Dosage- How often and intense should workouts be?

Healthy Fitness can generally be defined as the body’s successful adaptation to handling increasing stresses. I like to think of the process of building fitness as synonymous with preparing for a race. In the endurance racing world, these training/racing stresses can come in a variety of forms including:

• Intensity
• Distance/Duration
• Weather Related- humid, temperature, precipitation
• Nutrition Related- fasting, limited carb intake
• Training/Racing Environment- hilly, open water, trails, altitude
• Recovery Time within a workout and between workouts (Training Density)
• Frequency of Training Sessions

Fitness is best built through small, consistent, and progressive doses of these purposefully planned stresses. Think sipping your morning coffee on a slow, relaxing morning rather than trying to drink from a fire hose. Our bodies are equipped to handle and adapt to consistently small, progressive stresses- not large, quick changes. Large quick changes overwhelm our body and, if too large of a stress, can lead to injury. Although progression is paramount to ensuring continual adaptation, it must be done in small, consistent doses.

A coach’s goal is to always apply the minimum effective dose of training- What is the minimum amount of stress we can prescribe for an athlete to get the maximum gain in fitness?

Stress, in the correct amount, is a good thing and a requirement for building fitness. The key being in both the quality and quantity of stress.

Quality of Stress

Applying the SAID principle (Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands) is a nonnegotiable when preparing for a race. The human body adapts to repeated specifically imposed demands/stresses. Put into practice, the closer race day comes, the more your training should reflect and prepare you for the demands of the race- intensity, distance/duration, environmental factors. Simply, applying the principle of purposeful, progressive practice makes you best prepared.

Quantity of Stress

I believe that athletes only have so many big heroic efforts in them before they need a complete break and refresh. Athletes can only “go to the well”-both physically and mentally- so many times before it runs empty and they have to let it refill naturally by taking a break. With this in mind, we need to save those big efforts for when it really matters- a limited number of workouts and races.

What does this look like in reality?

Athletes consistently completing workouts that don’t completely exhaust them. These workouts are definitely a stress, but no so much of a stress that they need total and complete rest afterwards. A workout that they can successfully complete and will be able to go again in another 2–3 days. A good way to think of it is that athletes could have done another repetition or continued on at the same intensity level if the session had called for it.

For a very limited number of workouts, 1–2 a month depending on the timing in the season and sport/distance you are training for, athletes should be challenged to push themselves above and beyond the previously described workouts. These big stresses will not only physically prepare athletes, but test them mentally as well. Again these race prep workouts should be very limited and have plenty of recovery time afterwards to ensure maximum fitness gains.

This also involves limiting the number of times athletes race in a season. A race is a giant stress on an athlete- both physically and mentally. Operating under the principle that athletes have a limited capacity of these big efforts, we must encourage athletes to save these big efforts for when they are most needed- at their Championship races.

Applying the Growth Equation (Stress + Rest + Preparation = Growth), elite athletes not only train at the highest level, they rest at the highest level. This is what is not always seen or appreciated: rest and training going hand in hand. As stress increases, rest should increase, with the preparation increasing as well to produce the maximum growth. A disparity between increasing and decreasing the variables will not result in maximal, if any, growth. For a lot of people, putting in the effort is not the issue preventing them from improving. Rather, it’s recognizing and embracing the link between the other variables, rest and preparation, in conjunction with stress.

The Polarized Training model is a great general guideline to keep in mind. According to the Journal of Applied Physiology, “Polarized training consists of a high percentage of exercise time at low exercise intensity (75 — 80 percent) accompanied by little time at moderate intensity (5 — 10 percent) with the remainder spent at high intensity (15 — 20 percent).”

Basically, polarized training is where workout sessions are at either end of the intensity spectrum — high or low with very little time spent training at a moderate intensity. High-intensity training is defined as any effort above lactate threshold, and low-intensity training means any effort below aerobic threshold. As race day comes closer, moderate training (any effort above aerobic threshold but below lactate threshold) is continually minimized. Rather, the focus of workouts being either on high-intensity and low-intensity sessions.

Because so much training time is spent at a high-intensity level, there must be a large percentage of low-intensity level training to compensate. The low-intensity sessions serve as active recovery to prepare athletes for the next round of high-intensity training. Again, this depends on the timing in the season and sport/distance you are training for.

In a similar vein, incorporating the 80/20 principle.

“The 80/20 Rule of endurance training, which posits that endurance athletes improve the most when they do roughly 80 percent of their training at low intensity and the remaining 20 percent (give or take) at moderate to high intensity. So, the next most impactful thing you can do in your endurance training — if you’re already doing a lot of low-intensity training and a little high-intensity training — is to fine-tune the balance of intensities to bring your training in line with the 80/20 Rule.” (8020 Endurance)

How can you tell when too much stress has been applied?

Variety of ways, both expensive-complex and inexpensive-simple:

• Heart Rate Variability
• Tracking Waking Resting HR
• Training and Racing Performance and Metrics (Pace, HR, Power, RPE, etc.)
• Mood
• Sleep Quality and Quantity
• Physical Feelings- sore, tired and amount of time after workouts/races it takes to feel fresh again
• Appetite

While I discussed training and racing stresses, we must be cognizant of LIFE stresses- sleep, family, job, travel, friends, 21st century life. These can have just as big, if not bigger influence on athlete’s performance as training stresses. Especially sleep- sleep is the #1 legal performance enhancer.

The secret is the fact that there is no secret- just consistency.