I had a dream last night that I was on the Family Feud with Richard Dawson, I loved Richard Dawson, best Feud host ever! Anyways it was my turn at the toss up question and my team, The Lube, Chrissie Wellington, Mike Reilly and the lovely Jill Olausson, were all counting on my to come through. Richard shot out the question "a 100 tri coaches were surveyed on the following question... What is the biggest training mistake you see your athletes make??" I blurted out "Their Easy Workouts are too HARD!!" Survey says 100! Going harder than you are suppose to during your scheduled easy days is a huge training error we see all the time!
Many athletes believe we coach types add easy days to their workout programs just to fill space. You know a way take up time between the hard workouts while we think of new ways to torture them. Then when they get to the aforementioned easy day he/she decides that since they actually made the effort of doing the workout they are going to push it a little harder than prescribed and make it "worth" the effort. Then we silly coaches get back the report of our athletes weeks worth of workouts, let's say in a Garmin file download, and the efforts all look the same! HR's close to threshold and a bunch of steady efforts that are neither easy enough and then, consequently, not hard enough to get to achieve our goals.
Easy workouts fill the vital role of allowing giving us coaches a way of providing the athlete a gentler overload that we can apply in a higher volume without the inherent risk of injury that faster/harder workouts do. The Easy Workout keeps us introducing a stress your body, albeit a less harsh stress, to which must adapt. The formula to fitness remains the same, just gentler: Introduce stress in the form of a workout, allow the body to adapt to that stress, increased fitness, viola!
In the limitations of the space I have let me go into a few of the benefits of easy workouts. Let's start with muscle fiber recruitment. Basically there are 2 types of muscle fibers, slow twitch and fast twitch. A loose definition indicates that fast twitch muscle are the more powerful and explosive muscle fibers. While slow twitch one have a lower firing range or contraction then their fast twitch brothers. Going easy allows us to recriute more of the slow twitch fibers and build them up. This building up of slowtiwtch fibers will come in very handy during the later stages of an endurance event after Mr. fast twitch fibers have started to fatigue. Going hard all the time blocks this recruitment and stunts our endurance bulding efforts.
Secondly slow twitch fibers are more adapt at burning fat for fuel. Now we have wealth of calories stored in our body in the form of fat which can be used to supply us with energy as our event progresses. It will also help "save" carbohydrates allowing the fast twitchers to use that as energy. When you are working out at that lower end of the effort scale you are burning ruffly 70% fat and 30% carbs. Now you can teach your body to burn more fat. The body will produce more enzymes needed to burn fat, and use less carbs even as your effort increases, if you put the work in up front and go easy.
Lastly easier workouts stimulate changes on a celluar level. Once you start practicing the art of burning more fat the mitochondria in your cells, the cells power plants, will start to grow to meet the new demand. Bigger mitochondria = bigger power plants = more power (I given' her all I got Cap'n, the dilythium crystal can't take much more!)
Besides all the benefits above, increased cappilary growth, gradual adaptation of your tendons to more strenuous activity and a uptick in your hemoglobin production can all be linked to a solid foundation of easy workouts in your training plan. Not to mention the fact that going easy one day allows your hard to be HARDER the next day, because your body has adapted and is ready for it.
Well I could go one forever but hopefully you, with the help of a coach or mentor, have defined your workout zones and you have a good understanding of what "easy" means to you. The athlete then just needs to follow through and actually go easy one those days. Adhereing to this simple principle will net you big results come race day.
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