Training in the heat - scheduling sessions
With every year being, unfortunately, a new recorder-breaking year when it comes to average temperatures, it’s important to design your training sessions around those constraints.
You want to get the most out of your athletes but at the same time you have to balance a lot of other factors that have an influence on their performance.
Today we will discuss how to schedule your training sessions wisely when it comes to heat.
Create a wise schedule
The time of the day you work out during hot days is critical, you want to avoid the hottest parts of the day as much as you can. Heat causes a lot more blood to be delivered to your skin in order to help with cooling your body down. Unfortunately, this has the consequence that some of the oxygen carried through the blood can’t make it to the muscles utilized during a workout. That’s why it’s important to have a wise schedule and find the best possible time for your athletes to train.
Stay cool
The easiest thing you can do is schedule your training sessions to parts of the day when it is cooler - early in the morning or late in the evening. Mornings are particularly beneficial because it can give a lot of people a boost for the rest of the day. Once they are finished with their workout and slowly cooling down, they can have a sense of happiness and relaxation because of the release of endorphins during exercise.
If your schedule is fixed and you can’t move things around, train as much indoors as you can and use air conditioning or create a lot of ventilation in your training venues.
A slight breeze can make a training session much more bearable.
Everything that can help your athletes feel cool will help.
Adjust your training sessions
There are many numbers being thrown around when it comes to performance and heat (here and here).
The exact numbers don’t really matter that as much as knowing that your athletes are going to have a hard time executing on par with their regular performances. That’s why it’s important to adjust overall training durations and individual intensities during a single session.
If a regular speed session for your athletes would include 5 intervals for 2 minutes at 100% of their threshold power, reduce the duration of a particular interval and allow for longer recoveries, or you can keep the interval duration but have them run at a lower intensity.
The thing you want to avoid is them falling off close to the end of a workout. You want them to stay at their limit but don’t go over it. If that means they only worked out at 80% of their regular capacity, so be it.
It’s a hundred times better to finish a workout at 80% than to stop half way through.
Working out in the heat is a challenge and it will be an even greater challenge in the years to come. The sooner clubs adapt to this new reality the better for them and their athletes.
