Pillars of Success - Consistency of training

I’d like to share a few concepts of things I’ve found to generate reliable success in endurance sports. Many times we kind of skip over or try to “hack” things. I’d encourage you to think about how you can improve in these areas. I’ll only highlight one at a time, but give it some thought.

One of the things I really value is putting together consistent training with a planned approach and intelligent rest periods.

When we build a “basic week” we start to be able to work around life’s challenges. Knowing that Thursdays, for example, are tough days to do much of anything, maybe we plan for that day to be a rest or easy strength day. While many of us take Mondays easy if we train long on the weekend, if we have weekend commitments maybe Monday is a great day for a key session.

When we train consistently, we increase load and fatigue in an even fashion. The opposite of a ramp is a haphazard jumble of big days and needing to take time off from those big days, hopefully coming out stronger than we started.

With today’s algorithms and metrics, it’s easy to methodically increase volume while getting small fitness increases. It’s also easy to see the patterns of what’s working and what isn’t.

Lastly, I find it’s much more emotionally grounding for endurance athletes to train a system and move every day. 

 A question for you- what percentage of your planned workouts do you complete? And which path has been more successful for you?