Dear Athletes,
As this year is like no other, and with regular racing very limited, there is a big chance you have been training constantly, waiting for racing to commence. During this time with a focus on training, I thought it would be useful to look at training loads and how you can simply measure what your load is.
Why is this important?
Basically, because if training load is fluctuating – both up and down in volume – injuries can result. Therefore, managing and monitoring training load is a very useful tool for an athlete to minimise the risk of injury.
What causes an injury?
Using a very simplistic approach, when we train, we work our bodies through training load. In doing so we break muscle down, we rest, it repairs, becomes stronger through adaptation and we become fitter. When training load increases too greatly and/or rest is not incorporated properly, the repair process is not met. Injuries appear when our tissue threshold is exceeded, as the body can no longer sustain the workload. A training program should provide you with a training load that improves your fitness and allows performance progression, without exceeding your body’s ability to recover from loads.
How can we minimise injuries?
Injuries come in all sorts of ways, and every athlete needs to take steps to minimise the risk of them.
The risk of some injuries is fixed. For example, an older athlete will not recover as quickly as a younger athlete. As such, warm ups may need to be longer and recovery techniques more intense to keep their bodies moving well. Training type may also need to be adjusted as quick, sharper movements increase the risk of injuries.
Every athlete has the capability of improving their injury risk by working on the ‘flexible’ risks. These include things like flexibility and strength improvements – well proven techniques of improving movement and the supporting strength around this movement.
Flexible risks of injuries also include day to day habits and intermittent breaks to the regular training routine, which can affect training loads and recoveries. These include things like - sleep, or lack of it, soreness from training generally, illness, travel, off season breaks, camps or periods of more intense training, other exercise or unusual activity that may use different muscle groups. It is important to be aware of what you are asking your body to manage.
How can you monitor injury risk?
Fortunately, our sport of triathlon has some rules around some primary risks of injuries. Examples include helmets required while riding, shoes worn while running and the various regulations around the swim, bike and run disciplines.
As an athlete you can make selective choices on minimising injuries, such as training lightly when young, or maintaining your run speed sessions on softer surfaces to reduce impact while running.
A very good indication of where you may become injured is your injury history – that is the injuries you have had in the past. For example, an athlete with lower leg, achilles and calf problems may add a slight heel raise to their running shoes to ease the full stretch of the lower leg tendons and muscles. Taping problem areas is also useful in preventing repeated ankle strains and blister rubs.
In identifying possible injuries, it is useful to consider common injuries in the sport of triathlon. These tend to be lower leg, lower back, thoracic area of the spine and shoulders.
A final area where you can measure the impact training is having on your body, is to measure training load, below is a very simple method of measuring training volume.
Measuring training load
Your daily training load volume can be measured simply by either GPS training devices you use or you can calculate your km old school, by simply tallying up your sessions. When tallying you must tally according to discipline and also if you are doing strength and conditioning sessions, measure those loads too. Everything needs to be taken into account if you are going to truly measure loads. A simple way to measure training loads requires 3 calculations. These are -
- Acute Training Load – This is the total of daily training load over 7 days (ie a training week)
- Chronic Training Load – This is your average load over 4 weeks. This is calculated by adding 4 consecutive weeks of your acute training load and dividing by 4 to get the average.
- Training Stress Load – is calculated by dividing your chronic load by your acute load. Multiply this figure by 100 to calculate as a %.
The stress load should not continuously increase, because constant load increases the risk of injury. It can increase, but there is a limit. Increasing chronic load by more than 10% over 4 weeks should be closely monitored.
Let’s look at an example:
A triathlete trains the following km over week 1. This is calculated by simply tallying session totals for the week.
Week 1 Swim 20km, Bike 250km, Run 70km
The same triathlete trains the following km over 4 weeks
| Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Swim | 20 | 25 | 20 | 20 |
| Bike | 250 | 270 | 250 | 200 |
| Run | 70 | 90 | 90 | 100 |
Chronic Training load is
- Swim (20+25+20+20) ÷ 4 = 21.25km
- Bike (250+270+250+200) ÷ 4 = 242.5km
- Run (70+90+90+100) ÷ 4 = 87.5km
Stress load
- Swim 21.25 ÷ 20 × 00 = 106.25%
- Bike 242.5 ÷ 250 × 100 = 97%
- Run 87.5 ÷ 70 × 100 = 125%
On looking at the above figures, you could conclude the swim program is enabling training load increases and the athlete can progress in fitness because training load is increasing but not excessively. On looking at the bike training load figures, you may consider that the load needs to be increased over the following period, because while there is a max training load, there is also a minimum training load required in order to improve fitness. Finally, on looking at the run load, it would be sensible to assume the load has increased too quickly over this period of 4 weeks, and injury risks are increasing.
Obviously this is a very simplified analysis of training loads and there are other considerations to a training program, but it is important you can make these calculations regarding your training so you have a strong understanding of what your weekly training is providing you.
While the above email provides some ideas on monitoring training load, you must remember to monitor training intensities, not just volumes. While one email cannot cover all training loads in detail, some further reading on the World Triathlon Education Hub can be found here https://education.triathlon.org/mod/book/view.php?id=914&chapterid=4380
Train well!
Emma
