Training Monotony

After discussing over-training in the last couple of posts and introducing readers to the on-line recovery monitoring tool Restwise I thought I would maintain this vein of commentary and talk about training monotony a little further.

The idea of training becoming monotonous is easy to grasp emotionally but it’s important to understand the subtleties of the concept and how they apply to our conditioning program. I think any endurance athlete has been there before if they have been training in any one sport for several years. For me, if I’m not careful, monotony creeps into my program three or four months into the season. Human physiology responds predictably to any conditioning program for the first three months of training and then progress becomes slower and gains harder to appreciate with further effort. It’s around this time when attention must be focused on continually varying the stimulus to progress further. Maintaining awareness of this possibility and being creative when programming is key. This means changing the number, length and intensity of interval sessions and adding or subtracting distance to the endurance days. Backing off on everything every fourth or fifth week will also change things up appropriately by adding full recovery into the process.

Eddy B’s Standard Plan

The idea here is based on the fact that our physiology is adaptive. Stress the organism and it changes. Additionally, we must intermittantly vary the stimulus if further adaptation is to occur. For athletes, this adaptation is expressed as an improvement in our strength, speed and/or endurance. When I first started cycling in the 80’s I, like many other American cyclists of that era, followed Eddie Borysewicz's training plan popularized in his seminal text on the subject, Bicycle Road Racing. In it the training week was broken up with a sprint day, endurance day, interval day, a couple of easy days and then racing or longer training rides on the weekend. To say this program is effective is an understatement. Thousands of cyclists over the past few decades have followed variations of Eddie B’s plan with great success. There are other programs with additional complexity that may prove more effective for experienced cyclists but the average weekend warrior and even the developing elite rider will do well with Eddie’s standard plan.

When one looks at such a structured program, there seems to be significant variety from day to day and, indeed, there is. There are days to go hard, go fast, go long and go easy. This seems to follow the concept of variety I talk about. For a few months of training, I fully agree. However, after a while, one can see that this kind of micro cycle becomes quite repetitive and is, by definition, guilty of monotony. The athlete is in danger of doing the same hill repeats, the same long ride and the same sprint workout week after week and month after month. This can be avoided if one is mindful but complacency is a trap into which many athletes fall. Performance declines, races are lost and motivation ebbs. This is the over-training or “staleness” sports scientists talk about.

Although many would accuse me of being a science geek, I’m not prone to writing things down and keeping detailed training logs. I get the concept of it but after so many years of doing this I get along pretty well training “by feel”. As I have blogged about in the past, this style is not for everyone. I would argue that most cyclists, skimo racers and runners would do well to plan out their program weeks or months in advance. I’m sure some would argue that I would perform better if I did the same. The main reason I don’t is that my job demands often create unpredictable training opportunities. Being somewhat obsessive-compulsive by nature (say it ain't so!), I would probably lose my mind every time I had to deviate from the program because of work. Nevertheless, since I’m blogging about this stuff these days, I will be keeping detailed records of my training for awhile so I can “walk the talk”, so to speak. My intention is to explore periods of over-reaching and how they impact my performance at selected competitions. Having past workloads in front of me will make assessment easier. This will also allow me to better review the effectiveness of the Restwise tool.

Into the deep end

In terms of performance enhancement, not all monotony is counterproductive. As I have discussed previously, subjecting ourselves to repeated bouts of a certain stimulus can result in a period of over-reaching that then leads to a super-compensatory response that ultimately improves performance. For a time, whether it's a few days or even a week or two, the athlete engaged in such a process is dipping into the pool of training monotony. Stay in too long and bad things happen but get out in time and, well, you go faster. How long an athlete wades in these waters (beating the metaphor to death, here) is dependent upon training state and current recovery status. I cannot give anyone a hard-fast rule with how much and how long to do these cycles but most athletes will discover their individual doses through trial and error. Tools like Restwise may allow coaches and athletes to more accurately monitor these periods and better time the entry and exits to them.

Know the limits

The strength training and body building literature is rife with discussion concerning training stimulus initiation and timing. Gains in this realm are readily quantifiable since nothing is more obvious than weight on a barbell and progress or lack thereof is constantly in your face. Anyone visiting various forums and web pages pertaining to program design will be quickly cross-eyed reading the latest rep/set schemes designed to make you HOOOGE and strong. Unfortunately, many enthusiasts are quick to jump on the sexiest new routine in hopes of short-cutting the process of progress. A frequent contributor to some of these sites and long-time strength athlete, Dan John, is fond of saying, “everything works but nothing works forever.” How true this is in the strength world and I think the adage transfers over to the endurance world just as readily. Using the strength-training model, we should be changing things up about every 6 weeks. Sooner than that and we may not achieve maximal benefit from a given stimulus and longer than that and things start getting stale. It would be wise to keep these temporal aspects in mind as you plan out your schedule.

