other physical activity | Uphill Athlete

other physical activity

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  • #58755
    Richard Draves
    Participant

    How will my other physical activity fit with training? For example, I usually play tennis 3-5x/week, I wake-surf several times a week (well less frequently in winter), I expect to ski 40+ days this coming season (some mix of lift and BC), I enjoy skate skiing, the occasional gym climbing session, etc.

  • Moderator
    MarkPostle on #58758

    This is question we deal with a fair amount. It depends on a few factors, primarily, How hard is the activity aerobically, how far from your goal climb are you and what is your recovery capacity? Things like hard tennis playing, ski touring, and skate skiing for most folks have a pretty high aerobic demand and should be counted as “training” and incorporated into the program for the most part. I wear a HR monitor while doing them and log them into TP. Things like technical climbing (gym or outdoors) I do not log as aerobic training but I do think about if they conflict with strength training workouts. Usually its not a big issue. One of the main principles to think about with regards to a lot of these activities is how sport specific are they. You want the training to evolve to be more sport specific as the goal nears. Spending a bunch of time and energy lift skiing 8 months out from a goal is probably not an issue, if you’re 8 weeks out then you’ll likely want to spend some of that time hiking uphill with a pack on.

    Moderator
    krish on #58762

    Related to this question…most of my activity has been almost daily treadmill running at a volume that’s higher than the basic plan. (1) Should I stop and replace those with the plan on aerobic days, and, (2) is it ok to add some running to the strength days?

    Participant
    mattmay3s on #58781

    One of my loves is weight lifting – just coming off a strength block now. Always have to reduce it as I ramp up for a mountain. DOMS and long runs aren’t good buddies for me.

    Moderator
    MarkPostle on #58782

    Krish, As long as your recovering from the training it is OK to add some running to the strength days. I always have folks keep it low intensity and start with fairly short sessions like 20-30 minutes then build from there.

    Participant
    Edgar Carby on #58804

    I’m sure this will be covered on another call, but I have a similar question.

    My Denali climb is June 2022. I’m coming off a successful 10/2/21 50k trail race with ~6k of vert that I’m now fully recovered from. My current CTL is 76. I have 2 50k trail races between now and the end of this training block that I have been training for. One with about 3500 ft of vert, the other with around 5k ft of vert.

    I will aim to be around 85-90 CTL for the second race 10 weeks from now (Jan 22). The first race I am treating as a training run to do the whole thing at or below AeT, ie, lots of hiking. The second race is harder so I may have to push a bit but my goal is to simply finish feeling good.

    I feel like the training for these (LSD running, power hiking on hills, core/strength sessions and yoga) will dovetail nicely with the principles of the UA plan but I will need to add volume to keep my fitness up for the races.

    If I keep the ramp rate low, is it a problem to add volume? 10-15 CTL over 10 weeks is not demanding.

    Moderator
    MarkPostle on #58805

    Edgar- Given your training history, approach and timeline I don’t see any issue with your plan. If your CTL is in the 85-90 range and you recover well from the race you should be able to do a nice sport specific build cycle Feb-May and be right where you need to be for Denali.

    Participant
    Edgar Carby on #58807

    Fantastic. Thanks for the quick response.

    Participant
    DJW on #58911

    Yet another similar ask here, this one related to training load relative to work related load.

    I am a part time climbing guide/ski instructor in Big Sky, some in Sierras, and on S&R.

    Work related training load:
    – Lift served days will (hopefully) approach 100;
    – skin days, of varying intensity, 3-5/month;
    – climb/mountaineering, of varying intensity, days 3-5/month (first more challenging day was yesterday, 06 NOV 21).

    I have a fairly long TP training history, and some use of Uphill Athlete modules for climbs in PNW, Sierras, Europe and Nepal, and do something active an hour+ most days/week for years.

