
Do you find you arrive to race day very well prepared but lacking enthusiasm to race… you cannot wait for it to be over?
Are you carrying fatigue so that there is little difference between feeling and execution between your ‘hard’ sessions and ‘easy’ sessions?

If yes to any of the above… then you will benefit greatly from reading on.

I, as an athlete, have answered yes to all of those questions. I, as a Coach, have seen athletes answer yes to all of those questions.

There must be a better way… there is. It involves a few interventions.

1. Integrating training into your life, not the other way around
2. Session Hierarchy – Key vs Supporting Sessions (to be discussed below)
3. Allowing for scalability within sessions
4. Continuing to understand the why… and enjoy your training and racing journey

Let’s talk about Key vs Supporting Sessions and how they can provide a valuable framework to each and every training week and allow you to effectively improve performance without the need for the ‘more, more, more’ mentality that is so common place in endurance sport… and, also how this approach can have positive flow on affect into how you manage your relationship with the sport, including arriving to race day fit, prepared AS WELL AS physically and mentally fresh and eager to race.

Key sessions

These sessions are the sessions in your week that are designed to illicit a strong physiological, mental and emotional response and consequently a strong adaptation to said stimulus… ie. Have a great impact on overall performance. You may have 2-4 of these key sessions in any given week and they should be placed so that you can give them the attention and execution required. Generally speaking they are the harder and/or longer training sessions. In a race phase they will be the sessions designed to ensure you are physically and mentally prepared to race.

Supporting sessions

These sessions, as the name suggests, support the key sessions and well as general, overall health, fitness and performance. They are often prepatory, recovery based or designed to improve general resilience/endurance. Many will be coupled with or tied to a key session. These are the sessions that are best suited to the days pre and/or post a key session or on your busiest of ‘life’ days. Both types of sessions should have options to ‘scale’ them to fit with time and fatigue constraints, however, where possible the heaviest of scaling will be saved for these supporting sessions.

This simple idea of creating a session hierarchy means that not all sessions are equal. They look different on paper and as such the mental and emotional preparation and execution of them is also different. This creates variety, and importantly, creates an environment whereby the supporting/easy/recovery/prepatory sessions can be done effectively to leave room for the KEY sessions to be done appropriately.

As a result, the amount of effective training is increased and your overall fitness and performance is improved. The goal of training is to improve. It just makes sense.

It is not healthy or effective to train hard all the time. And, training should not be a chore. Furthermore, variety of training prescription and execution is the best way to integrate sport into ones life. Life isn’t a spreadsheet and we are not robots.

#AgeGrouperLife