In my last article on early season limiters I suggested three potentially performance-limiting factors which are often ignored by the performance oriented athlete but are absolutely integral to building the type of training that will lead to the highest potential level of performance later in the season. In summary these are:

• Strength
• Aerobic Base
• Mobility

If there is one biomotor ability that sets athletes (from all sports) apart from non-athletes it is basic strength.

The topic of the month here at EC is limiters. When most athletes think about limiters, they think in and around the qualities that go together to make up their events. If Johnny Kona has a functional threshold of 320W and yours is 280W then you might consider that a limiter to your event specific goals. Perhaps it is, however, January is not the time to be thinking about these event specific qualities. January is the time of year to consider some of the more basic and often ignored qualities that go together to make up the qualities that might eventually limit your performance in your specific event.

The topic of conversation this month at EC is race selection. Now is the time of year that athletes are filling in their calendars and deciding what races will occupy 2012.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that deciding which races best suit your strengths is a bit of a mystery for most.

In my last article in our How to Qualify series I looked at how some typical benchmark workouts may progress across the course of the qualifying year for an athlete who is on track for a Kona slot. In this piece, we’re going to dive into these benchmarks in a little more depth to look at some of the implications of being strong in some benchmarks while struggling to hit others.

I’ll address such questions as:

• What do the benchmark tests tell us about strengths and weaknesses of the athlete and the sort of training we may want to include in the athlete’s program?
• What do they suggest about how the athlete may want to approach a pacing plan for the event?

In my last article in our How to Qualify for Kona series I talked about some of the general levels of fitness that I typically encounter among athletes who qualify. Many of these measures of fitness are a little abstract, especially for those not super familiar with WKO+ or my own method of performance modeling: CTL, VO2 score, etc.

In this piece I want to bring some of those numbers down to a rubber meets the road perspective so that we can begin to answer the most basic of questions –- what sort of training sets/sessions should an athlete be able to accomplish to indicate they are in Kona shape?

I am currently reading what I consider to be one of the best books on training theory and practice that I have ever put my hands on. If you knew just how many books on these topics that I have put my hands on over the years, this is no small feat! Surprisingly the subject of the book is neither swim, bike nor run training. It is a book on strength training: Practical Programming for Strength Training (Rippetoe and Kilgore).

Now, before you get up on your specificity high horse, hear me out on this one.

In a recent article I looked at some of the differences in training responses that I’ve witnessed for different athletic “types.” I concluded that there are some differences in how quickly various athletes respond to a training stimulus that are related to genetic type. While we can’t do a whole lot to change our genetics, there is another factor that dramatically affects how we respond to training over which we have much greater control.

Last week I talked about the different improvement curves that I’ve observed for different types of athletes. I identified three basic athlete types: the natural, the realist and the worker.

As part of our new “How to Qualify for Kona” section that recently kicked off, I’m going to put some of those observations into the context of what it means to different types of athletes looking to qualify for Kona.

“It takes Different Strokes to rule the world” – Different Strokes theme

While I had to confess my complete lack of qualification in talking on last month’s subject of time management, things have come full circle this month to a topic that I am intimately familiar with: the relationship between training load and top performance.

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” – Albert Camus

As you’ve probably figured, it’s time management month here at EC. I’ve deliberately held off in writing a piece on time management because, well, to be honest, time management (at least in its traditional sense) has to be one of the areas that I am one of the least qualified of the entire EC team to comment! Not so much because I think I manage my time poorly but more because I don’t have a lot of experience in juggling a lot of activities into my waking hours. See, the issue is I value my non-waking hours far too much.

by Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

In the last article that I wrote on the importance of functional flexibility, I looked at flexibility demands in the freestyle stroke. I suggested that, in order to be able to "swim like a swimmer" there are certain flexibility pre-requisites that must be attained. Levels of flexibility that most adult who do not fall into the category of life-long swimmers, do not typically have.

In this piece I want to follow up on the last with a few practical exercises that you can use to improve shoulder mobility and improve your swim stroke.

In my last article on functional flexibility I touched on the importance of flexibility in the swimming stroke. To be certain, there are folks who are technically limited in their swimming by errors made in body position and recovery, entry and catch mechanics. It has also been my experience that many, while knowing what to do, are limited in their ability to do by limitations in their flexibility, especially among older athletes without a swim background.

I want to go into a little more depth in this piece on probably the most important area of the stroke where flexibility limitations can come into play -- the catch.

As a follow up to my last article on putting the "go fast when the race is slow" strategy into practice, I was asked by one of the guys to offer thoughts on how effective his own pacing strategy was in that race. Since there were a few additional lessons that came out of it, Gordo suggested a follow up post may be in order.

A bit of a departure from my series on flexibility this week to indulge one of my guilty pleasures: Power File Analysis!

In April we were fortunate to have a number of ECers and friends of EC racing the Oceanside 70.3. A group of these came in with quite similar bike splits and seemed like a great opportunity for a case study.

The early part of the season is the perfect time to work on all of those "little extras" that tend to fall by the wayside once the hours of SBRing start to creep up. One of those little extras that is actually integral to achieving your season’s goals is injury prevention via appropriate flexibility training.

