Do you know what are the performance factors that explain why each person obtains sports results?
Tim Cusick’s graphic, one of my reference coaches, is certainly very clarifying since it gives you a global idea of the combination of things necessary to obtain a certain sporting performance and, therefore, you can get to know what to improve with training .
Training in the rain and in bad conditions is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, if you get caught in a competition, what are you going to do? What equipment are you going to take? are you going to be warm enough? what do you need to cover yourself more? How long will that goretex last in the rain?
You will be able to answer all these questions and more without hesitation in a training situation and later, in the race, they will enable you to make good decisions to compete in the race in the best personal conditions despite the bad weather conditions.
Intuitively, when we want to improve in an activity, we usually think of training more. This means more time, more distance and/or more intensity. However, there comes a time when one stagnates and training more does not improve.
At this point, it is when you wonder what you need to do to continue the progression and continue to increase performance capacity.
How to make training on the treadmill more bearable?
It’s not about putting on a Netflix series, or chatting on social networks, no.
You have to be focused on what you are doing, both in the technique and in the effort, otherwise, it will hardly obtain benefits or end up being a significant activity that promotes repetition and habit creation.
Therefore, it is about looking for the formula that allows us to be focused on the effort but at the same time, entertained. And this is easily achievable thanks to the Stryd.
Finding the optimal pace in any competition is no easy task. It is not the Holy Grail either, but we must recognize the enormous difficulty of knowing if we could have done better (except in those circumstances in which it is flagrantly yes).
For this reason, finding that exact point of suffering is certainly complicated and more so the more variable and the longer the competition. It is also not the same to manage a race for a leading competitor, than one who is going to look for his best time or one who is going to simply finish.
In order to be able to manage competitions correctly, we simply need to have a correct reference in terms of the functional pace/power threshold. From that point, we must modulate our effort according to the length of the race. In this way, we ensure that we can sustain the intensity from start to finish without melting down beforehand and arriving on foot or crossing the finish line without giving away performance.
Any physical activity generates a response in the body that aims to respond to the physiological demands that exercise is causing. This can be an increase in respiratory or heart rate, a mobilization of energy resources,…
The training seeks to organize these physical activities over time with the objective that these acute adaptations end up generating adaptive processes that lead to an improvement in performance.
But what physiological adaptations are produced in your body according to the intensity of each training zone?
My goal in writing the Ultra Trail training book was to try to convey the key idea that training time is not proportional to race time.
Javier Iriberri did the RAAM and trained as if he were preparing to win the Quebrantahuesos. Nuria Picas almost crossed the Alps from Vienna to Nice on cross-country skis as if preparing for the Pierra Menta. And so many others I could name.
If you have not read the book and are curious to know what its pillars and basic principles are, I will summarize them below. I’m sure they will be useful to you. And if you have read it too, since it will be like a reminder of what one must do on a day-to-day basis to be highly effective in terms of the time dedicated to training with respect to the result obtained.
The cardiovascular system is the system par excellence that no one doubtlessly associates with resistance activities.
The indicator par excellence of the capacity of the cardiovascular system is the maximum oxygen consumption or the well-known acronym VO2 max. This value is nothing more than our body’s ability to capture oxygen from the environment and use it in cellular reactions to transform it into movement. The greater this capacity, the greater the performance capacity of the individual.
Discover why there are individuals with a higher VO2 max value and why we should never underestimate the daily work in training that will offer us the possibility of getting the most out of our engine.
When carrying out resistance activities, it is essential to know the importance that the energy and thermoregulatory system has in determining our performance.
On the one hand, current technology allows us to evaluate the energy expenditure of the activities we carry out. In this way, and analyzing each sports discipline and its energy demands, we will seek that with training and diet, we get closer to what would be optimal for each competitive activity.
On the other, self-knowledge is a fundamental weapon to keep the temperature at bay, looking for a compromise between the level of intensity of effort and the possibilities of rehydration to compensate for hyperthermia of extrinsic (the environment) and intrinsic (the effort) origin.
In general, all resistance activity practitioners tend to base all their training on the work of the cardiovascular system, disregarding any type of session related to strength and speed. And this is a mistake since it has been shown that the work of these two physical qualities improves the performance in resistance activities thanks to an improvement in the mechanisms of transmission of the nervous orders with which there is a direct contribution in the economy of the movements.
When you cross the finish line in any race and, if you don’t arrive exhausted, cross it in more or less good condition, you tend to think that perhaps you haven’t fully squeezed yourself and you haven’t been able to get the most out of your potential. .
One of the easiest ways to dispel these doubts is through performance graphs and the evaluation of the mismatch between pace or power and heart rate. From the relationship between heart rate and pace and/or power we can get the desired information regarding whether you have gone over or under and this is called the performance mismatch.
Maximum heart rate, threshold heart rate, maximum and minimum heart rate when we work by heart rate and functional power threshold and functional rhythm if we work by power and rhythm respectively are the different references that coaches take to later determine the training zones with our athletes.
Faced with such a kind of disparity, however, the following question should be asked: What magnitude would be the best to be able to work with the greatest possible precision?
Do you know what VO2 max is? Do you know your performance level? Stress tests serve above all to ensure that the athlete who performs them is in good physical condition and does not present any contraindications to intense exercise. In addition, they also serve as a prediction of the performance that you can show in any competition.