Winter Training: what's the best plan?
It is pretty common for athletes to lose a bit of focus over the winter months and not be too sure about what they’re trying to achieve with their training. On the other hand, some athletes think they just need to carry on as normal and keep hitting the competition style sessions. The answer to what training you should be doing over the winter isn’t always clear cut as it may depend on when your races fall and what your goals are. However, the vast majority of athletes will benefit on building a strong aerobic base and improving their maximum aerobic capacity as that builds the solid foundations needed for a successful season. A great quote from a famous Kenyan runner is, “don’t try and live in your house before it’s built”. It’s a great analogy to think about when looking at what you’re trying to get out of your winter training cycle.
The principle of fractional utilisation is that your zones or thresholds are effectively set by how high your ceiling is.
General Preparation Phase:
How do you build a strong aerobic base and improve your maximum aerobic capacity? To build a good base, we need to accumulate a large amount of training time at lower intensity efforts. This lower intensity work is critical to developing aerobic pathways and improving our efficiency. In order to develop our maximum aerobic capacity, we need to do a small amount of high intensity work in 1 or 2 sessions each week. This means we should be achieving a very high degree of polarisation between intensities and the majority of our training volume should be accumulated below the lactate threshold. This highly polarised model wouldn’t be the most effective training structure in the build-up to a race, unless training for very short distances, as you need to be doing race intensity sessions which will accumulate a lot of volume around your threshold. This winter phase of training can be called anything, but a good name for it is the General Preparation Phase.
Build Your Capacity:
Why should you be aiming to build your maximum aerobic capacity? Well, one of the biggest determinants of performance, even in long distance events like Ironman or long bike races, is VO2 max. The principle of fractional utilisation is that your zones or thresholds are effectively set by how high your ceiling is. The bigger the engine, the more potential there is to go faster and by increasing your capacity, you give yourself room to move your threshold up. The most effective way to build your maximum aerobic capacity is by training in the VO2 zone. On the bike, this could range from around 106-120% of your FTP. While running, it could a bit faster than your 5km speed. It’s harder to predict due to the influence of technique but it should be hard. That doesn’t mean it’s an all-out sprint, but the design and structure of sessions has to stress your system in order to bring about the necessary adaptations.
VO2 training isn’t all the same either. You typically have two different types of VO2 workouts which are broken down into short VO2 sets or long VO2 sets. Short VO2 intervals are anything under a minute in length and long VO2 interval are anywhere from 1-5minutes in length.
VO2 Short workouts:
Short VO2 workouts are designed in a specific way that keeps your VO2 elevated for a long time. Sessions will typically follow a block of time that is broken down as a short period of hard work followed by a short period of rest. For example, on the bike, 10 x of 40secs hard / 20secs easy or 10 x of 30secs hard / 30secs easy are classic designs. Or on the run, 10x30sec hill repeats is a great session. By keeping the recovery time short, VO2 stays elevated and the necessary stress is placed on the system. The number of repetitions, volume and intensity of session is very much dependant on the athlete and their capability. The beauty of short VO2 workouts is that they enable athletes to accumulate a relatively large amount of work in their VO2 zone that they simply wouldn’t be able to achieve if they tried to do the same amount of work in longer blocks. If you’re doing these bike sessions on a smart trainer, it’s potentially worth taking ERG off as you don’t have to deal with the lag in power and you can get a better-quality workout done.
These short VO2 sessions are very effective at building your VO2 max and are best done at the start of the General Preparation Phase. They’ll build your ability to go on to longer VO2 reps. While short reps are best for developing VO2 max, long VO2 reps are best for developing maximal aerobic power and that’s what we really need to develop to perform in endurance events.
VO2 Long workouts:
As stated above, long VO2 reps can last anywhere from 1-5 minutes in length. These reps are more specific to the demands of longer distance racing (what most of us do, unless you’re a sprinter) and you can improve your economy. Doing high quality long VO2 workouts will develop big improvements in maximal aerobic power, there’s no point in having a big VO2 max if you don’t have the power to show for it. A classic long VO2 set on the bike would be something like 7x3mins at 120% FTP with 2mins recovery. However, as is the same with the short VO2 sets, the number of repetitions, volume, recovery and intensity of session is very much dependant on the athlete and their capability. Starting with such a session as mentioned would be near impossible for most athletes. A classic long VO2 run set would 5x1km at above 5km race pace with 1-2mins rest. Again, it will take an athlete time to build up this intensity. As a rule of thumb, 20-25mins is the maximum time you would want to spend at VO2 intensity, so that is a good guide as to how build sessions and where they should be progressed to. It all comes to manipulating the variables in the right way and knowing what limiting factor you’re trying to overcome.
