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Intuitive Athlete

Posted on by Kirsty Sheehan

Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve looked at a workout on your program for the day and a little voice inside chimes in telling you that your body is just not up for it? It could be that you’re feeling slightly under-the-weather, or that you have a niggle that is complaining a bit more than usual, or you’re feeling a higher level of fatigue that day. Do you listen to this gut feeling and sit out, or do you rationalise with arguments of ‘pushing through’, thinking the coach knows best, not wanting to seem lazy, or having an unassuageable desire to tick the box (i.e. see it go green in Trainingpeaks) just because the workout is there?

Part of being an (endurance) athlete is learning how to push through discomfort. That might be the piercing sound of the alarm at 4am, or the burn of hydrogen ions building up at the end of a hard interval. When you learn to push your body to go beyond what feels comfortable, one of the unfortunate side effects can be that you stop listening to those signals suggesting impending damage. There is certainly no greater interruption to training than injury or illness.

I have found as a general culture in triathlon and running, certainly in Queensland, that ‘more training’, and driving oneself harder is often perceived as better. You are given a larger degree of kudos if you cycle 200km, or you punch out 8x 1k run intervals at 3.20pace, than if you do an easy recovery run, despite the overall importance of recovery to success. Someone cycled around Australia once, and then there is impetus to cycle around it twice to ‘better’ the feat. If you’ve completed an Ironman, then of course it’s on to Ultraman! In a world driven by strava kudos and comparison it becomes easy to ignore your internal queues for self-preservation, and to push the envelope farther than what is healthy.

It has been an interesting experiment for me this year using Strava. I had previously shunned the platform as a slippery slope to over-exertion, unnecessary comparison, and potential overtraining. I have actually been surprised to find many positives to its use including:  keeping connected to those in your sporting circles that you might not see on a daily basis (especially during COVID iso), having a strange sense of (online) community and support, learning different cycling routes, training strategies, and generally gaining some appreciation for the struggles and triumphs in the lives of other athletes. Undoubtedly some of my concerns have also been realised, and it has taken some strength to resist the temptation of comparison. I have found that it is a good way of quashing your own intuition by trying to ‘better’ another athlete’s training performance on Strava, especially when their circumstances may be very different to yours.     

As a coach I look at overall periodisation of a program, and set this up according to key goals over the season. Whilst I try and account for other life stressors, health, age, gender, experience and the lifestyle of an athlete, it is impossible to adjust minutely depending on day-to-day changes in circumstance or ‘feeling’ that an athlete has. Trusting that your coach knows better than your intuition gives too much credence and power to their decision-making. Instead, I believe that it is important to be able to support the athlete in making the best choice regarding training, based on their immediate situation. For example; rather than blindly completing a high intensity set when you have a sore throat, and feel under-the-weather, the preference is that the athlete is supported to either have the autonomy to dial the set down, sit it out, or in the very least consult with me on how to adapt training.

Triathlon is rife with “exercise addicts”. There is a fairly strict set of criteria set out in the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for differentiation of exercise addiction, separating this from a general, healthy love of training and involvement in triathlon. The criteria that always sticks in my head to help separate the two is: Continuance: continuing to exercise despite knowing that this activity is creating or exacerbating physical, psychological, and/or interpersonal problems. For me this is the ultimate ignorance of intuition; feeling that you are doing damage to yourself by training but being unable to resist completing the session. I think that many of us have been there before when you just know that you have some series signals telling you to lay off the training but you just can’t break the ‘consistent’ streak, or miss that session that suddenly seems paramount for your triathlon season. Converse to my concerns expressed about giving too much credence to your coach, this is a situation where the coaches’ stance can actually help to override the addiction. They can look at the situation objectively, and I believe, also have a duty to safeguard your health and wellbeing above all else. In these circumstances having an open relationship with your coach, and an immediate line of contact, can help support more intuitive training.        

