You’ve just knocked out 1hrs 45 mins run and you are half an hour from home, starting to feel a bit ragged but otherwise HR,stomach, hydration etc etc are ok

Do you :

a. Wind it down a bit and nurse yourself home OR

b. Crank it up and make it uncomfortable for the last half hour?

The decision on whether to punch through the back half of a session is critical to the adaption/training effect.

If you always switch off when things get a bit uncomfortable or get in the habit of dialling pace down “so that you feel ok” then there is no doubt you will still benefit…but what are you missing out on

Fluro will have plenty to say on this topic but there’s a lot of new research in this area. When you force yourself to go somewhere you dont want to a whole lot of physiological and neurological adaptions take place. Really interesting is you can start to recruit different muscle fibre types. If you always dish out the same 5hr ride or 2hr run you often miss this opportunity

When you get to the point of fatigue using your “business as usual” muscles your body will go looking for other ways to get by. We’ve all heard the expression “used muscles I thought I never had”. This is very true….whats also happening is you are using nervous system connections and mental connections you havent used either. In old school this might get loosely labelled as HTFU development

Yes we have to balance the recovery issues and not “overdoing it”. But in this politically correct ,science obsessed world, the majority of age groupers will look for a reason to turn the dial down at the end of a workout not turn it up.

We are all familiar with the footy coach rhetoric of giving 110% at the end of the game- the mental toughness bla bla. This ignores the real benefit of punching hard at the end of the round- its here that often the biggest training effect can be had. Particularly for an experienced athlete/someone who has plateued it may take 3.5hrs of riding to get to that point where going harder for another 2 hrs will make all the difference. If all you ever add is more of the same steady training load then you’ll miss the opportunity

So next time you get close to the end of the round- think about punching through even harder- you’ll be surprised what happens on the other side.

This entry was posted on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 12:23:57 +0000 at Wed, 23 Feb 2011 12:23:57 +0000. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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