Month: May 2024

For everyone who finishes a big triathlon, marathon, or 100-mile bike ride, completing it is a momentous occasion. If you gave it your all, you’ll probably want to lie down (and maybe cry). Don’t. There’s a proven strategy for recovering from a strenuous endurance event, and it starts as soon as you cross that line. Do it right, and you’ll feel fresher faster. Plus, you should be able to maintain your level of fitness. Consider it the last 5% of your training program, the critical step that locks in those gains made over the previous months of workouts, sweat, and soreness.

The First Week After Your Race

Hydrate
You need to replace all the fluids and electrolytes you lost during your event within the first several hours of your finish. Keep sipping fluids and eating fruits and vegetables (with their high water content) until your urine is clear. Then, continue hydrating with intent for the next three days. Three days is how long muscle recovery can take. 

Eat Right
This week isn’t the time to gorge on all the foods (and alcohol) you avoided during your training. Your body needs you to keep up your training diet so it has the essential fuel to repair muscle strain, replenish vitamins and minerals, and get back to normal. Plenty of lean proteins are a must during this period, and healthy fats (olive oil, avocado, seeds and nuts, salmon and oily fish) are welcome, too, as they pack a lot of calories per serving.

Sleep
Sleep, especially the night after your race, will likely prove difficult. The tingling from your inflamed joints and muscle soreness will make deep, restorative sleep a dream. But, try anyway. Give yourself at least an hour to prepare for sleep this week. Turn off the TV and put your phone away. Do some light stretches and then focus on your breathing. Take deep breaths in and out, and be conscious of each breath you take. This should relax your muscles — and brain — and better prepare you to fall asleep. Last, schedule a good 7-9 hours of sleep each night. You know how much sleep you need to wake up rested. Listen to your body and get it.

Stay Active
Active recovery starts right after the finish line. Keep moving for 30 minutes to calm your body after the physical effort and the adrenaline rush of finishing. Walking is all you need to do. The one exception is if you’re dealing with a musculoskeletal injury that makes moving painful. If you’re injury-free, keep moving via light activity over the week. Walk the dog, take a light hike, go for easy swims or bike rides. This isn’t a workout, though. Keep the intensity to a pace that lets you breathe through your nose. The idea is to lubricate your joints and get your heart pumping blood through your muscles to accelerate their recovery.

How light is “lightly active”? When ultrarunner and author Dean Karnazes ran 50 marathons in 50 U.S. states in 50 days throughout the fall of 2006, his active recovery involved standing in his RV for an hour or so as it traveled to the next state. Using his legs to stabilize his body in a moving vehicle provided enough no-impact muscle stimulation to boost his recovery and help him sleep that night.

Skip the Big Projects
Just because you’re no longer training 10-15 hours a week doesn’t mean you can now paint your kitchen, redo your yard, or build that deck off the back door. Your body and mind aren’t ready to tackle these projects. Save them for the week after, at least.

What Now?

After your first recovery week, it’s the perfect time to reflect — and look forward. If you’ve had a great race or event, it’s natural to start thinking about your next one. After all, you accomplished something epic, and the endorphins and fatigued delirium feel amazing. It’s these moments where a human coach or even Humango’s AI-powered coach, Hugo, can be the voice of reason, encouraging your continued progression as an athlete but doing so on a realistic timeline unique to your goals, timeline, and fitness.

The post-race lull in training can be a psychological and physical minefield, where an athlete could do too little or too much and sabotage their growth in both cases. Do too little, and you risk losing all that hard-won fitness, strength, and stamina. You’ll start training for your next goal several steps behind where you could be. Doing too much, too fast before your body is ready for it could send you into burnout, or worse, an overuse injury. A coach, referencing your training data, even your sleep data, will slowly guide you back into form over a few weeks (or months, if desired), prescribing a program that maintains your newfound stamina and strength during this period between training seasons and then builds on it once you’re ready to go.

Unless you ran track or swam in high school or college, you likely picked up your sport with no outside group to show you how it’s done. And there’s a good chance you still practice it on your own. You log miles and miles on your bike, in your running shoes, or at your local pool. But an elite endurance athlete does it differently. They join a team or a club, working through prescribed workouts with a community of like-minded athletes. And it pays off. 

A 2008 study of elite rowers found that the team aspect quantifiably pushed them to a higher level of performance. At a primal level, this makes perfect sense. Humans are social animals, and we like to be around others who share our interests and passions. As a result, the group dynamic provides daily training motivation. Below are several more ways a group can boost your training.

Inspiration
Inspiration comes from many sources. In a community, it’s easy to spot. It could be the 70-year-old who still runs marathons and does the same workouts you do. It could be the cancer survivor who hates that day’s workout as much as you do but does it anyway. Maybe you’re the inspiration, and knowing this pushes you to train harder to live up to your fellow athlete’s vision of you.