In theory as you become experienced in sports you should get better at making more intuitive decisions.  You learn about yourself as an athlete and what you can and can’t tolerate. In practice I have actually found that greater experience can mean more reliance on deliberate decision-making rather than gut feel. Perhaps the thought process becomes more cognitive, and less spontaneous because it is not the first time the athlete has been in this situation. They ‘think’ back to what happened last time. They remember how much training it took to achieve the goal previously. They want to tick certain boxes that in the past created success, so they can feel confident. It seems that youth and ignorance can truly be bliss for helping you train to the tune of your own body!

My position when starting this blog was that the more intuitive you are able to be with your training, the better your chance of success. I was sure that I would find evidence to support that intuitive athletes have less injuries, ongoing illness, less missed training time, and therefore greater performance gains. Granted that my skills as a researcher may need to improve, I still submit that I found no such evidence. Much to my disappointment there seems to be a dearth of research on the subject. My “gut feel” remains that blocking out the externals, and listening to your body, is an essential part of ongoing success as an athlete.

Feeling the Need for Speed

Posted on by Kirsty Sheehan

As a coach one of the more common “head-butts” I have with my athletes is over running too fast, particularly during the first base building phase of a training program. As an athlete myself, I get it: I’ve done it, and I’ve suffered the consequences multiple times. We’re all impatient to get faster, and the fun part is when you finally feel your legs moving speedily underneath you. But to safely get to this point, there are a few ‘boring’ steps in between that shouldn’t be ignored.

The first step is determining whether speed work would actually benefit your training, which may not always be the case during every phase of the training cycle. To answer this question it’s helpful to first establish what exactly we mean by speed, and which types of running training should be considered speed workouts. Running speed is commonly used to refer to several different concepts: the highest rate at which you move across the ground (maximum speed of movement), your acceleration (how quickly you can accelerate from a stationary position), and also your speed maintenance (i.e. maintaining a high speed and minimising deceleration over some distance). Maximum (max) speed is usually only maintainable for around 8secs, or 30-40m, and is an anaerobic pathway (not dependent on oxygen). Functional threshold run speed is speed maintenance over a 60min hard out race effort, which is reliant on aerobic energy pathways (oxygen dependent).

For most of the athletes I coach, competing in endurance events, threshold run speed is a more useful determinant of running performance than maximum speed. Is there any use then, for endurance athletes to do max speed workouts? Whilst traditionally max speed workouts are programmed for runners training for events of 10k or less, perhaps counterintuitively research supports that they can actually provide benefit for all runners.1 Doing a sprint session such as 4x20m all out with a 90sec recovery can improve power, strength, neuromuscular coordination and running economy.1 During speed running, leg muscles need to contract at a faster rate, and the nervous system learns to control this process more efficiently. Efficiency means less energy usage running at the same speed, which is  key to endurance running. Better neuromuscular coordination, where the brain communicates more quickly with the muscles through the nerves, can also lessen the risk of injuries. Furthermore, sprint work encourages increased ‘fast twitch’ muscle fibre recruitment, which can be useful in providing support for fatigued ‘slow twitch’ fibres in the back end of an endurance race. It also increases muscle cross-sectional area, although it is unclear how much this contributes to force production. 

Before you rush out and start some high speed intervals it is important to understand the impact and risk of this, and the preparation that your body needs. These types of workouts are highly stressful for both your central nervous system, which is trying to cope with enacting movements at a much faster rate than usual, and your structures, which have increased forces running through them. It therefore takes time to recover from, with some studies suggesting 72hrs for full resolution of the stress.2 This type of training is much more likely to cause injury if you do not at least have a basic level of strength developed (usually in the gym using weights) to prepare your muscles for the high forces that they will be exposed to. In preparation for making movements at speed it is also necessary to rehearse these same movements in a slower fashion. This is usually practiced with run drills as well as strides.