In keeping with the training camps theme of the month, I thought it might be apt to write a short piece on some of the key workouts that I like to include in my athletes' plans during the course of a big week.

With EC’s recent Tucson camp (and the picture of Petro’s nutritional strategy as shown in the picture) fresh in my mind I thought it might be a good time to chat about one of the less considered elements in training camp planning: nutrition.

“Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.”
-Michael Tilson Thomas

In the last article that I wrote on season planning, I offered some thoughts on the optimal way to plan your training stress to have you arriving at your goal performance level. In the article prior to that, I talked a little about the way that I phase an athlete’s year to optimally address their personal weaknesses. In this final installment, I’m going to bring those two concepts together and show how these elements go into determining the actual training volume and intensity that we plan for each week.

“It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it."
-Lou Holtz

In the last two articles of this series I’ve offered some thoughts on setting realistic performance goals for the coming season and how to go about coming up with some checkpoints to let you know that you’re on track.

by Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

In the last article on season planning, I outlined some of the math involved in making accurate performance predictions/goals for the coming season.

What we need now is BENCHMARKS! A benchmark is a semi-specific fitness test that lets the athlete know:

• Whether they are on track towards hitting their season goal.
• If there are any weak points in the athlete’s physiology that may need to be worked on.

Once we know the athlete's starting point and end destination (as described in the previous article), we can begin to identify some checkpoints along the way that let the coach and the athlete know they are on the right course.

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

The theme for January at EC is “Having your best season ever” so I figured it apt to begin at the beginning and look at how to go about undertaking that crucial first step of setting performance goals for the 2011 season.

With the onset of winter, many of you will be returning to the ever-frustrating mission of trying to make up some more ground on those elusive folk who perpetually lead you out of the water –- the ex-swimmers.

In a previous post, I provided a means of classifying yourself into three levels of swim skill -- skilled swimmer, triathlete and novice -- by simply comparing how fast you move through the water relative to your engine size (VO2max). The inference being that if you have a big engine and you’re not particularly quick in the water, you’re wasting a lot of the work produced by your engine in non propulsive activities, or, put another way, you’re not "skilled" when it comes to swimming. In reality though, the situation is a little more complex…

One of my main interests over the last year has been teasing out the impact of both fitness and fatigue on performance. What I’ve found is that while athletes fall within a pretty narrow range in terms of how fit they get from a given load, there is a vast difference between athletes in how long it takes them to recover from the load.

by Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

With a minimal amount of equipment you can set up a more than adequate home gym in your own garage. Your own space where you can mix up exercises as you see fit, you have enough floor space to actually do some integrated, functional whole body movements (that will help you as an athlete!) and you can actually have some fun and do some crazy stuff without attracting the attention of the gym Nazis. Yes, for the early season you can get a good mix of functional hypertrophy training, muscle balance training (pre-hab) and general aerobic conditioning with a very limited amount of equipment in your own garage.

by Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

Before Marilyn posted her recent workout of the month she offered me a sneak preview so that I could comment on describing the workouts using EC terms. I was forced to e-mail back to her that when it comes to EC zone descriptions, those workouts were "hors categorie," that is, beyond our current categorization (another advantage to having diversity -- such as those with bike racing experience -- on the EC coaching team).

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

With the Tour of Utah still very fresh in my mind and body, I thought it might be a good week to chat through some of the key considerations in absorbing the mammoth training load of a training camp.

by Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

My last article prompted a spirited discussion on our Endurance Corner forum that centered not so much around the formula I presented, but rather the classification of athletes into “front of the pack,” “middle of the pack,” etc., based on the number that you come up with. While these were intended as very general fitness classifications, the implications that they have on actual ironman performance was appropriately questioned. Some good points were raised. Enough points that I thought it worthwhile to do a follow up piece on what that number tells us about potential ironman performance.

by Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

The task of testing is integral to the whole training process. After all, training is a means to an end and that end is better performance on race day.

There are many ways to test to see if your training is making you better. There are lab tests that use lactate curves or VO2 curves to assess improvement, there are field tests, such as Joe Friel’s 30 minute TT or Coggan’s CP5/CP20 tests to approximate the athlete’s "Functional Threshold" and there are races! All of these tests have one thing in common: they hurt.

by Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

My favorite TV channel of late is, without question, Universal Sports. Prior to the introduction of this channel, we rarely saw swimming and triathlon outside of major events like the Olympics. Now, with 24 hours of air time to fill, we get to see all of the ITU world cup races, the world athletics circuit and small invitational swim meets.

Because of this, we also get to see superstars racing at far below their best. When this occurs, we hear comments like, “Phelps is coming off a tough training block right now.” But what does that mean? What does a "block" of training consist of and why is the block approach preferable to constant load over the season? Is there an optimal duration for each training block? I’m going to delve into these questions a little…

by Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

In the last three articles in this series on bike fit (part 1, part 2, part 3) we examined how to set up your ride to provide the most neutral, comfortable all day position.

So, what modifications can we make to our "all day" position to strike the best balance between comfort, power and aerodynamics?