Month: June 2024

In the beginning, you and every other athlete start their endurance sports journey with the same step. But by tracking your day-to-day progress via a coach or coaching app such as Humango, you learn what type of endurance athlete you are and what training works most effectively. 

For example, you may find that you have a diesel engine that allows you to go hard for hours throughout a marathon run or 100-mile gravel bike race, but you don’t have a gear that you can use to pull away from the pack at the finish line or on a hill climb. Or, you’ll discover that you have a race car engine with a gear that taps all-out power bursts repeatedly. Then again, your training might reveal that it’s easier to pull off hard workouts in the afternoon or early evening than in the morning or vice versa. No matter what you find, the right coach or coaching app will help you turn your athletic profile into a competitive advantage.

What Is a Competitive Advantage?

In short, anything that maximizes your strengths and optimizes your performance is an advantage. This is where coaches earn their pay. Their experience working with hundreds of athletes lets them tap a deep knowledge base that they apply to your training so you arrive at any race or event primed for peak performance. Consider them a shortcut that bypasses years of hit-or-miss learning you’d have to do on your own. 

Humango’s AI coaching app will do the same, taking your training results and parsing the data daily to determine the right balance of hard intervals, long endurance work, and recovery. At its most granular, Humango helps you figure out the best warm-up protocol before a race. Do you need 10 minutes, or is 20 minutes necessary? You’ll figure out how much rest/sleep you need each night to perform your best the next day. From a mental standpoint, this guidance reduces stress and, more importantly, builds confidence. When you know you did the work to reach your peak form, it’s easier to trust your speed, fitness, and stamina on race day.

Tools To Gain an Advantage

First, get a coach to develop a personalized training plan for you. Next, make sure they can adapt it after every workout so no training session — or recovery period — is wasted. To do this, your coach will need you to track your performance via a coaching app like Humango that accepts data uploads from a GPS watch for running and a bike computer for cycling. At the very least, you should track speed, time, pace, distance, and heart rate. A watch that measures sleep cycles and HRV can help you and your coach determine how much rest you truly need. Cyclists can also add a power meter to their bike to measure the watts produced.

Analyze all these data points, and you’ll soon understand the what, when, and how of your best performance. This information lets you and your coach map out a race day strategy optimized for your physiology and psychology. Then, once you know precisely how to set yourself up for success, you’ll get the chance to enjoy the competitive advantage you have over everyone else.

It’s a fact of basic human biology: To run faster, you must run fast. Obvious, right? Yet so many runners don’t. Instead, you can see them running at a conversational or just above conversational pace around the park or along the greenbelt, happily logging their miles. And that’s great. They’re staying fit and getting outside. But for those runners who want to go faster, it takes hard, intentional effort — a lot of it.

There is a payoff, namely, faster one-mile split times that trickle down through all your running intensities. With speed development, your hard 10k race pace from six months ago can feel like your marathon race pace today. That isn’t to say running fast will ever feel easy. It probably won’t. But when you post a faster time than your previous race, you’ll know it was worth the work. 

Sprint Training Workouts for Running

Speed interval training is how you build speed. Start with short sprints lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. The number of intervals depends on your fitness and your goal (10k, marathon, or a sub-5-minute mile). An experienced coach or an intelligent AI-powered coaching app like Humango will prescribe a set of intervals based on these criteria. Expect to be pushed hard but not so hard that you risk injury or overwork. Even more importantly, a coach will carefully manage your speed training workouts, allowing you plenty of time to recover.

In these sessions, expect to run hard and fast. In doing so, you should start to run more efficiently and effectively by building your aerobic capacity and neuromuscular coordination. Instead of taking long, loping strides as you might during a run at a conversational pace, speed work forces you to focus on a more forceful push-off to propel you forward. This will, in turn, increase your turnover rate and have you running at a higher cadence. During sprints, your arm swing will also become better integrated with your stride as you consciously swing your arms faster to force your feet to turn over faster. Through practice, these positive adaptations will make you a faster runner.

Training for Speed in the Gym

Power is a critical component of speed, and power comes from muscle. Think about the optimal body type of a 100-meter dash competitor. She’s all muscle because she needs that power to a) turn over her feet as fast as possible and b) maximize the forward propulsion of every step. The same holds for an elite marathoner turning over 5-6 minute miles for 26.2 miles. It takes muscle power to keep that up mile after mile. 

