Pre-season focus

If you read my last post on routine - if not, go and read it now - you might have decided to have your early season strength and conditioning sessions on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon. You may encounter a few hiccups at first; forgotten gym bag, stuck in traffic, a vet appointment you made six months ago. Eventually things smoothout and you put in a solid couple of weeks, but then more problems crop up. Things keep getting in the way. Maybe you get home and realize it’s Wednesday and you are supposed to be at the gym. 

The previous post was about skills. Key to improving skills is adequate flexibility. With flexibility, more is not always better. What you need  is just enough. This is particularly true with running, where too much flexibility will result in a loss of economy and can increase the chance of injury. When we don’t devote time to flex work, when all we do is swim, bike, and run, our muscles adapt to a limited range of motion. Eventually, this will cause trouble in the knees, hips, shoulders, lower back … just about any joint except maybe your nose.

The early season is a great time to focus on skills. Later, when large volume is the goal, spending time on the mechanics of execution will feel like a waste of valuable time. Now is when you should back off, slow down, and strive to achieve smooth, fluid motion. Swimming, biking, and running all use different muscle activation patterns, so spend time on each.There is no metric that will inform you that you are performing well. Go by how you feel. Smooth, easy, yet powerful.

What is top end? There are several terms in use that describe pretty much the same thing. The key is rapid movement at high intensity. Think kicking a soccer ball on goal, or a volleyball player spiking the ball. Now extend that effort for thirty seconds to three minutes. For cyclists the best model is a sprint finish. I follow Joe Friel’s terminology and call this aerobic capacity work, since the goal of this exercise is to maximize the body's ability to process oxygen.

This is the first of an eight part series on what to focus on at the start of your season. For those of us lucky enough to be living in Hawaii, that is now. This is not the time for epic, all-day marathon efforts. Focus instead on force production, skills, and things like bike fit and diet improvement, things that often get swept aside once the season gets underway.