    Specific ASK:
    – my past methodology was to log everything, be attentive to how I feel (I journal daily) and rest as needed.
    – is there another approach you would recommend, e.g. not logging everything or other, you can recommend.

    Advise when able and thank you.
    Onward,
    Don

    Moderator
    MarkPostle on #58950

    Don, If you have a history with TP I always recommend to keep the same methodologies going forward to allow and apples to apples comparison to past seasons, I think this is the most important thing. That said its important to understand if your comparing your CTL score to others (always dangerous ?) or to some theoretical gold standard (I.e. CTL of 100 for Denali) that if you log lift service skiing, yoga, hangboarding, dog walking and leaf raking that your CTL will be a bigger number than another athlete who only logs more sport specific training. My personal method is to only log aerobic work that gets me into a minimum of Z1 and also my Strength work. I add notes of additional training related things that I want to keep track of (so everything is housed in one place) but don’t give them a TSS. Hope that helps.

    Participant
    DJW on #58967

    Well received and understood. I’ve decided that, this season, I’ll monitor all activities but log only those that more qualify as TP/UHA training. Thank you. Onward, Don

    Participant
    Jeff Jacobs on #58970

    Good morning–where can I find the training regimen for both the basic and advanced plans?

    Thanks,

    jeff

    Participant
    Nate Emerson on #58971

    Hi Jeff,
    I sent you an email and a link to the form that has the plan descriptions.
    Thanks!
    Nate

    Participant
    Eicke Hecht on #59022

    Hey what’s about commuting by bike almost every workday. That means for me about 2*10k biking in the city so not really fast.

    Participant
    Anna Hern on #59064

    Speaking of other workouts/activites…I swim a lot in addition to the run/hike/yoga activities of mountaineering. I know y’all do not recommend swimming for training but I have runner’s ischemic colitis and have found that I can swim hard/long and have no health issues associated with swimming. In fact I climbed Rainier successfully last summer with about 95% of my training as long swims. Not ideal and hoping to do much more running leading up to my next climb, but I have to protect my overall health first. I do plan to use swimming for recovery workouts, etc throughout this training plan. I began reading up on the sTSS score training peak uses specifically for swimming, however, even my hard swims are coming up with extremely low sTSS values. I am wondering if something isn’t recording correctly. Also, are these low sTSS values making my CTL lower than it actually is? I feel like I have a much higher level of fitness than training peaks is giving me credit for. I’ve never been a metrics person in terms of training (minus hours/week or mileage/yardage) so I’m just trying to gauge what everything means and if I’m kidding myself about my level of fitness and what that means for my next climb.
    Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance,
    Anna

    Moderator
    MarkPostle on #59077

    Anna- Good questions. I’m glad that swimming has been a good work around with your ischemic colitis. We don’t have anything against swimming (I went swimming yesterday :)) its just one of many activities that don’t look much like mountaineering and all things being equal arent as good for preparing. In the real world all things are not equal and we need to make compromises. As you mentioned I would explore how much footbourne training you can interject without causing issues. I would also explore hilly hiking over running and see if that helps. (If your footbourne volume if limited hilly hiking with a bit of pack weight is the most sport specific) Bike and rowing might be of use as well. Not sure what your current strength training program looks like but the addition of things like weighted box steps may also help you. As for the swimming TSS its a bit hard since swimming is so non impact they don’t generate a high TSS number since they don’t have a high training stress (recovery demand) thus I think those numbers are fairly accurate. With my 1 on 1 coached athletes I convert all aerobic training to the hrTSS as I find this allows more apples to apples comparisons but I don’t have any athletes that are doing more than say 20% of their volume swimming. You might try the hrTSS as well and see if you like the results. (Assuming youre monitoring your HR in the pool) We also commonly have folks do a larger volume of training (by time) if its non impact so you’ll want to consider longer sessions which will helps the TSS score. As with all athletes we like to move from general to specific with training so within your limitations I would make an extra effort to do some sport specific work in the last months/weeks before your goal.

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