My vision
I notice that many athletes underestimate the impact consistent training has on their progress. On platforms like Strava, I often see extreme training sessions followed by several days or sometimes even weeks of complete rest. Sometimes athletes feel that one intense workout per week, à la Jan Frodeno, followed by a few days of rest, puts them on the right track. However, progress and growth as an athlete requires consistency, maintaining your workouts every day, every week, and every year. Growing step by step contributes to your development and resilience in the long term. This does not mean that intensive training is not necessary; on the contrary, it is often the quieter training sessions in between that make you a better athlete in the long run
Train with a purpose
Many athletes put on their running shoes or go to the pool without really having a specific goal in mind. For recreational athletes who just want to exercise and stay healthy, this is of course fine. However, for athletes with specific goals, it is very important to start training with a clear goal. Here is a distinction between simple exercise and targeted training.
For example, if you're going to do a swim workout and just swim for an hour without a specific goal, it can sometimes be difficult to stay motivated, and that hour of swimming seems like an eternity. On the other hand, if you go to the pool with a concrete goal, you are much more motivated to achieve this goal. Consider a goal to work on your technique and speed during your swim training, for example by starting with a technique set and then swimming 10x100m at competitive pace with 30 seconds of rest.
When I do these kinds of training myself, I'm actually not really concerned with how long I've been swimming during the training, but I focus my full attention on the next interval. This not only makes the training more effective, but also more engaging and motivates you to achieve the set goal.
Find balance
Finding the right balance between work, private life and sport is crucial to both maintain personal growth and enjoy your sport. As a father of two children, I understand that this can often be a challenging puzzle. I myself also had trouble with this balance in the beginning. If you're passionate and want to do everything you can to achieve your goals, it's tempting to give yourself all in the weeks before an event. However, without a healthy balance, you will end up exhausted both mentally and physically and run the risk of overburdening yourself and your family.
Giving everything for a few weeks is sustainable, but without balance, you are wearing yourself out in the long run. You can get mentally burned out and at the end of the season you can still do your training sessions because you “have to”, but are you actually looking forward to the rest season. Finding this balance is a joint process that we must go through together. It's not just about achieving sporting goals, but also about maintaining well-being and happiness within your family and other aspects of life.
Listen to your body
Listening to your body is often a challenge for avid athletes. Athletes strive not to miss their workouts and sometimes ignore the signals their bodies send. It is even possible that athletes are somewhat proud of the fact that they only slept four hours and still get up at 5 in the morning to get that hour of training before work.
However, it's important to remember that your night's sleep is the only time when your body really recovers and is actually working to get stronger. During your training, you break down muscles, and the trick is to let your body recover just a little better than it was before during the rest period, also known as supercompensation. If you constantly fall short of this rest period, you deprive your body of the chance of supercompensation and run the risk of injuries and overtraining in the long term.
So it's important not to be afraid to skip a workout if your body signals that it needs rest. Recognizing and respecting these signals contributes to a healthier training regime and a reduced risk of injuries and fatigue.
Train at the right intensity
Picking up your bike for a relaxing 3-hour ride, pedaling hard and getting tired is a great way to spend time, especially with friends on a Sunday afternoon. However, if you want to get the most out of your workout, it's crucial to maintain the right intensity. This often means that you should slow down endurance training and make interval training a little spicier than you are used to.
The distribution of intensity will also shift throughout the season, depending on the goals you are training towards. In the early preparation phase, basic endurance training with a moderate intensity can be essential to increase your aerobic capacity. As the season progresses and specific goals get closer, the focus can shift to more intensive interval training to improve your speed, strength and specific race performance.
In short, finding the right balance in training intensity, tailored to your goals and the phase of the season, is very important to make progress and prevent injuries. By the way, this does not mean that I will forbid you to occasionally do a nice hard endurance training with friends, after all, fun is also key.
Keep it simple
On the pool wall, I sometimes see swimming training sessions that barely fit on one A4 sheet. The same goes for cycling and running training, which incorporate countless exercises and variables. My rule of thumb is that training should be easy enough to remember. While it's important to work on different technical aspects while swimming, there's little point in doing 10 different drills during one workout. Choose a maximum of 3 and perform them with extreme precision. This approach also applies to cycling and walking; focus on the aspects that need improvement, perform effective interval training, but don't try to cram everything into one session.
