5 essential workout types to elevate your training for a breakout season

As the winter training season quickly rolls over into spring training, make sure you are including the key type of workouts that will ensure you develop the strength, speed and endurance to take you all the way to an outstanding season. With only so much time to dedicate to training sessions, spending your precious time on the right kind of workouts is critical.

Prioritize hard intervals

Maintaining or improving our VO2max is important for all athlete, but aging athletes need to pay particular attention to these. As we get older, VO2max drops off and the hard truth is the only way to delay or minimize this is by getting your sweat on at least once a week in the pool, on the bike and on the run. These types of intervals involve hard efforts for anywhere from two to five minutes on equal rest. You can build to your VO2max with shorter intervals, such as 30 second repeats, as long as the rest is equal and the number of repetitions is high enough to get your heart rate up into the correct zone 5.

To keep it simple, you can do the same set for all three disciplines. Keep in mind that all your efforts below VO2max are a fraction of that value, so if you raise your VO2max ceiling you also raise your Functional Threshold Power (FTP). This provides another way other than doing FTP sessions to boost your FTP.

Push the power

Hills on the run and bike, and low cadence sets on the indoor bike trainer will build you muscles and help you tackle any terrain. This is another area that is key for again athletes. Like VO2max, muscle mass declines as we age. Similar to doing work in the gym, pushing the power helps maintain strength, minimally, and increase muscle mass if you are new to strength work in the pool, or on the bike and the run.

To add more resistance in the pool add paddles and pull buoys for a strength building boost. If you can’t get out on the hills on your bike, simulate them on your bike trainer by using resistance and low cadence, pedalling between 60 and 70 revolutions per minute (RPM). If you live in a flat area you can also leverage the incline feature on your treadmill and climb to the top of nowhere.

Steady state intervals

Moderately hard intervals are important because they mimic race effort, ranging from tempo and threshold. These are longer intervals anywhere from five to 20 minutes, generally, done is zone 3 to zone 4. Steady state intervals offer a great variety in your training program because you can mix it up with tempo, threshold and race pace, keeping things different every week and varying the stimulus.

It is also valuable to choose the effort that your body is telling you is appropriate on the day, factoring in your current level of fatigue and life stress. This allows you to pivot to a tempo effort from a threshold effort depending on how you without changing the actual workout.

Long rides and race simulations

You’ve likely been doing plenty of zone 2 work over the winter. In order to make space for hard intervals, strength work and moderate efforts you should shift some of your endurance miles into building out a long session in each discipline each week. This typically becomes the long swim, bike or run on the weekend. It can also double as an opportunity to sometimes include a race simulation.

Simulate your race by training on similar terrain demands of your race, race pace and fuelling strategy. That means not all your long sessions are strictly zone 2. It’s ok to throw in some other zone work and hilly terrain or hill repeats from time to time. Make a point to also pepper your week with some shorter endurance sessions to maintain some easy miles in your program.

Before the weeks and months slip by and you find yourself unprepared on the start line of your first race, review your training plan and make the necessary adjustments to get these key session in. Don’t miss the opportunity to put your precious time and effort to the best use. By including these types of sessions you will get the best out of yourself and have your best season yet.