Even fairly serious Age Group athletes, who do quite well, don’t train like pro’s. Nowhere near like them in fact. Sure there are elements in common about how they train but simple time constraints and perhaps other resource constraints are significant limiting factors.
I would contend that quite a bit of what we read is not designed for Jo Smith who trains 7-8 hours a week.
So what YOU need to be most effective is not the same as what a pro needs. Not the same in entirety that is.
Look at this table
This should give you some indication of the best way to spend your time.
If you’ve read blogs and books a bit you will probably have cottoned on pretty quickly that threshold sessions are very productive. (Longish intervals around your LTHR, say 2×20 minutes)
And you possibly have heard that training near your VO2max, although not really used in your triathlon race, will boost your ability to hold race efforts for longer.
You probably don’t do weights as “that would cut down on your training time” and surely can’t be an efficient use of that time? (wrong)
You probably don’t warm up and don’t do drills even though you could increase your efficiency by, maybe, 5% for virtually no physiological cost (ie you can do drills AND train). Of course it’s wrong to avoid drills/technique too.
So look closely at that chart again and then research how it affects your chosen race distance.
Tailored Duathlon Training / Triathlon Training
If you want to devote 3 hours a week out of your total 7 hours sprint triathlon training with a long bike ride on Sunday morning then that’s really up to you. You’ll finish.
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Surely it would depend greatly on what it is you’re training for? Long intervals around LTHR will only train you for longer intervals around your LTHR, and if you can already sustain an effort to complete the race duration then time would be infinitely better spent on speed and efficiency work which will shorten the duration you need to sustain that effort for. Long triathlon races certainly would benefit from the above, but I’m not sure I’d apply it to a 5k runner who has no intention of running further/longer?
yes the importance varies by distance; as you say
A lot of triathlon articles are geared towards Ironman races and a lot of running articles are written for marathoners.
Threshold performance is pretty important for endurance athletes – ANY triathlon, including sprint.
It is certainly a benefit for a 5k runner – as would be endurance and VO2 and ‘power’ training, the mix is different
Not sure I’d call sprint triathlon endurance so much as a nice day out doing some activities 😉 I’d certainly like to see more posts like this though, too few people focus on how to use the functions of these devices and instead focus on how many functions there are. This is leading to things like VO (or bounciness as I like to call it) where literally nobody including the people who wrote it know why it’s there. Even stuff like interval training doesn’t seem to be used judging by the fact that Garmin Connect hasn’t been able to create HR interval workouts for over a year and almost nobody has noticed. This sort of points to most people just recording data either because they don’t know how to use it or have no interest in using it. It’d be nice to see a few articles going through how to use each feature to train with and why you would.
thanks for your comments. great to get feedback. I’ve done the gadget stuff for probably over a year. before that there was/is a LOT of stuff on this blog about training/physiology/using data. Stuff on HRV and training load TSB/CTL/ATL for example. liked your comment about the HR data not being in the GC workouts…I’d not noticed either!! tho I don’t tend to train that precise way but do use HR data a LOT.