A season is planned around certain goals. It can be to achieve a new personal best, win a race, or finish in an event.

In order to get there, it’s important to be realistic and understand the key limiters that are holding you back. Someone who is a fast runner will have a problem stepping it up to longer distances just as a cyclist who is great on the hills has trouble holding on to a group on the flats.

It’s important to recognize those weaknesses early on and have a battle plan ready to address them throughout the season and come to the race ready to achieve peak performance.

Basic skills

Every athlete comes with a unique combination of genetics and training. They will fall on a spectrum for the three basic skills needed for endurance sports - endurance, force, and speed skills.

If we look at these three skills as the foundation of an athlete’s general fitness, we will be able to provide them the best training program. It’s the coaches job to develop different skills at different times during a season and that’s something we will discuss in the future.

Endurance

Endurance describes the athlete’s ability to conserve glycogen and glucose to be able to function for an extended amount of time.

We have to be mindful that endurance is very event specific. A person that has the ability to finish a marathon will certainly have the endurance to finish a 5k race while the other way around doesn’t have to hold true.

Endurance, also, is the key thing to work on for novice athletes that are just starting out in the sport. A more experienced athlete will have to keep maintaining their endurance every season.

In the beginning of the season, general training and even some cross training is beneficial to build up endurance. As the season progresses, more and more of the endurance will be built with race specific training as well as an increased volume of training.

Force

Force represents an athlete’s ability to overcome resistance. This can be rough or choppy waters during a swim, hills, or a head wind. Just as endurance, force is developed with general strength training at the start of the season with weight training, body-weight training or using special equipment to target specific muscles.

As the season progresses, race specific training sessions that are higher in intensity will take the role of developing force further so weight training won’t be necessary but it’s still advisable for older athletes to keep a small amount of weight training throughout the entire season as muscle mass starts to decline quicker with age.

Speed skills

Speed skills are a different way of combining technique and efficiency.

Technique defines how your body moves through a medium. It can be water for swimming or air for cycling and running. There might be different body positions depending on other factors as well.

To improve technique, athletes regularly incorporate drills into their training program. It is done by focusing on a certain aspect of the movement like the catch in the swim or driving the knees during the run. The downside of technique work is that the athlete will temporarily slow down until they fully internalise the new technique until they start getting faster again.

When it comes to efficiency, it represents the effort someone is perceiving while moving and it’s directly tied to technique. The more efficient someone is the less energy is wasted and the effort level is perceived to be lower.

One thing to keep in mind is that technique work is that as soon as fatigue starts kicking in it’s advised to stop the technique work because now the athlete starts to ingrain bad habits.

Technique work should be added into sessions at the very beginning to avoid this particular problem.

Advanced skills

Just like the foundation of a house determines how the rest of it will stand, so do your basic skills influence further development as you get deeper into your racing season and with around 12 weeks remaining until your most important race, it’s time to develop those advanced skills as much as possible.

Muscular endurance (base period)

This represents an athlete’s ability to generate high force for a prolonged period of time. It combines the basic skills force and endurance.

By correctly executing specific training sessions athletes can raise their lactate threshold, increase their resistance to fatigue and tolerate the buildup of lactic acid.

At the end of a long distance event, especially in a triathlon, it’s important to have high muscular endurance to be able to run at higher paces at the end of a long race.

Building anaerobic endurance starts in the middle of the base period and consists of mostly zone 3 work while towards the end of the base period it can go into zone 4 and 5a.

The key to remember here is that the work part of an interval is constantly lengthened while the recovery stays the same. Once the athlete gets to the build period, these efforts should be around 20 to 40 minutes long and done in heart rate zones 4 and 5a.

They are quite hard but should still feel like controlled time trials where the key is not to go all out but still feel that an extra effort has to be put out.

Anaerobic endurance (build period)

Athletes that are able to resist fatigue at very high effort levels have developed anaerobic endurance sufficiently. They are able to tolerate lactic acid and excel in short-distance races.

Athletes racing in longer events like (half)marathons or long distance triathlons don’t put too much emphasise on anaerobic endurance, though.

There are two ways of developing anaerobic endurance. The first is by working on developing the aerobic capacity further and work for 2 to 6 minutes in zone 5b with long recoveries with an approximate 1-to-1 ratio of work and recovery, while in the later stages of the build period the intervals get shortened to 30 seconds or up to 2 minutes while working in zone 5c. At the same time the rest periods are still kept in the 2 to 6 minute range.

This enables the athlete to improve their tolerance for lactic acid but it’s quite stressful for the athlete so it’s not something that novice athletes should be doing.

If done too much too quickly, athletes risk injury and burnout.

Power

Power enables athletes to generate a high amount of force very quickly. You can easily observe this in, for example, cycling where the athletes with the greatest power just seem to be flying up the hill.

This advanced skill depends on the athlete’s nervous system to send signals to the muscles which then in turn contract maximally.

To develop power, athletes use very short intervals of maximal efforts usually in the 8 to 12 seconds range which are then followed by very long recovery periods.

Since these repetitions are very brief, the athlete’s heart rate will never be able to catch up so using heart rate monitors for these type of workouts is not an options. It’s far better to focus on pace, power or the rate of perceived exertion (RPE).

An athlete has to be well rested before they should attempt to improve because they will otherwise not be able to produce the stimulus needed to facilitate adaptations.

Building fitness - limiters and skills

Basic skills

Advanced skills

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