Implementing periods of rest and recovery triatlons your training schedule Salvadoran coffee beans essential. Setting Tips for preventing sports-related injuries through nutrition trjathlons goals allows you to measure your progress accurately, motivating you to persist, train harder, and inch closer to your triathlon dreams. Just imagine your body as an efficient machine, able to sustain long-winded efforts. Your body needs rest to heal and recover.

Boost endurance for triathlons -

Four possible physiological outcomes can be achieved through a strength training program:. The key is to achieve just the right amount of each outcome at just the right time. What constitutes a successful sport-specific strength training program for one triathlete may not work as well for another triathlete.

It all depends on your level of training, the length of the triathlon you are training for, and your individual needs. But one thing is universally true: Strength training for triathletes should be very different from programs used by bodybuilders, powerlifters, and the general public.

Everyone has the same muscles and bones, but everyone uses them in completely different ways. Different training goals, or outcomes, are reached by using different combinations of exercises, sets, repetitions, rest periods, exercise order, weight, and progression plans.

For example, a bodybuilder is interested in one thing: size. In their case, the bigger the muscle, the better. Having large, bulging muscles is not what a triathlete wants, because body mass negatively affects endurance efficiency, and larger muscles add a lot of mass but not necessarily a lot of strength.

The bigger your muscles are, or the more mass they have, the more strength it takes to move that mass, especially over a long distance. Mass also creates increased frontal resistance in the water and frontal air resistance on land. However, the triathlete can benefit from larger muscles if that increased size is kept in check and is used properly.

If you want to increase the performance of a muscle, sometimes you have to start by increasing its size. Once the muscle size is where it needs to be, you can change the emphasis of your strength training to move toward your desired outcome.

A muscle that is the right size can be made stronger and more powerful or be given more endurance. For example, most of us have a dominant side that includes an arm or leg that is larger and stronger than the other side.

The triathlete can benefit from larger muscles if that increased size is kept in check and is used properly. Most right-handed people will have larger muscles in their right shoulder compared to their left.

Sometimes we need to focus on hypertrophy to even out the body. Additionally, if you have ever suffered a serious injury that required rehabilitation, there is a good chance that one limb is larger than the other.

This happens when rehab is focused on the injured limb and neglects the unaffected limb—allowing only one limb to get stronger or larger. On the other hand, long-term rehab, in which both limbs are used, allows the unaffected limb to get stronger or larger while the injured limb progresses more slowly.

In each case you have a unilateral deficiency in both size and strength that could be fixed with focused strength training with hypertrophy as the goal. Athletes who compete in powerlifting and weightlifting are not usually as big as bodybuilders; however, they are very strong for their size.

In these sports, success depends on how much you can lift, not on how big you look. Powerlifters who compete in contests for bench press, squat, and deadlift, as well as weightlifters competing in the Olympic lifts—the snatch and the clean and jerk—are usually very strong for their size.

Some of the strongest lifters pound for pound are actually women. But remember, these heavyweight sports have almost no endurance component, because a competitive lift consists of 1 rep that will last anywhere from 2 to 20 seconds. A triathlete needs compact, strong muscles but requires much more endurance from them.

General fitness programs are likewise not useful for triathletes, mainly because of their wide range or variety and their lack of sport-specific exercises.

The key is to choose exercises that mimic the sport of triathlon and put them together in a way that works for you. You will more than likely boost your race results if you incorporate strength training into your triathlon training, because stronger muscles deliver increased power, speed, lean mass, and muscular endurance.

Your race focus, experience level, and current body composition will inform how these benefits contribute to your performance gains. The first benefit of strength training is muscular power, or the ability to produce force quickly.

In a triathlon this is useful during a short sprint to pass a competitor, uphill cycling, and transitioning into and out of the water. A powerful muscle is able to call upon its anaerobic energy stores to support quick movement.

Strength training increases muscular power in two ways:. Energy production and recovery happen deep down in the muscle fibers, where glycogen, enzymes that increase the speed of muscular contraction, and creatine and phosphocreatine energy substrates are all increased because of strength training.

Second, you can increase your speed through strength training, regardless of what race distance you compete in. This is the result of the selective recruitment of fast-twitch muscle fibers during strength training.

During endurance training you mainly use your slow-twitch fibers, which are designed for low power output and long durations. During strength training you have to call upon the fast-twitch muscle fibers for their high power and force output. The downside to fast-twitch fibers is that they fatigue quickly—usually in less than five minutes.

When you put out a sudden burst of speed in training or racing, you know that you cannot sustain it for very long before slowing back down to your regular pace.

Strength training builds up the ability of the fast-twitch muscle fibers to activate and provide that burst of speed.

You will still have to slow back down, but you can obtain a higher-intensity burst of speed meaning faster and recover from it faster, which means you can do it again when you need to. The third performance benefit of strength training comes from an indirect effect: a reduction in body fat because of an increase in lean mass.

Strength training is all about increasing lean tissue. Again, we are not talking about bulking up your muscles, but about making the muscles you have more dense. Increasing muscle density decreases your fat-to-lean ratio, which ultimately improves performance.

More lean tissue means more muscle to produce movement, which is exactly what you want, because muscle essentially carries itself.

Finally, increasing muscular strength increases muscular endurance. For example, rowing will not help to develop your muscular endurance to perform well when running a half-marathon and vice versa.

Focusing on muscular endurance-type workouts should only be developed after you have developed your aerobic capacity. That is not to say that while you are developing your aerobic capacity you are doing nothing to train your muscular endurance. This simply is not true. There is an overlap and a continuum as you train.

In fact, combining all aspects of training abilities appropriately will give you the best chance of reaching your highest sustainable intensity output your body will allow. Your first mission is to accumulate a number of weeks of training at a high volume using longer-distanced, slower-paced workouts.

Following this phase, you then shift your focus to incorporate workouts that prioritize developing your muscular endurance. Here is where interval training begins to come into focus. Longer duration intervals that last from 10 to 20 minutes at an effort level of 7 to 8 on a Borg scale of where 1 is the easiest effort and 10 is the hardest effort will allow you to accumulate an appropriate amount of time to develop muscular endurance and train your muscles to resist fatigue.

As you progress in the sport these efforts may increase to longer steady state intervals of 20 to 40 minutes with continued short recoveries. Incorporating these efforts once a week for each sport you perform is an appropriate way to begin developing muscular endurance. For example, if you are a triathlete, then performing a muscular endurance workout one time per week for the swim, bike, and run is an appropriate beginning dose.

As your body becomes more adapted and depending on your race expectations you may even add these types of sessions twice a week into your routine.

Remember in endurance sports it is the athlete who slows down the least towards the end of the race and specific to triathlon towards the end of each discipline who is the most successful. Developing your muscular endurance is critical in enabling you to maintain a high pace throughout the entire race and be the athlete who slows down the least.

Christopher Breen PA-C ACSM EP-C holds degrees in exercise physiology and is a Certified Physician Assistant specializing in sports medicine and orthopaedics. Chris is also a Certified Exercise Physiologist, a USAT Level 1 Certified Triathlon Coach, and he is the founder and head coach of ARIA Endurance Coaching, LLC.

Chris works in the orthopaedic faculty group practice at NYU-Long Island, in Long Island, NY. The only app with personalized training plans designed specifically for real people who want to accomplish something amazing in endurance sports.

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