Hopefully it goes without saying that staying hydrated, particularly while training on the treadmill or turbo trainer, is important.

But how exactly should you be hydrating yourself in these sessions?

Watch Coach Rob explain below…

In a nutshell, you need to be adding water and electrolytes back into your body at the same rate they’re leaving.

One of the big challenges with indoor training is how hot you get compared to outside. That’s not because it’s so much hotter inside, but because you don’t have the air flowing over your skin to keep you cool, as is the case outside.

When you do have the air flow over your skin, it is carrying water and sweat away from your skin, taking the heat away from your body. And of course you don’t have this effect indoors.

You can see the effect for yourself by doing a relatively easy turbo session and seeing just how great a build up of sweat there is on your skin. Then turn a fan on. You’ll find it’ll help the water evaporate off your skin and cool you down.

So – it’s the heat that’s the problem, not the sweat.

As your body sweats it takes sodium and other electrolytes with it. The amount of electrolytes lost varies person to person. If you find yourself often cramping up after a hard turbo session, the chances are you’re a heavy sweater that loses a lot of electrolytes in your sweat.

The heaviest sweaters, like Coach Rob, can lose up to 1500mg of sodium per hour. For context – most of the ‘standard’ electrolyte tablets available provide around 300mg of sodium per tablet- so a lot less than a heavy sweater would need to replenish what has been lost.

Team Oxygenaddict partners, Precision Hydration offer a free online sweat test to help you assess how much sodium you’re likely to be losing and also offer an in-person test for more accurate results. (Team Oxygenaddict athletes also get 15% off Precision Hydration’s products online).

So in summary: use a fan to keep cool while indoor training, and assess the quantity of electrolytes along with liquids you need to replenish based on the amount you’re losing.

Fat burning is a hugely important topic and area of consideration for people completing Iron distance, and even 70.3 distance triathlons.

Fat burning is going to take place naturally anyway – regardless of what you eat or how you fuel yourself. It’s how our bodies typically source fuel when exercising at low intensity.

Coach Rob explains below why this is important in long distance triathlon and how to make the most of it.

For most athletes, higher intensity means your body has a greater reliance on carbohydrate metabolism, and actually shuts off the fat burning metabolism as a source of fuel.

So – training hard and fast all the time means your body won’t make the adaptation to become more efficient at burning fat – i.e. learning to get more of its required energy from fat.

This is why it’s quite common to see very good age-group, and even pro triathletes over the Olympic distance, really struggle to step up to Ironman. Their bodies often simply can’t keep going long enough to perform well over longer distances.

With sustained training in improving your efficiency of fat burning your body can provide an increased amount of energy per minute from your natural fat stores to fuel you over an extended period of time.

This is incredibly important as our bodies can provide a seemingly endless supply (in the context of long distance triathlon) of natural fat. The amount of carbohydrates the human body can metabolise is limited – typically to around 300 calories per hour. An Ironman athlete will burn way more than that per hour, for many hours – so without fat as a fuel source there’d be a significant calorie deficit. It’s this deficit that leads to some of the struggles that we so often see people having in the latter stages of an Ironman race.

So it’s important to ‘train’ your body to burn fat.

If you’re a relative beginner long-distance triathlete and don’t have much of an endurance background, this is one of the biggest things to make sure you get right in the lead up to your race.

That’ll mean dedicating time to train at / below your aerobic threshold. That is – the level at which your body is still mainly using fat as it’s source of fuel. As you spend more time training at this level your body will adapt, providing a greater proportion of your fuel from this fat source. Over time therefore, you’ll gradually be able to go faster while still fulfilling your energy needs from your own natural fat supplies.

A great way to begin to train your body, as counter-intuitive as this may sound for triathlon, is to go for a hike! So – extended periods of time at a relatively low intensity, where you don’t need to rely on gels, sweets etc.

Likewise – long, slow bike rides are also great for this, as long as the pace is kept conversational (i.e. easy). As a general rule of thumb if you can hold a conversation your body is in it’s fat burning zone! The minute you switch to a heavier, more laboured breathing style that’s likely to be when your body is switching to burning carbohydrates rather than fat.

If you use a heart rate monitor the middle of Zone 2 is the perfect place to be. If you use a power meter on your bike, 68-70% of your FTP is around what you should be aiming for. The key though, is for the pace to remain conversational.

Over time your aerobic threshold – i.e. your fat burning threshold – will increase and improve. To give you an idea of what’s possible it’s not uncommon for pro-ironmen to complete their bike leg at ~80% of their FTP while remaining aerobic – i.e. getting most of their energy from fat, even though the intensity is relatively high.

So if you’re stepping up to long distance triathlon – please do make sure you factor this critical element into your preparation and training.

Rest and recovery is an essential part of a training week yet it seems it’s often harder for triathletes to rest and recover properly than it is to train!

As highly motivated athletes who want to be the best you can be, it’s very easy to fall into the mindset that if you’re not training, you’re not improving.

Here’s Coach Rob explaining why that’s not the case…

In Team Oxygenaddict we really push the need to take your prescribed rest days / recovery sessions as just that. Otherwise your body will struggle to make the adaptations and improvements in fitness that you desire and deserve – because that’s what it requires for that.

Rest & recovery doesn’t necessarily mean doing nothing though. Our sessions might involve a shorter, and DEFINITELY easier swim / bike. Such sessions are designed to promote blood flow to your muscles to help with recovery. You’ll often feel much better at the end of these sessions than you did at the start.

Think of them as a free massage!

Related to this, and a topic that crops up a lot in Team Oxygenaddict is the mindset of missing sessions.

That is, the mindset that if you missed a session one day, the logical thing to do is to add it onto the following day’s training schedule. It most definitely isn’t the thing to do!

The majority of us are balancing work, family and life in general with training. Inevitably then, there will be days where sessions are missed. It’s not the end of the world.

Stacking multiple days worth of sessions into a single day typically means you don’t get the desired training benefit from each individual session. Typically athletes under perform in those sessions and often tire themselves out having a knock on effect on upcoming sessions.

Team Oxygenaddict athletes often post their situations in our Facebook group – with the assumption that their recovery day should be scrapped in favour of the missed session. Or that a hard session can be squeezed in somewhere to make up for missing a session.

The advice from me is usually always the same. That is, in terms of the bigger picture of your training goals and plan, there’s no benefit (and often a detriment) to foregoing recovery days or finding a way to fit extra hard sessions in in the short term.

So as well as providing you with a training plan relative to your goals, ability, experience and available time to train, we’re also there to help stop you making bad training decision that can lead to fatigue, overtraining, or injury.

If that sounds like you, why not see how we can help you get the most out your training for the coming season!