It’s hard to go too hard in a session but it’s easy to go too hard too often.
How to structure your week:
A phrase which you’ll read in a lot of META articles is that you only benefit from the training you recover from. Hard VO2 sessions will take ~48 hours to recover from so it’s very important that the days after these sessions are easy training. You don’t want to do more than 2-3 VO2 sessions per week and most will benefit from doing 2. This means the rest of the should be made up from low intensity aerobic work below the lactate threshold. One of the big mistakes people make is moving their training around and unknowingly placing hard sessions, which are designed to be spaced out, within close proximity of each other. They wonder why they then feel burnt out and lack energy. There’s also evidence that going into hard sessions with high motivation results in greater adaptations and gains than if motivation is low. Feeling rested, fresh, well fuelled and having good energy levels is the way to approach these sessions.
Aerobic Training:
Just to cover what this is, good quality aerobic training should not be hard. A common phrase amongst athletes and coaches is make the easy days easy. One of the biggest differences between amateur athlete’s training and professional athlete’s training is the respect of this principle. It’s hard to go too hard in a session but it’s easy to go too hard too often. The winter is about building your aerobic fitness and very gradually building the duration. Taking this approach mitigates the risk of injury and creates the platform for longer reps that move closer to race pace. As mentioned above, to do hard sessions well, you have to go into them fresh. Constantly pushing your easy sessions, a bit too hard, results in poorer quality VO2 workouts because the athlete is simply too fatigued to go hard and will probably lack a bit of desire to do it. A good way to think about your lower intensity training is that it facilitates all the harder work. If you can think about your week as a whole, and how each workout impacts another, you’ll start training smarter.
Strength Training:
Strength training shouldn’t be just in the winter but it’s common for it to waiver towards the end of the season when athletes are building to their biggest races. The winter time is a great opportunity to build more strength and this compliments the style of training being done.
GPP Focus should be aimed at mainly volume and techniques for around 4 - 6 weeks, normally 3 or 4 sets of 10. Once we are competent in all the movements we can then turn our focus to strength building. This phase involves doing lower reps with heavier weight loads 4 or 5 sets of 5. This is the best way to build strength after the general preparation phase (GPP).
Final Thoughts:
The winter time can be demanding when it comes to external stresses. It’s very important to not place stress on stress. It’s pretty simple, if you do a hard session and then don’t look after your body, you’ll either get very little benefit from the session or you’ll set yourself up for a bad few days at some point. Vice versa, if you end up being out late or something happens that puts you under a lot of fatigue, think twice about doing a hard session the next day. Thinking about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system is the key to understanding what’s happening here. Hard sessions cause a sympathetic stress to your system while low aerobic training has an opposite parasympathetic effect and helps put a break on things. If you measure HRV (heart rate variability), it’s a great way of understanding when you should and shouldn’t do hard sessions, if correlated with other variables. If stress is high, the best advice is just do something easy and save the hard stuff for another day. Doing some easy training is also much better than nothing due to the way it stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system.
Avoid doing VO2 sessions late in the evening. As they raise blood glucose levels and stress levels, it’s very likely that sleep will be impacted by it. If you’re doing club training like track nights, think carefully about what training and rest you have planned after it. It’s very likely that your sleep will be affected so planning a little bit longer in bed the next morning or having a good routine set up for after the session is important.
Hopefully this presents a good picture of what you should be trying to achieve with your training over the winter and what you should be focusing on. The best advice is to make sure you understand what the purpose of each session is, think about how each session impacts another and don’t ignore the importance of balancing external pressures with training. You can’t burn a candle from both ends. If you can work on these areas of your fitness over the winter, you’re guaranteed to come out the other end stronger. The length of this phase is dependent on when your A races are and when you need to start the next cycle of training.