Category Archives: Uncategorized

4 Keys to Success for Time-Crunched Athletes

Aside

Great post from Jim Rutberg yesterday on 4 Keys to Success for Time-Crunched Athletes, that really meshes with how I feel I ought to train to make effective use of my time. But he makes an observation that low-volume (ha!) athletes should not try to maintain a high-intensity programme continuously and need to factor substantial recovery periods into each mesocycle. He suggests an eight-week build (with a recovery week in the middle) followed by a four week block maintaining training volume but focusing on aerobic endurance. Interesting. Do go read the whole article.

Data Into Pictures

Status

I’ll probably post about this more soon, but suffice to say that I’ve just set myself up on TrainingPeaks. Having had a Saturday to myself, I have hacked the last two years’ worth of data from my venerable Polar S625X watches out of the Polar-specific PDD and HRM files and got most of it into TP. With a free Premium trial, I can finally see a picture of what two years of training has been doing to me.

How does that help? Does that help?

PMC? TSS? ATL? CTL? TSB? That’s a lot of TLAs! But there are lots of athletes and coaches taking advantage of the picture that the Performance Management Chart gives you, and plenty of posts about it online. Coach Cox has lots, and his Analytical Triathlon Training article is a good place to start. I also like Jim Ley’s blog post on measuring fitness and training stress. DC Rainmaker uses TP too, so it must be good. 🙂