Putting together your training plan

Putting together your training plan

by Emma Carney (AUS) -
Number of replies: 0

Dear Athletes,

Last week we looked at your training program and the details required to ensure it is providing you with everything you need to develop as an athlete.

This week we are going to look how you put these together to develop your own personal training structure.

As I said last week, while you may have a coach, it is very important that as an athlete you know and understand what you are working on, and what your training program is focussed upon developing.

Understanding is the first step to mastering a skill and mastering a skill is the ultimate goal of elite athletes.

My email sent on 14 April 2020 ‘Planning Season 2020’ addressed the 5 main considerations required to set out a training plan. These require your plan to –

  1. Target specific races.
  2. Establish your training cycles.
  3. Include preparation (tune up) races.
  4. Provide an organised approach to your training routine including travel and race specific preparation.
  5. Allow and provide for recovery.

Given the above considerations let’s look at how we can put everything together.

To plan your year you need a calendar year laid out on a page, with each week visible. This will become your macro planner. Add the key races you will target – these will be those races your national federation has identified as selection races for WC teams, and other key races you know will lead to you improving your World Triathlon ranking.

Your training cycles then need to be added (these were provided in last week’s email). I always found 6 week rolling blocks worked well, with the 6th week of each cycle slightly lower in volume, set as a recovery week.  This does vary, and you need to consider how you train best.

Things then start to become a bit more personal, because with training blocks set you now need to address the specific skills required for each discipline. What you require as an athlete will differ from what others require. Understanding your own strengths and weaknesses and opportunities to improve will help identify where you can place the higher focus, and other areas which may be ok with less focus. It is important to remember that while triathlon is an endurance sport, when speed is the key to winning races, you must not stray too far from speed throughout the year. Every discipline requires speed - you need speed in the first 200-300m of the swim, you need speed and skill on the bike whether you are riding alone or in a group and your run requires the skill of pace change and threshold speed.

With your coach, you need to consider where to place the weekly focus of each skill – generally speaking is a specific skill high focus, medium focus or low focus?

The year is clearly laid out, with the details of the season plan.

As you can see all training skills are considered throughout the year – this is useful in making sure your program is complete.

Below is a planner which is useful for this – I set this up for the WT Grand Final in Edmonton this year. This plan is an example only – it is not an absolute solution as to what is required to prepare.

PDF icon Training Plan Example

With everything laid out, it becomes clearer as to what the main focus of your training plan will be throughout the year.

One very obvious thing we learned this year is that your plan must be adaptable, cannot be rigid and will most likely need adjusting as the year unfolds.

See you next week.

Emma