Even as an endurance athlete you are set to gain benefits from max speed work but an important question remains: how often should you be doing this type of work? And what of the more “traditional” speed workouts like 400s, 800s and 1k reps? Research shows that the training adaptations described above can be achieved from as little as three weeks of sprint training, at a frequency starting at once a week and no more than three times per week.3 However, this type of session is best done after a rest day, and with significant time to recover following, which makes it incredibly difficult to fit in the context of a triathlon program. The most likely placement would be during a recovery week as some of the only intensity sessions, though this would undershoot the frequency slightly in the case of a customary 3-4 week training cycle. This may be an argument for max speed work being scheduled during base 3, where some foundation strength and aerobic fitness have already developed, and overall the programming has less intensity, leaving more room for recovery.

Some research also supports the idea that the more traditional ‘speed’ workouts in triathlon today only need to be conducted in the last 4-8 weeks prior to a key race, in a frequency of once to twice a week.4 This is an interesting finding which challenges the majority of triathlon and running training programs that schedule weekly ‘speed’ sessions. Of course there is an argument to be made for providing stimulus for the development of all systems during each training phase; however, in the real world, this should be weighed against the increased risks of faster running (especially injuries which can be season ending). The overarching message seems to be that our “need for speed” in training may be a lot less than we think. Undoubtedly there should be a measured and well-planned approach to including both traditional speed intervals, or high speed, sprint workouts, to gain the adaptation benefits whilst mitigating the risks.     

1. Ross A, Leveritt M. Long-term metabolic and skeletal muscle adaptations to short-sprint training: implications for sprint training and tapering. Sports Med. 2001;31(15):1063-1082. doi:10.2165/00007256-200131150-00003

2. Thomas K, Brownstein CG, Dent J, Parker P, Goodall S, Howatson G. Neuromuscular Fatigue and Recovery after Heavy Resistance, Jump, and Sprint Training. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2018;50(12):2526-2535. doi:10.1249/MSS.0000000000001733

3. Koral J, Oranchuk DJ, Herrera R, Millet GY. Six Sessions of Sprint Interval Training Improves Running Performance in Trained Athletes. J Strength Cond Res. 2018;32(3):617-623. doi:10.1519/JSC.0000000000002286

4. Litleskare S, Enoksen E, Sandvei M, et al. Sprint Interval Running and Continuous Running Produce Training Specific Adaptations, Despite a Similar Improvement of Aerobic Endurance Capacity-A Randomized Trial of Healthy Adults. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020;17(11):3865. Published 2020 May 29. doi:10.3390/ijerph17113865

Too Strained to Train!

Posted on by Kirsty Sheehan

I remember last year finishing 7am-7pm clinics, getting home for 8pm and trying to wind the mind down in time to have a decent sleep so I could get up and train the next morning. I could rarely wind down before 11pm, and then a 4.30- 5am alarm would be most unwelcome. A key bike set that I’d been so keen to hit the night before would in the stark morning light (or grey dusk) suddenly seem impossible and my body just could not reach the goals. Granted I had an idea of what was going on given the physiology study during my degree but it would still frustrate me no end. In my head I would be thinking; but I sat on my arse in a chair all day yesterday (not strictly true as there would have been pre-work training but you get the idea), my legs should be rested! Recently with the post-COVID ramp up in ‘work’ and ‘life’ stressors I am seeing a number of my athletes struggling in the same fashion with training sessions, perhaps with less understanding of the reasons why.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the steroid hormone cortisol, otherwise known as the ‘Stress’ or ‘Fight or Flight’ hormone? It’s an interesting hormone in that it has the dichotomy of helping to control a lot of important functions in our body; such as blood glucose levels and blood pressure, but can also be quite dire for our health when we have chronically raised levels. Cortisol is necessary in physically stressful situations i.e. a race or intense training session because it prepares our body for the need to act. It does this by increasing rate and depth of breathing, increasing muscle tension, improving availability of sugar in the blood stream, diverting blood flow to large muscle groups, and increasing perspiration to cool the body. It heightens alertness and focus. All this can lead to improved performance. Huh?! So how come your training sessions get worse after a stressful period at work or in life. As in my post-clinic scenario an activated stress response can cause sleeping difficulties and fatigue through constant ‘alertness’. Your body reacts the same way to emotional stress as it does to impending physical stress. When you then come to hit this response for training, you’ll find that it is decidedly tapped out! Not to mention that your focus and priority may have been shifted to work, or whatever other life stress is haunting your thoughts.

