We all deal with time restraints. We all have to deal with boredom in our training at times. Many of us travel for work or live in “sub optimal” training environments.

I often get asked what are the “bang for buck” sessions, the ones I would do if I only had 30 mins to an hour

Interestingly enough many of Australias top age groupers are limited to training 1hr or less most of the time due to their jobs, children or other interests

So here goes- and pleased to hear other contributions

Bike - Ride 20-40mins at slightly under FTP intensity (90%of FTP will do). You can divide these into shorter intervals say 4×5mins or 2×10mins on limited rest. 2 blocks of this is (40mins) is as much as most people can handle and will greatly improve your fitness if done consistently (note slightly under FTP so you dont blow yourself to pieces. The science says you get almost as much at 90% of FTP as going full blaster yet the recovery is much better

Run- 20-40 mins blocks at about 90% of your 8k best pace. Again I like to use about 5mins (its long enough to get rythm and short enough to focus on quality) with short breaks. For example tonight I ran 4×5mins with 1mins easy. My preference is to do this on a treadmill- easy when travelling-takes out the guesswork and injury risk is low

Swim-100m repeats just as hard as you can swim them. There really isn’t such a thing as going too hard in swimming-  its much easier to recover from than running and riding. If I was travelling for work -20×100m can be done in less than half an hour and you’ve had a great workout. Stopping every 100 for 10-15secs keeps you focused on the clock and your form good without loosing aerobic focus (or wasting time). The top age grouper at IMOZ did a big chunk of his swimming this way. Adding sets of 4-6x 1oom with paddles within this workout are an excellent time efficient way to strengthen your shoulders enough to deal with swimming in a wetsuit. If your legs a stuffed from riding/running you can always throw in a pool buoy- then there’s no excuse not to belt out 30mins-1hr this way

I am yet to meet a guy who couldnt improve his fitness with these type of sessions. Obviously for the longer events in particular we need some longer duration sessions and we cannot understate the benefit of the appropriate “base” miles at the right point in the program. However next time you are in a lift with a guy complaining about having no time to train remember you could always hit the “bang for buck” type sessions and see how you fare

My guess is pretty well. There are many triathletes that avoid just getting down and training hard. You dont need quantity all the time. Good quality often is a superior substitute. So go out there and bang my man!

This entry was posted on Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:52:45 +0000 at Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:52:45 +0000. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Posted in All Articles Cycling Psychology Running by Jimmy C 1 Comment