Getting Faster or Slower… What is Your Focus?

Train slow and for long and ultra distance endurance events, and you’ll get slow and build your endurance. Train fast and focus on developing speed, and you’ll get faster. It’s all about ’specificity of training’… a key training principle.

There are a few athletes who can excel at two different distance simultaneously but they are few and far between. If you want to reach your athletic potential at any given distance, you must FOCUS most of your training time and energies on the demands of that distance.

I say this because I often hear from people training for Ironman distance and half iron distance races that they feel ‘flat’ or ’slow’ during high volume, steady state aerobic training periods. The fact is that slower, steady state training brings about a physiological adaptation to that type of effort…which is required in order to successfully complete the long distance race. Ask anyone who has gone through a multi-year long distance training regimen and they’ll tell you how much their physiology has changed and allowed them to boost endurance, fat metabolism and the ability to ‘go forever’ but leaving them void of the ability to ‘pick it up’ and ‘go fast’.

As an athlete who wants to develop your potential, you need to train ALL of the energy systems BUT you also need to FOCUS on training the energy systems that are most often used in your KEY EVENTS. At the same time, you must learn to accept the consequences of focusing on just doing long or ultra distance racing. While you’ll gain tremendous endurance and aerobic capacity, you’ll lose some muscle mass and to some extent, the ability to go ‘fast’ (relative to your own ability) but that’s a choice you have to make.

I have found that athletes who ‘mix it up’ and combine speed training with endurance training do the best. This also applies to their race focus year to year. In other words, if you are an ‘Ironman athlete’, consider switching to a short-course focus (no IM’s) every few years in order to ’shake things up’ and keep your body in a state of improvement and growth. Too much steady, long and slow training year after year will only make you….slow.

Train Safe and Train Smart,
Coach Troy
www.strongandfocused.com