Building a plan

Introduction

In the sections on strength training, swimming, cycling, and running I describe a skeletal framework for scheduling workouts. The actual design you end up with will need to accommodate your unique requirements, but there are some ground rules that need to be followed for best results.

Here we take a look at how to combine those individual schedules into a balanced blend of activities. Before we dive into that, let's take a look at how training weeks are combined into blocks. We will use blocks of three different sizes. A megacycle is a year, a microcycle is a week, and a mesocycle is a group of weeks. More or less. It's all about rising and falling waves of training volume and fatigue.

Alignment

You should expect your training schedule to align with your "real world" schedule. Perhaps you work full time Monday through Friday. That means you must squeeze some training into early morning, before work, or later in the day after work, and you have Saturday and Sunday to devote to longer workouts. Or maybe your week follows a similar pattern but starting on a different day. The key thing here is that your weekly schedule sets up your training rhythm. Every Monday you do this, every Tuesday you do that, and so on throughout the week. We call this weekly routine a microcycle.

Whatever your weekly schedule is, you need to adjust your workout schedule to fit properly. Be willing to make some trade-offs that involve changing your routine, but at the same time be careful not to let your workout schedule dictate how you spend time on other things, like time with family and friends. Just as in swimming, balance is key.

Customarily our American calendar starts a week on Sunday. Our training schedule works better when a microcycle includes a complete weekend. For this reason we typically start our week on Monday.

Managing fatigue

One of the goals of workouts is to stress the muscles to overload. This comes at a price, called fatigue. We use rest to remove fatigue, and it is during these periods of rest that the body repairs all the damage. The neat thing about it is the body wants to prevent this sort of damage, so it rebuilds the damaged parts stronger. More muscle fibers, stronger bones, more capillaries, more mitochondria. These are all in response to the damage caused by overload, and most of this rebuilding takes place during sleep. You must never compromise on sleep.

A long time ago coaches figured out it is better to vary training volume and intensity over days, weeks, and months rather than train the same way every day. In the course of a week there should be hard days and easy days, and of course there is the need for a solid eight hours of sleep every night. After several weeks of hard training the body needs some time off to recover. Younger, fitter endurance athletes can go three weeks before needing a week of reduced volume. Older or less fit athletes do better with a cutback week every three weeks. We call this three or four week period a mesocycle. Just like microcycles, mesocycles create a training rhythm.

Athletes over fifty may do better still by using a longer "week," such as a nine day cycle, to give themselves more rest days between breakthrough days. The difficulty in implementing this design is that it does not mesh well with other "real world" events. It may be practical for someone who has retired, or is self employed. A writer, for example. Joe Friel gives some examples in his book, Fast After 50, so if that sounds interesting, give it a look.

A note about terminology. Long ago a wise but forgetful coach was often confused about their athletes' cutback weeks. Was it week three, or week four? They decided that this confusion could be avoided by always designating week four as the cutback week. Those athletes on a three week mesocycle would not have a week three. TrainingPeaks is set up this way.

For now, let's use a three week mesocycle. Weeks one and two will include higher volume, and week four will have less volume. But less is not zero. Week four begins with a few days of rest and active recovery. The goal here is not to stop training entirely, although if you need to visit someone, or get a haircut or eye exam, this is a good time. The latter part of the week is devoted to testing. Exactly what gets tested and when depends. Performance assessment tests are done at very high intensity, often harder than anything you will do in a race, but they are short duration and therefore do not contribute much fatigue. They make great mental toughness drills.

Stress channels

Swimming stresses the body in ways that are different than biking and running. No impact loads, and more upper body muscle activation than lower body. This is not to say that swimming does not contribute to fatigue. More specifically, in triathlon practice the primary focus of swim training is technique.

One way to think about workouts is to assign them to channels. You must balance the training volume within each channel, and between channels. To increase training volume in one activity you should decrease volume within the same channel, preferably within the same mesocycle.

A three week mesocycle has two hard weeks followed by a cutback week, so one way to balance cycling and running is to focus on one activity each week for weeks #1 and #2. To minimize the risk of injury it is preferable to run on fresh legs, so make week #1 the run intensive week. The very intense aerobic capacity workout should always be on the bike. That leaves the lactate threshold workout on Thursday and the long and slow workout on Saturday. Fill in the non-breakthrough days with easy efforts from the alternate activity.

Again, the benefits from the Tuesday aerobic capacity bike workout affect all three activities, whereas the benefits from lactate threshold work and aerobic threshold work are more sport specific. Swim workouts are best done on the easy days, and on the same day as strength training. In this example that would be Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. I suggest making the Monday swim very low intensity, primarily drills, and the Sunday swim can focus on long duration, continuous swimming.

Naturally the final workout calendar depends on your schedule. Another factor that needs to be considered is what Friel calls your limiters, the sport specific capabilities which will benefit most from some extra work. You must not address limiters by piling on more work. That will increase fatigue and negatively impact all of your other workouts.