Chronic stress can also cause more frequent infections or illnesses, digestive problems, changes in appetite, anxiety, increased inflammation and depression. I don’t think I need to go into detail about how these things will be a decrement to your training performance and recovery. The antidote to stress is inducing the parasympathetic response, which in essence causes the opposite reactions in our bodies; also known as ‘rest and digest’.  

All this might be sounding a bit grim when you find you’re stuck with work or life stress, and it’s hard to tap into the ‘rest and digest’. So what can you do to limit the damage to your health and training:

  • It always feels a bit preachy to me, but of course you can take some time out for mindfulness, or practices such as meditation, yoga or Tai Chi (yeah, ok, I didn’t think so….you’re a typical triathlete).
  • Managing your training load and intensity is up there as one of the more important things to offset other life stressors. A concrete example of this would be moderating an athlete’s training sessions to be <Z3 whilst they are going through higher stress periods. Practically it would be looking for sessions where you can get more bang for buck, so they don’t sap as much time.
  • Along this same line you can potentially time recovery weeks with heavier work or travel weeks to balance out the stress.
  • Miss a morning training session to have a sleep in when you are feeling particularly wiped.
  • Cut down warm ups and cool downs to save time.
  • Add extra recovery days.
  • Ultimately exercise flexibility with goals (particularly race goals) so that training does not become an added stress. Afteral; if you’re an AG athlete this is your hobby, and it should not be adding excessive stress to your life!

Above all; communicate with your coach when there are more stressful times in your life so they can help to support you with these and modify your training to accomodate.

Finding the Sweet Spot

Posted on by Kirsty Sheehan

There is a training zone on the bike, commonly referred to as the Sweet Spot, that offers great gains for functional threshold, or aerobic capacity, without the extreme effort of supra-threshold work. This zone is described as moderately hard and is the intensity that most triathletes would race a Standard (Olympic) Distance triathlon. The technical parameters of the zone are defined as 88-94% of Functional Threshold Power (FTP), or 75-85% of Heart Rate Max. One of the great benefits of training in this zone is that you recover far more quickly from it than efforts at, or above threshold, whilst still achieving the same gains. Sounds like a sweet deal!

Programming sweet spot training for my athletes got me thinking about this zone in a more metaphorical sense. Is there a sweet spot in the life of an AG athlete and how they relate to their training? Putting my athlete cap on I’d describe the sweet spot as that feeling of satisfied-tiredness. When you get back from a training session and feel like you’ve worked and achieved, but you’re not collapsing on the couch unable to move for the rest of the day. In a recent conversation with one of my athletes she told me about the feeling of excitement when opening up her TrainingPeaks calendar to see what’s instore for her over the coming week. How she pours over the sessions, reads the details and gets psyched.

Conversely to this I have admittedly placed athletes into a training session well beyond their capacity, with more advanced athletes. I have also handed out intervals where an athlete has tried hard to achieve them but fallen short. I have ALSO given an athlete a volume of training that they have just not been able to sustain due to both lifestyle and personal physical factors. One could call all these situations “Missing the Sweet Spot”! I have observed that it can result in a number of negative responses from the athlete; at best it can damage trust and reduce buy in, as well as motivation. At worst it can leave an athlete  totally demoralised and ready to pack their training in entirely.

So how does a coach find the sweet spot? The most obvious answer would be to rely on the numbers and the zones, so scientifically developed by Exercise Scientists such as Dr Andy Coggan. Problem is, as discussed in my previous blog on feedback the numbers don’t always tell the full story: https://multidimensionalsportscoaching.com/2020/04/21/feedback-reading-the-full-story/ The training an athlete can cope with is also dependent on other factors such as genetics, previous experience in the sport (as well as life experience), and their personality. A very pertinent example of this is two athletes of a similar level being thrown into a cycle training session where they find they are the ‘slowest’ in the group, and have to work hard to keep up. They struggle through the session and are both physically wiped after it. One athlete responds after the session by making their mind up that they are going to hit every training session to get stronger and come back and keep the pace next time. The other responds by going into a slump and believing that they are useless as an athlete, and what is the point. Can you predict this as a coach? I believe it actually becomes your job to predict it, to find that level of training that inspires, excites and challenges your athlete, without breaking their spirit and enjoyment of the sport.