For many runners, time spent in the gym is an anathema. It shouldn’t be. Strength training can be a cheat code to build speed quickly, as resistance work can exhaust muscles in seconds versus several minutes or hours on a track or trail. Squats, broad jumps, hill sprints, and even sprinting in a pool are all practical power-building exercises for runners. Rather than dreading strength-focused workouts, embrace them. They will pay off on those long runs by allowing you to maintain higher paces longer.

A well-designed speed training program balanced with sprint intervals, strength training sessions, and longer recovery runs will literally kick your running into a higher gear. Do the hard work and see for yourself.

Of all the legs in triathlon, the open water swim leg is likely the least practiced element in any triathlete’s training. Compared to a pool, open water swimming presents a unique set of challenges. Finding a safe body of water to swim in, finding someone to swim with for safety’s sake, and acquiring a wetsuit that fits — these are just some of the reasons few triathletes practice swimming in open water. In fact, it’s not uncommon for novice triathletes to experience their first open water swim at a race. For many, it’s a rude introduction to the sport. 

But these difficulties also provide a fantastic opportunity for a triathlete to leapfrog the competition by becoming a strong, confident, and efficient open water swimmer. Doing so will propel you into the bike leg faster, fresher, and less frazzled than many of your fellow competitors. Below is a quick guide to preparing for and mastering your open water swims.

With Humango’s AI coaching app, open water swimming is easily integrated into a triathlete’s training plan. The AI-powered coach can schedule it into a training block and automatically accommodate the extra endurance needed to finish an open water workout compared to a pool workout. And depending on the results of that first swim, Humango can adjust the distance and intensity of the next one. But as with any training plan, the secret lies in getting started. 

Start Open Water Swim Training in the Pool

Due to variable conditions (chop, wind, swell, cold, difficult sighting, etc.), open water swimming may take twice as much energy as pool swimming. So, even though 3,000 meters in a pool may be no problem, you might only cover 1,500 meters in a lake — or less in the ocean — with the same effort. To prepare your body for that extra effort, try this: Don’t touch the wall on your turns at the end of each lap. Instead, do a flip turn at the “T” at the end of the lane line. You won’t have the benefit of the push-off from the wall to propel you in the other direction. 

Focus on shorter strokes and a higher stroke rate to better handle chop, swells, other swimmers, and quick direction changes. To help you get there, try tying your feet together with a band or swim buoy, which should naturally force a higher turnover. Another drill is to swim with your head up and eyes out of the water like a water polo player every other length or so. This small change will also shorten your swim stroke and raise your stroke rate as you use your arms to keep your head elevated.

Once you’re comfortable with swimming with your eyes out of the water, practice sighting. On every third or fourth stroke, lift your eyes out of the water to find a mark on the pool deck ahead of you. Don’t just glance at it; take the time to truly focus on the mark before you put your head in the water again. Sighting is one of the most important aspects of open water swimming. Getting it wrong will have you swimming off-course and wasting energy and time in the water.

Finally, learn to breathe bilaterally, that is, on either side of your body. This technique pays massive dividends in open water when facing cross-current swells, chop, and wind. By breathing away from them, you reduce the chances of swallowing water.

5 Tips for Swimming in Open Water

For many swimmers, open water swimming is more of a mental than a physical challenge. The currents, the cold water, the thrashing of a hundred competitors, and the distance make it difficult to find the rhythm and relative ease of a pool swim. Knowing this, make those first open water swim workouts more about skills and confidence than fitness. Below are the key elements to owning the swim leg in a triathlon.

