Clubs Craft

I order for an athlete to have the best possible chance at reaching peak performance, coaches have to carefully balance training stress and recovery. To avoid guess work it’s important to have a structured plan that will help coaches always know where their athletes are and towards what goals they are working. Athletes will be able to see what lies ahead and get ready for the coming sessions.

Let’s first zoom way out and look into planning a year.

A season is planned around certain goals. It can be to achieve a new personal best, win a race, or finish in an event.

In order to get there, it’s important to be realistic and understand the key limiters that are holding you back. Someone who is a fast runner will have a problem stepping it up to longer distances just as a cyclist who is great on the hills has trouble holding on to a group on the flats.

It’s important to recognize those weaknesses early on and have a battle plan ready to address them throughout the season and come to the race ready to achieve peak performance.

This last weekend (13th of October) the 32nd annual Zagreb Marathon race was held with over 5000 participants in different categories - marathon, half marathon, 10k and relay.

I participated once some 7-8 years ago but never had the time to race it again because a lot of triathlon races I take part in are also taking place during that time and I just like triathlon races a little more :)

How much an athlete needs to spend training in a certain intensity zone depends on the type of events they are participating in.

The shorter the race, the more they will spend at and above their anaerobic threshold. The longer the race is, the more time they will spend in aerobic zones to build the needed endurance.

Let’s dive into some more interesting topics and physiological states the athlete’s body goes through in today’s blog post.

The more we understood how to design a training process the more we relied on devices that will help us gauge training intensity in order to be able to precisely stress a desired aspect of the athlete’s physiology.

Heart rate monitors started gaining popularity but proved to be an unreliable witness quite often. That’s why sports scientists and coaches have devised multiple methods that when used together give us a better way of crafting the right workouts for our athletes.

How we can measure intensity is the topic of todays blog post.

As our understanding of the influence training has increased and we learned more about the physiological processes that are happening in our body, we started using that knowledge to improve athlete’s performances.

Today, even someone who isn’t to interested into the science of training has heard about different thresholds and training zones.

This will be the topic of today’s blog post.