Feedback-Reading the FULL story

Posted on by Kirsty Sheehan

The majority of my coaching is online, especially in these times of COVID-Iso. Without being present at a session, I believe the only way a coach can build a picture of the athlete’s progress is through post-activity feedback; both the objective and subjective data. As an athlete I have had my fair share of coaches who seem to miss the importance of post-workout comments (both reading and responding to these). Now as a coach I see these as invaluable in my assessment of the athlete’s progress because the metrics often don’t tell the full story (this is even assuming the metrics are recorded properly e.g. someone’s power meter drops out, someone forgets to put a new battery in their HRM, GPS records inaccurately due to cloud cover etc etc). I have had plenty of cases where the predicted effort level of certain metrics has not translated into the expected outcome. A female athlete who worked hard to achieve a power threshold value on the bike, yet we found efforts at supra-threshold were consistently still too easy based on subjective feedback. The data suggested that these efforts should be challenging and without comments there could have been a long period of inadequate stimulus to achieve proper training adaptation. On the other side of the coin I had an athlete consistently struggling with run repeats (frequent almost imperceptible stops), which on paper should have been easy to achieve. Without comments, and based on objective data, I could have kept trying to flog dead legs. Instead we have gone looking for the sweet spot of challenge.

Remember that before data there was good ol’ how you felt. This is not to say subjective feedback should supersede objective metrics but that the two can be used very effectively in conjunction to flesh out the picture of your athlete’s performance.

Over a year ago I read “Champion Mindset” by psychologist, coach, and ex-pro athlete Joanna Zeiger. One of the more profound thoughts I always remember from this book is the assertion that you don’t need to ‘feel’ good in order to perform well. As an athlete I had known this on some level but never brought it forward in my consciousness. Times where I thought my legs were cactus and I’d still come out and run a PR, or thinking I couldn’t ride up the mountain today but pushing aside the discomfort and getting it done. Frequent recent experiences in the pool where my (very insightful) swim coach would push me to do an extra effort where beforehand I’d emphatically state I was wiped and couldn’t beat the clock, but I actually could, and I did. Experiential evidence with the athletes I coach has come more recently. Pre-effort the doubts creep in and there are protestations about tired legs, headaches, or it not being the right time of day, week, or month. Most of these athletes still go and get the job done, and many surprise themselves. I think this shows that it would also be a mistake to think that subjective feedback from an athlete should always determine decisions on training but it should have some bearing. Equally an athlete who keeps telling you they feel like shit, and that actually pans out in chronic below expectation performances, needs to be listened to.   

Subjective feedback gives an athlete a log of improvement that goes beyond the metrics. The same workout done four weeks apart may achieve a similar HR, cadence/ power etc BUT they may feel significantly less perceived effort output the second time around. It can also help to develop an athlete’s own insights into themselves and what works best for them in training. Feedback as a coach to your athletes performs a number of functions;

  • it lets the athlete know where they are according to your expectations
  • it is a great opportunity for you to be able to summarise the objective data
  • it builds the coach-athlete relationship
  • it provides a platform for educating your athlete
  • it allows you both to gain clarity around the direction you need to take
  • it helps build and maintain motivation and enthusiasm for training

Lack of feedback from a coach can very quickly leave an athlete wondering whether they are actually paying attention to their efforts, and interested in their performance. So much of performance is based on confidence in oneself as an athlete and one’s own abilities, that I have often mused about whether a coach can actually ‘damage’ performance purely through negligence in feedback. I suspect I could open up a rather large can of worms there, and that the answer may be different for opposing genders and personalities. A short google search will highlight the reams of research showing the power of positive feedback in enhancing an athlete’s performance. As a coach I am looking for bang for buck in terms of performance gains. If I can achieve a boost in performance for my athlete simply by (doing my job) and providing feedback, I’d be mad not to!

