In winter, the daylight hours are short, and the weather is often challenging to train in. This means that, for a lot of people, training time is limited and often requires that extra bit of motivation.
As such, a lot of athletes find themselves asking the question of how to make the most of their winter training time. With time at a premium, it’s important that you make every session count.
With over six months to go to race day, you’re in a great position to make significant fitness gains during the winter months, as long as you plan the use of your time effectively.
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Winter Training Overview
The best training approach over winter is the one that will give you the biggest overall improvement in your performance come race day.
For triathletes racing either Half Outlaw or the Full Outlaw distance, the bike leg will make up over half of your total event time come race day.
This means that, in terms of effort invested to improve your fitness, the biggest ‘bang for your buck’ that you can get in training is going to be improving your bike fitness.
This fits with the time of year perfectly, as the relatively short, high intensity bike sessions are best completed indoors on a turbo trainer.
This bike training focus has the added benefit that the cardiovascular fitness that you develop will also significantly help improve your run fitness, meaning that you don’t also need to do hard run intervals. That has the added bonus of vastly reducing injury risk. Swim training over winter will be heavily focused on improving your stroke mechanics and technique.
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If you’d like to chat with us about winter training with Team Oxygenaddict, schedule a call here
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Winter Bike Training
The ‘traditional’ approach to winter training is that of building your base fitness through riding lots of long, slow miles.
If you have the time (and weather) to do that, it’s still a valid training method. However, most age-group triathletes and are busy balancing work life, family life, and training. The shorter, colder days naturally mean less time realistically available to train in any given session, and makes riding in daylight a real challenge through the work week for most triathletes.
The winter focus that reaps the biggest rewards come race season is increasing your Functional Threshold Power (FTP) on the bike.
By increasing your FTP over winter, when you transition to more riding outdoors in the spring, you’ll be able to ride faster for the same effort.
This will translate into significant speed increases, for the same relative effort, over any race distance. It might mean that you have to look for new training partners though!
The good news is that it’s relatively simple to increase your FTP – focused intervals on the turbo trainer at the correct intensity are proven to do that. The bad news is that it’s not easy!
You have to be prepared to spend your winter doing some hard work. But, as long as you’re prepared to work hard and commit to some intense indoor sessions, you’ll reap the rewards and can start seeing a noticeable difference in as little as four weeks.
We’ve seen typical results of athletes getting an increase of on average 8-10% in FTP over an 8 week block, so it’s possible to end the winter in SIGNIFICANTLY better bike shape than you started it!
An example of a really good main set to improve your FTP is:
- Warm up for around 10 minutes
- Complete a main set of 6 x 5 minute intervals, at 100% of your functional threshold power (FTP) or heart rate (FT-Hr), with a minute recovery after each interval.
- Cool down for 10 minutes
You can get full details of how to calculate FTP and FT-Hr here
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Winter Run Training
It’s tempting to assume that in order to improve your running over winter, you need to be going hard and doing lots of tempo and interval sets.
However, your winter bike training is focused on building your functional threshold power, and you can only train hard a limited number of times in a week.
This means that, in order for your run training to compliment your bike training, it makes sense for running to be at an easy or steady pace.
Running slower than you are used to is still really effective at building run durability – the ability of your body to absorb run training without picking up soreness, niggles or injuries.
Easy running will help develop your running biomechanics and strengthen your ligaments, tendons and run-specific muscles. Athletes who take this approach often find they get a really consistent winter of run training in the bank – with few or no sessions lost to niggles and injury.
That run durability, when combined with the high levels of cardiovascular fitness gained from bike interval sessions, means it’s common for athletes to set personal bests in run races in the spring – despite them having done no ‘fast’ running all winter!
Calculate your run pace zones with our calculator here
Use the run pace calculator to find your E-pace, and try your next steady run at that pace. You’ll be surprised how much easier you can run and still get massive performance increases as part of a structured plan!
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Winter Swim Training
The most effective use of your pool time is going to be to improve your stroke mechanics and technique during winter.
Aim to build fitness as a byproduct of practicing perfect technique, rather than swimming hard intervals. In swimming, practice DOESN’T make perfect – practice makes permanent.
Only perfect practice makes perfect.
With that in mind, if you know that you have stroke flaws (which even the most accomplished swimmers do), it makes most sense to spend your swimming time improving your technique, rather than swimming hard intervals that will just embed your current stroke flaws into your muscle memory.
Time invested in improving stroke flaws will mean that you can then use your fitness to apply force to the water more effectively, moving faster through the water for less effort.
Sessions focused on practicing specific drills, and then swimming with mindful intent to hold good form, will see you make big improvements over the winter.
Then, as race day gets closer, you can focus more on improving your swim fitness and endurance with your new, more effective stroke.
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If this article has resonated with you and you’d like to find out more about winter training with Team Oxygenaddict schedule a call here.
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