1. Dial in your wetsuit.
   Wetsuits come in all shapes and sizes, and you want to find one that allows a full range of motion in your shoulders. Start by making sure you have it on correctly. Many swimmers who are new to open water don’t pull their wetsuits high enough; this creates a down pull through the shoulders, limits movement, and adds restriction to the neck area. After you ensure you’re wearing it correctly, use your first swim in a wetsuit to see if it feels right. Try a different wetsuit if it feels like you’re fighting the wetsuit after roughly 50 strokes. 
2. Find the perfect goggles.
   We mentioned how critical sighting is to a successful swim leg. To sight well, you need a high-quality pair of swim goggles that won’t fog up or leak. Try different ones until you find the pair that stays tight. And if they get scratched, get a new pair. You need perfect vision in a triathlon to stay on course.
3. Swim with a group.
   Stay safe and join an open water swim club for some practices. You can also find a swim buddy or enlist a family member or friend to paddleboard or kayak alongside you as you swim. The club can help you identify landmarks to sight so you stay out of the way of boats and traffic. They may even put out a buoyed course for you to follow with known distances so you can better manage your workload. A supporter on a paddleboard or kayak is much easier for boats to see, and they can offer a respite if fatigue sets in sooner than expected.
4. Practice your sighting and feel for the water.
   Take what you practiced in the pool to the lake or ocean. Then add this element: Sight a landmark or buoy, take 20 strokes with your eyes closed, and see where you end up. Did the current or your stroke take you off-course? If so, note it and correct your course accordingly. You may have to find a new landmark to focus on. For example, instead of keeping the buoy straight in front of you, you may need to keep it to the left of your line of sight, knowing the current will push you back on course. Once you make a turn, do it again and correct your course as needed.
5. Make it a workout.
   You need to swim strong in open water, but you don’t need to do it all at once. As you get comfortable with the water, break those hard, fast strokes into 50-stroke intervals. Go hard for 50, then easy for 50, and so on, working your way up to gradually swimming the workout as directed by your coach or training plan. 
6. Make it a workout.
   You need to swim strong in open water, but you don’t need to do it all at once. As you get comfortable with the water, break those hard, fast strokes into 50-stroke intervals. Go hard for 50, then easy for 50, and so on, working your way up to gradually swimming the workout as directed by your coach or training plan. 

If you’re training for your first or fifteenth triathlon, bike ride, or running race, guess what? You’re playing a game. In this game, the winner (that’s you) takes home the satisfaction of personal records. It could be that you ran your fastest marathon, rode your bike farther than ever, or finished your first Ironman triathlon. Your goal was the object of the game. And the various training sessions you completed were the levels you had to beat to finish that game.

In decades past, turning training into a game was limited mostly to training teams and clubs. Members could push each other with every workout with mini-games like racing to the next stop sign on a run or ride. The group dynamic pushed athletes harder than they would have pushed otherwise. However, with the advent of wearable fitness trackers such as GPS watches, heart rate monitors, and power meters (for cyclists), this training gamification expanded to solo athletes around the world. 

This flood of trackable performance data could now be uploaded to training and fitness apps, and with it, a new generation of gamification ideas for training. Not only was training more fun, it was also more effective. A 2019 study by University of Pennsylvania behavioral scientist Dr. Mitesh Patel found that by making a game out of walking for fitness, with points and virtual awards for completing various challenges or competitions, participants clocked close to 100 more miles over six months than those who were simply told to walk every day. The gamers weren’t told or asked to walk more. They just did, thanks to the gamification built into the program.

How To Turn Your Training Into a Better Game

The first step is easy: Set a goal. The second step is to find a training plan to guide you to success. Next, you’ll need to track your progress with a GPS watch, heart rate monitor, and power meter (if available) and upload it to an app that lets you see your progress. Humango’s AI-powered app does both. It takes your goal, turns it into a training program, then logs your progress via an easy-to-follow dashboard.

Once you set your objective, figure out what type of gamification environment you thrive in. Patel’s study above noted that fitness gamification participants fall into three general types: competitors, supporters, or collaborators. 

Competitors compete against others in their workouts, comparing efforts, totals, and pace splits from their workouts. Some even compete in virtual races and challenges through training apps such as Zwift or even Peloton. It even takes the form of virtual awards, badges, and digital pats on the back. The drive to get those accolades quickly is what gamification is all about. 

Supporters are the equivalent of teams or clubs — or, in the case of Humango, a global social network. As members work through their training programs, they can support their fellow members through in-app training groups. These groups feature leaderboards and comment sections for added motivation and encouragement. Perfect for clubs, coaching organizations, teams, and individuals, this feature is designed to make members feel connected to a group and, therefore, less likely to drop out.

Collaborators are those friends and family who commit to doing something together. It could be a group of bike-riding friends who want to log 10,000 total miles in one summer. Each member’s weekly mileage contribution will differ, but the group goal inspires people to do their part to reach it. And because they don’t want to let their teammates down, they stick with their training.

So, which type of fitness game works best? Patel’s study found that competition-based gamification produces the biggest gains in fitness and overall activity. But gamification of any sort can still be effective in helping endurance athletes stick with their training, reach for higher goals, and, best of all, achieve them. 

So, whatever your athletic goals may be, make them a game and start playing!