Covid Coach

Posted on by Kirsty Sheehan

I hoped my first blog as a coach would be on something more upbeat than a virus, but at this point it’s not possible to avoid the Covid lurking in the corner! It is encroaching on almost every aspect of our lives, limiting our freedoms, and threatening our health. Over the last two weeks of social distancing I have watched with interest the responses from my athletes, and from various triathlon clubs around Brisbane, to the cancellation of races, events and group training. It has presented in many cases like a grieving process;

  • Denial; they won’t cancel my event, it’s too big and important.
  • Anger; I CAN’T BELIEVE they cancelled my event! I’ve put in so much hard work! I’ve spent money and time, and this has been my purpose for the last ‘X’ months/years.
  • Bargaining; ok, let’s just all stay in. Lock us down for two weeks and then we can come out and get on with it, and I can do my event.
  • Depression; there is no point training because there are no events. I’m not doing what you put on my plan!
  • Acceptance; it’s fair to say that not everyone has, or will reach this stage. Those that have are jumping into new technologies and training modalities and embracing the challenges of finding alternative means of keeping up their tri-fitness.

Whilst triathlon for age-groupers is just one aspect of our lives, and as people keep pointing out there are bigger issues that relate to the virus so we shouldn’t complain, we can’t ignore how integral sports and group activities are to our physical and emotional health and well being. In a relative sense I think a triathlete is justified in feeling disappointed by the cancellation of events and things which impact their training, such as the closure of public pools.

Some of the most fantastic ingenuity is coming from the triathlon community to help it’s members continue to train. Windtrainer, pilates and run sessions coached via zoom are becoming the norm and Zwift meet ups are now the way to do a group ride. I have seen numerous pictures posted of home gym set-ups, and all manner of bungee cords attached to people ‘swimming’ in backyard pools. As part of the coaching team for the UQ Triads we have posted weekly training in Team App to be completed individually and reported back on through the Facebook page. It has been fantastic to see the pictures of everyone individually going about their training.

There has been the inevitable drop off of some athletes from coaching plans where they believe there is no longer a purpose to the training without a race or event in the near future. I actually believe that more than ever this is the time to have a coach giving you a solid programmed routine, accountability and feedback. Without regularly being able to meet your training buddies in person, or feeling that strong sense of motivation of a race around the corner it would be easy to flag the sessions and fall into a hole.

Hopefully you won’t find me too callous if I suggest that there is actually a silver lining for triathletes in all this. This is FINALLY THE OFF-SEASON, a chance to reflect and correct all those niggles, instabilities, technique issues and limiters that no one ever makes the time to do during the full-flight of the season. It can also be seen as a great time to build some solid aerobic base and strength. Let’s face it; there are events at all times of the year on the over-crowded tri-calendar. Unless forced to stop (unfortunately often through injury), we rarely do!

The big issue for athletes that are generally motivated by the buzz and adrenaline of races is to find something that replaces that. That’s where what I call “Training Wins” come into the picture. Setting a goal that is challenging and might, for example, put you up on a Strava leader board, or might just be a personal challenge you’ve had in the back of your mind for awhile (e.g. breaking a 45min 10k run, setting a new 40k bike TT PR around the track etc). Discussing these goals with your coach and planning training to achieve them can be a great way of establishing purpose in your program again. A Training Win goal can also be used to test out a taper strategy or try something new in your ‘pre-event’ routine with very little pressure if it goes awry.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the burgeoning Esports market with Zwift offering a plethora of race options for running and cycling, both as an individual and in teams. For a great example see: https://www.koasportsleague.com/

The take home message is that this is far from a time to sink into despair. It is instead a time to start re-imagining your goals, thinking of the big picture and where you want to be in a couple of years time, then setting your plan up and putting those wheels in motion. If you would like help with re-setting your goals and establishing a plan to get there then drop me a line today on kirsty@multidimensionsportscoaching.com.