Aug 11
3
I’ve come across a lot of press releases,pro interviews and anecdotes on this topic
Story goes likes this………..hey you multisport athletes- combined time wins not who’s the fastest at each discipline- if you want to win at multisport you’ve got to train for it right so stop focusing on one sport at a time and then trying to put them together…..etc
Right?……..
I think there’s a case to say WRONG. Whilst I’m not disagreeing with the fact that there is a minimum level of training that needs to be applied to chain the different sports together eg particularly swim/bike and bike/run
However a potential problem is people get stuck on trying to improve at all three(or more) sports at the same time. This is entirely possible to some degree -particularly at the lower end of an athletes fitness potential and/or training experience
The closer you get to the front of the field and the longer your experience with training the slower those improvements come. The simple principle of overload gets harder to achieve- the body has become pretty accustomed to most things you can throw at it out of the mulitsport workout bible
So thats the time when a single sport focus can be of potential benefit. For example lets say our subject has a threshold pace of 4mins per km running on the back of years of multisport training. This person does their standard 3-4 runs a week (1 long, 1 moderate, 1 intervals, 1 recovery) along with their 3-4 bike sessions and 3-4 swim sessions. As a result of this consistent volume you often find they can hold a very high percentage of that FT pace for a long time but when asked to “push it” there isn’t a lot more there. Why? because the number of times they “test” that limit in a week are very few. The number of total sessions addresses their aerobic development and muscular endurance but very little is being done to regularly raise the “ceiling”
It is very difficult holding those 12 workouts a week to really bust the door down.
Think about studying for a set of exams where you had to keep swapping subjects every couple of minutes- you’d eventually improve but many things would potentially escape you eg that complicated formular that takes a few days of applied questions to sort out
There is nothing wrong with taking a single sport approach for a decent period before coming back to the multisport athlete approach
For example lets give our runner above 4-6 weeks away from swimming and halve his riding time
Shit he’s got all this energy now. Perhaps we give him two interval sessions a week
Perhaps we really challenge the pace of his long run
Perhaps we can do some specific hill work or technique work
Potentially he could have 2 or 3 rest days and still manage to do way more running than before
It would also give him more flexibility to go hard when he felt he had the legs for it
All of these things help teach the muscles and brain to do something they arent accustomed to- its like doing intensive tutoring on your maths
One of the really big benefits of the single sport approach is the extra rest availble, typically more rest =better adaptions (provided you also do the work)
The other massive benefit is the ability to do multiple daily or intraday sessions within the same sport- this is much harder to schedule with 2 or 3 sports all wanting attention
For example the cruisy run in the morning and the harder intervals session in the evening followed by an easy recovery run the next morning to really maximise the adaptions
So be open to both single and multi approaches- they are both necessary and effective if incorporated in the right way