Support
We all have days when you don’t want to exercise. Days when you can’t due to an unexpected event or unplanned surprise. Days when an injury puts you out of commission. It’s easy to feel alone and left out on these days. But these are the times when the support network of your endurance family kicks in and encourages you not to give up, not to give in, and not to worry. As a result, you’re more likely to stick with your sport, no matter what life throws at you.

New Perspectives
When you train on your own, it’s easy to stick with what works month after month, year after year. But within a community, you see all different sorts and shapes of people achieving their goals differently than you are. They may train harder but less than you. They may be driven to perfect their swimming strokes rather than exhaust themselves to build stamina. Whatever the case, you’ll learn new ways to approach your sport, and that will keep it fresh and interesting for years to come.

Coaching
Often, an organized group will have certified, experienced coaching available to design group workouts, build individual training programs, and, for competitive teams, create race strategies for both the team and for individuals. At its most basic, this coaching could be a certified fitness instructor leading a strength training session or spin class.

The Easy Way To Find a Community of Like-Minded Athletes

There are a variety of ways to join a community. You can join a gym and attend a regular class or workout. Or you can join a local track club, cycling group, or triathlon team. You can also join an online community like the one hosted by Humango. Whichever method you choose, you’ll connect with other athletes who are also training for your specific goal (marathon, Olympic-distance triathlon, or gran fondo bike ride, for example). Once connected, you can share training tips, workouts, and results with each other — and in many cases, you’ll even get to train together.

Humango’s AI coaching will guide you through a progressive training plan for your endurance sport of choice, but its community function will provide the glue to keep you motivated, supported, and inspired. The Humango community draws athletes from around the world and gives them the opportunity to join various forums, i.e., Masters marathoners, gravel bikers, and Ironman-distance triathletes. You can join group challenges, meet training partners from your town, and ask the group for tips on getting the most out of the Humango app. You can even find mentors who can guide you through, say, your first New York City Marathon since they finished it multiple times before. Humango’s global reach means that no matter where your athletic goals take you, someone in the community can be there to give you the friendly push you need. 

Humango isn’t just AI. It’s real people, too.

We all need motivation to accomplish our endurance sports goals. Heck, we need motivation to wake up each morning. And what is the most effective method to motivate yourself or anyone else to excel? Positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement, whether it’s an internalized fear of failure or a coach or teammate denigrating or punishing you for not measuring up, is ultimately unproductive. So, where can you find positive reinforcement? Outside of a race result, workout data is the most direct and immediate source of positive motivation available.

Before we go further, let’s review a motivation primer. Motivation or positive reinforcement examples fall into two categories: intrinsic and extrinsic. For many athletes, extrinsic motivation is the desire to win or beat someone in a competition. But it also includes that sense of excitement a novice triathlete feels when they sign up for their first Ironman race or runner experiences when they register for their first marathon. Visualizing the finisher’s medal at a goal race serves as a powerful motivator to do the work needed to physically cross that finish line. Even comparing your workout against others on online communities such as Strava qualifies. Athletes new to a sport and unsure of their capabilities can use these extrinsic motivators to jump-start their endurance careers.

Intrinsic motivation is personal. It’s the desire to improve technique, build more power, develop more stamina, and consistently get faster. It builds confidence. Intrinsic motivation is also more sustainable. (Think of the decades people put into improving their golf game.) It’s also the hallmark of the most successful athletes, which makes sense. When the drive to succeed comes from within, they never run out of motivation to keep working on their sport.

Over time, athletes will draw on both types of positive reinforcement to stay motivated. That first-time marathoner may now set their sights on qualifying for the Boston Marathon (extrinsic) and decide to invest in training to make their running stride as efficient as possible (intrinsic). The same goes for a triathlete who spends more time streamlining their swimming stroke in preparation for their next competition instead of doing high-intensity running workouts on the track.

So, how does Humango fit into the extrinsic or intrinsic equation? First, it asks you to set a goal event to train for (extrinsic). Then Hugo, your digital coach, builds your training program and sets you on your way. As part of any progressive endurance sports training program, you’ll have training zones to stick to and target heart rates, powerwatts (if on a bike), and running paces to hit. When you collect all this data and upload it to Humango, you’ll immediately receive positive feedback in the form of a quantifiable improvement in fitness and cardiovascular stamina. 

The data will turn into a positive reinforcement loop as your speed, strength, and endurance improve. The data proves it. And more than likely, you can feel it.

 Leverage Your Data To Achieve Better Results

Use the following tips to tune your intrinsic motivation and become your best positive reinforcer.

