[Richard Hazelby]

Good day,

In the last week of transition period, and feeling really good, super fit and strong, noticing massive gains in my endurance, start of the program was struggling with 30 mins of zone 2 (was only in zone 2 for about 10 mins of my first zone 2 session, the rest zone 3), after the first session my cardiovascular and respiratory system adapted pretty quick. Now I am happily breezing through 1:15 of zone 2 and feeling like I can go all day and even cranking out a 7.46-minute mile for the last mile of my last session.

From the start, I haven’t been adding the time of my strength training to my hours of training, I wasn’t going to start adding into the equation until the endurance phase of the base period, due to the nature of endurance training. I have been averaging almost 2000m elevation gain a week, currently sitting at around 13,500m elevation gain since starting the transition period and don’t struggle with the volume at all.

Would you recommend adding the strength training time to my training or wait until I start doing muscular endurance training?

Rich

Topic

[birey]

birey on November 23, 2017 at 11:54 am #6791

Rich,
I struggled with how to count strength training time during my first couple training cycles. When planning this third cycle, I realized that the histograms in TFTNA’s “Planning Your Training” chapter show total training for the week and the proportion of that week that belong to each type of workout, including strength. I think the ratios are working for me because, as uphill athletes, we are all too prone to focusing on mountain time at the expense of arriving rested, strong, and psyched to gym workouts. In short, those ratios have kept me proportionally focused on strength training, which I’m hopeful will pay dividends for a spring peak.

I’d love to hear a Scott or Steve reply to this to see if I’m on track. Thanks for posting.

Birey

[Richard Hazelby]

Richard Hazelby on November 23, 2017 at 12:40 pm #6792

The problem I’ve got is that I had to cut my mountain hours quite a lot for the training program. Even now at 11 hours of training a week (that’s excluding my 4 hours a week of strength training, so 15 hours) I could happily spend 20+ hours in the mountains a week and a lot of time for work I have to do more than that. having such a big base already I found that if I added my strength time then my time in zone 1 just wasn’t enough or if I was spending a lot of time out then adding the strength was just punting my hours up when I was trying to keep them low.

Rich

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on November 24, 2017 at 9:27 am #6802

When planning a progression of training load use the duration/hours of aerobic training because time/distance is a decent proxy for load in the aerobic zones. Time is not such a good proxy for load when it comes to strength training and the strength workouts in our plan do not progress so much in duration.

We count (and suggest others do the same) the strength training into the total volume or training in the week. Just be consistent in how you log your training.

Scott