> |
> |
Training volume and seasonal planning
Last week you read about the pitfalls of skating alone too often and skating beyond your technical limits. Now let’s look at two pitfalls that will help you plan your training over the course of the season.
3. Excessive Training Volume and Overtraining
Without doubt one of the biggest misnomers in this sport is the belief that skating long distance will make you faster. Skating long will improve your aerobic capacity and muscular endurance, but it does little to improve your speed.
Logging a load of miles has its time and place early in the season when building an aerobic base. But once the competitive season rolls around the focus should be on speed, not mileage. So why do so many skaters go out and skate 20-30 miles a day 5-6 days a week? The only reason why anyone should skate this much is either 1) They just love to skate; 2) They want to lose weight and are trying to burn as many calories as possible; or 3) They are training specifically for an ultra endurance event such as A2A. The problem is that the majority of these people are training for events ranging from 10km to a 42 km marathon, and think that this is the best way to prepare. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! This sort of mileage during the ‘in-season’ is a waste of time.
If you want to get fast, you need to train fast. Short intervals, lots of anaerobic training, and work on improving your acceleration and ability to recover after repeated surges in pace. The reason you log miles in the early season (preseason) is so that you can focus on speed work during the late preseason and competitive season. My general advice to most people... once you’ve built your base cut your mileage in half, take 2 or even 3 rest days per week, and focus more on speed work using short interval repeats and sprints distances.
4. Lack of Seasonal Planning
Most skaters fail to understand the fact that it is impossible to maintain a high degree of competitive readiness for more than a few months at a time. Because of this, all skaters need to frame the entire year in one scene and divide it up into smaller and more manageable segments. Each of these segments has its goals and objectives, as well as appropriate and corresponding training methods. Choose your races early, and plan your training so that you achieve a peak in performance at the desired time.
The real trouble begins with skaters who live in a climate that is temperate enough to skate year-round. There is no forced off-season the way there is in northern latitudes, and as a result skaters get sucked into training the same way the whole year through. The result is one big plateau in performance. Well guess what folks? No matter where you live you still need to plan and adhere to off-season training. The body needs some downtime and gradual and progressive building of capacity leading up to your main event(s).
The concept of planning your season in this way is called periodization, and it is a cornerstone principle of modern sport science. Skaters can also get themselves into trouble by attempting to maintain peak or near-peak form for too long. Consider, for example, an individual who has a big race in early May, a number of smaller races during the summer months, and then has their other big event in late August. Rather than try to maintain top-form over the entire 5 month period, it would better to peak in May, maintain reasonable form during June, and then back off significantly and rebuild once more for a subsequent peak in August. Five months is too long to maintain optimal fitness, even for the most talented of athletes. Plan your season around key events and learn more about the concept of periodization. You will get more our of your performances by peaking and tapering several times during the course of a season than you will be trying to maintain top form for several months on end.
opyright © 2004 Barry Publow. All Rights Reserved.
