Triathlon Training: Six Sessions Per Week – Is That Enough?
I had a good question this week which I thought worth sharing. An athlete is training for an Ironman, and currently has time in her busy life to do 6 sessions – 2 per discipline (plus one strength session). The questions was at what point should she try and increase the volume of sessions to get to the ‘magical’ 3 sessions per discipline per week.
Good Question!
I thought this was a really good question, involving thoughts about session frequency, session duration and session intensity. My answer to her …
“Most of your ‘Ironman volume’ will be built through the existing endurance sessions.
The long ride, run and swim will all get progressively longer. This is where we will build the aerobic engine to enable you to complete the distances.
The intensity sessions will change. Instead of really short, hard intervals, these will get longer – so you will be doing sets of 10 or 20 minute intervals. These will be slower than your 1 and 2 minute intervals that you’re doing currently, but well above race pace. Most of these sessions will stay within the hour – maybe going a little over. These sessions will help you build the necessary speed and strength to race quickly.
So, these six sessions (the endurance and the intensity sessions) will form the bulk of your fitness preparations.
Any additional sessions will usually be recovery type sessions – keep things ticking over, help flush out aches, focus on technique, that sort of thing. We may introduce these as the months progress.
At this stage, there is plenty more to do within the existing session structure. That is unless you have spare time and want to do some short, EASY sessions? In that case, we would add one session at a time. A third run session, then a third swim session, then another bike session.”
One Size Does Not Fit All
Within the answer above there is obviously a lot of detail missing. This is not a one size fits all answer.
The third session per discipline is obviously valuable. It will help fitness, technique, strength, recovery. However, it will only do that if the rest of the training remains manageable and the athlete has the necessary time to fit in these sessions. If we try to shoehorn these sessions in to a busy life that doesn’t really have the time, we potentially compromise the other sessions. It is better to do those six sessions as intended, consistently, than squeeze in others.
More is not always more.
I have a blog post somewhere about my training leading up to my fastest ever Ironman. It was actually based on roughly six sessions per week, lots of recovery, good execution of sessions. Quality over quantity.
There is another post that could be written here about the hierarchy of training sessions in any given week or training cycle, which ones to prioritise, which ones are more important than others. Perhaps that’s for another day.
If you have any thoughts about this subject, or want some input into your training week, please get in touch.
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