• Go into each workout with intent, knowing what you want to accomplish. It’s easy to just show up and do the work. It’s more productive to understand what and why you’re doing it. If you have a hard day of intervals, know they’ll be hard. Know that the last interval’s work is more important than the first. Understand that a multi-hour bike ride is not only building endurance, it’s also providing a vital opportunity to learn and tune your hydration and re-fueling needs.
• Get specific and concentrate on a small part of your workout instead of trying to make everything perfect. Try to hold a higher cadence on the bike when climbing. Same with your turnover on your runs. Or you can work on pacing your intervals better so you finish them faster and harder than you started them. These are small victories that a) keep you focused and b) keep you motivated.
• Learn from your failures. Did you blow up during your speed work at the track? Look at your data to see where, why, and how to prevent it from happening again. Did you get blown off the back of the pack on a group ride? Learn from it. See each setback as an opportunity to become smarter about yourself as an athlete.
• Trust and believe in your progress. There will be days and weeks when you feel weak and slow. Fortunately, the data will be there to prove you wrong. Use it to reset your perspective and carry on.

Injury prevention never ranks high on an athlete’s reasons for choosing a training program, but it should. Left to our own devices, we humans easily fall into the trap of jumping into an endurance sport by going too fast, too far, and too often, only to succumb to a tweaked shoulder, stress fracture, or preventable illness. At the same time, training plans aren’t without their problems. If they’re too ambitious, they can lead to an overuse injury, burnout, and a weakened immune system, all of which will put an end to your training. Conversely, a good, progressive, periodized training program for running, cycling, triathlon, or swimming — any endurance sport, really — will have an injury and illness prevention program or aspect built into it. If a coach creates a program specific to your unique goals, current fitness level, and experience, you’re even further ahead.

A coach, whether human or Hugo (Humango’s digital coach), will design workouts that ask you to work as hard as your training data shows you can. Sure, these workouts will push you harder than you think you can go. However, the volume of work prescribed will be within your ability to do it. All you have to do is maintain good form, technique, and control — three elements that will help prevent injury — and you should see a positive fitness effect. Additionally, your recovery from these harder efforts will be customized to you. Taken together, a bespoke training plan and personalized recovery plan will mitigate the chances of burnout or overuse injuries.

That said, life never goes according to plan. A night of poor sleep or a stressful family or work situation can throw you off your game and training plan. So, how does a coach know when to dial back the intensity or volume to keep you off of injured reserve? They’ll monitor your feedback (“How do you feel?”) and look for signs of mental fatigue or frustration. They — or it, in the case of Humango — will also monitor your workout data, specifically the correlation between perceived exertion and heart rate while also assessing whether you could complete the workout goals for the day. If not, the coach will assign you an easy day or two to recover. They may even prescribe a cross-training day of yoga or strength training to give your body a break from doing your sport on consecutive days.

In the end, the best way to stay injury- and illness-free is to stick with your training plan and always share your workout data with your coach after each session so they can see how you’re doing in real time. Below, we’ve spelled out several ways a well-designed endurance training program can keep you on your feet, in the saddle, or in the water day in and day out.

6 Tips To Avoid Injury in Any Sport

1. Start every workout with a full-body, dynamic/range-of-motion warm-up to get blood flowing and lubricate your joints and muscles. Then, go easy for the first 10-20 minutes of any cardio workout. You want to feel comfortable, smooth, and in rhythm by the end of your warm-up. At the end of every workout, take equal time to cool down. A proper cool down will kickstart the recovery process and set your body up for the next workout.
2. Stick to your workout. When it tells you to take it easy, TAKE IT EASY. When it says run or ride at a moderate pace, stick to the pace. Don’t sweat it if an easy or moderate workout feels too easy. It’s supposed to. If a hard workout feels easy, your coach will adjust your next hard workout accordingly.
3. Incorporate strength training into your plan. Humango’s coaching app and good human coaches will include strength workouts in your program. They may strike you as a waste of time, but weight lifting and core-strength workouts are your body’s insurance policies against injury. They shore up joints and supporting muscles that your sport of choice fails to engage, which can reduce the chances of torn muscles or ligaments.
4. Switch up your goal events throughout the year. Training for a 15k mountain trail running race is different from training for a big-city marathon. The same is true for a 40k cycling time trial vs. a 100-mile gran fondo race. Different events tap different energy systems in the body; they also reduce boredom and the chances of burnout. Mixing it up is one of the keys to becoming a more resilient athlete.
5. Sleep longer. As an endurance athlete, you need more sleep than the average sedentary person. Make sleep a priority, and if you can swing it, embrace the power of an afternoon nap. 
6. Eat well and eat enough. You need fuel — a lot of it — to complete your training each day. Don’t skimp on it. A lack of energy will lead to fatigue, poor results, and a weakened immune system, which could leave you susceptible to a virus, cold, or other ailment. The same goes for hydration. Give your body the nourishment it needs, and it will adapt to accomplish whatever you ask of it.