Repeated days of interval training is one example of training monotony. It’s not hard to imagine something like this taking a significant toll pretty quickly and setting one up for a crash and burn. Time things right with adequate recovery and a nice up-tick in conditioning may result. That’s the idea. But subjecting oneself to frequent threshold and suprathreshold efforts is painful and exhausting. Most recreational competitive cyclists don’t have the discipline for this kind of routine. Instead, what this group of athletes is great at is the steady-state ride day after day. Pressure level is what most of us would call “tempo”. It’s not painful. You can sort of talk sometimes, but it also feels pretty fast and makes us “feel like a racer”, as Mark Twight likes to say. The physiologic stress of repeated rides like this may not seem as high as interval monotony but the result can be just a devastating to performance. It’s just probably a little sneakier.

Wading in

I’m down in southern Arizona engaging in a little training monotony of my own right now and I’m starting to feel it. Before this week I had two weeks with races on weekends and plenty of intensity during the week. When I started racing a few weeks ago, I noticed the expected hole in my fitness. I just did not have the top end aerobically and struggled at the back of the group near the top of climbs. Breathing hard was hard and it was mainly from lack of specific training addressing this quality. I knew this going in. Once recognized, it was time to start training it. Hill repeats and time trial intervals were the order of the day twice a week. This provided the “sharpness” my program had been purposely lacking.

With a short vacation this week I thought I would take the time to back off the intensity and get some repeated volume in. This week will represent a deliberate period of endurance monotony. With a full-time job I don’t typically have time to engage in a block like this. Although I did six sprint intervals on the second day of this block, nearly all of the time has been spent at aerobic pace, easily conversational. I have 16 hours in 5 days so far and my legs feel it. In spite of little intensity and no weight training this week, the muscle soreness is there. I’m slightly cranky and my sleep is a little fitful. Since I’m on the road, I’m not eating my usual diet. I’m definitely over-reaching.

I’m not racing this weekend so I will soldier through it. I’m driving back to J-Hole Monday and Tuesday so those will be one-hour easy rides and, hopefully, super-compensating days. Whether or not I’m swimming too far into the deep end will be revealed a week from Sunday when I go to the line again. I’ll let you know. - Brian  

Comments

[Julian]

Hi Brian, great blog - always some good food for thought. And I really like seeing how you mix weight training with endurance sport. I really like both but there isnt too much good info out there for those that do! Anyway, I didnt see your email address, so I hope you dont mind I write in the comments here. I was looking through the training plans on lwcoaching.com and saw this regarding interval training and thought you might be interested given that its in some ways similar to what you outline in your "short and fast" post >
"G3 Planned Time: 1:00:00
Warm up riding for 10 minutes by starting easy and gradually increasing the pace until you are sweating. Then do 10 X 30 seconds at max effort with 4.5 minutes easy spinning between each repeat. Be sure to take the full 4.5 minutes recovery between each repeat. This workout is to stimulate speed and muscle development. The muscular fuel source is Creatine Phosphate (CP). CP is entirely used up in 30 seconds and takes 4.5 mins to regenerate. If you start the next repeat before CP has regenerated the effectiveness of this workout is undermined. I KNOW you will feel ready before 4.5 mins is up. This workout requires patience to reap its magic."

[brian]

Thanks, Julian. Yeah, I did a bunch of those intervals this winter. I was simply doing them on the 5 minutes. Basically the same as you outlined. I think this type of work is essential for cycling where a sprint at the end or a bridge to a group mid race is a possibility. I will say that 30 seconds is a long time and found myself cutting them to 25 seconds. I'm a wimp, though! Thanks for reading.

More weight stuff coming up.

[matthew]

Nice post. I've used similarly structured intervals when coaching Rebecca Rusch. One could argue, coherently, that the benefits of doing 30-second intervals may not be valuable for an endurance racer, but I disagree. Brian's overall theme - keeping things interesting, challenging different power-delivery systems, etc. - is the key here (not to mention that even in 24-hour racing, there are moments when maximal power is key for momentum maintenance). In other words, the benefits of sessions like these, IMHO, extend far beyond the acute, end-of-race-sprint needs that Brian references.

For a variety of reasons, I am damn curious to see how Brian responses to this volume block. And, more importantly, to see "when" the benefits begin to appear...