Your Best Triathlon

As with all aspects of fitness, the way to train your body to tolerate and remove hydrogen ions is by training at your lactate threshold. This, then, is the best marker of training intensity.

And with every gram of carbohydrate stored away as glycogen, the body also stores away nearly three grams of water. This will all come off when you get back into training later on. So don’t worry about it. In fact, it’s probably best to not even weigh yourself this week.

You will probably feel like the 5 minutes between sets is too much recovery. Remember, with this workout you are working on developing greater muscular force—not endurance. Fatigue is counterproductive for building force. If you are fresh for every hard effort, you will get more benefit from this workout than if you skimp on the recoveries and become progressively more fatigued. If you are tired, the force you apply will not be as great and you won’t get the same results. It’s even okay to take too much rest between the force intervals.

, during a swim, bike, or run, your fatigue is even greater than you had thought originally, stop the workout and call it a day.

Fast-twitch muscles use mostly carbohydrate for energy, whereas slow-twitch muscles rely on fat. Anytime you can shift the workload from fast-twitch to slow-twitch muscles, you will waste less of your limited stores of carbohydrate and thus improve economy.

Fit and experienced athletes tend to recover faster when they do light exercise as opposed to taking a day off from training.

Fatigue is the enemy of skill development. When you are learning or refining skills, you’ll find that short and frequent workouts with short sets are best. I typically have triathletes swim for 20 to 40 minutes, several days each week, in Base 1. These workouts often are simple 25 meter or 25 yard repetitions focusing on the skill we’re developing. After each 25, stand at the wall and t

When the plan calls for a bike session of more than an hour and you are forced to ride indoors, cut the workout in half, but ride no less than one hour. You should still do the “meat” of the session, whether its objective is aerobic endurance,

Always swim, bike, and run as if you were trying to sneak up on someone. Be quiet and efficient.

Stop trying to “win” workouts. Praise your training partners for how fit they are and let them dominate now when it doesn’t matter.