Every week I speak with athletes who want input on training planning. They want to know what workouts to do and when. Some athletes want to do a LOT of training because they have ambitious goals.
Other individuals--fitness or endurance athletes--are struggling with motivation, and they want me to help them "get fired up" to train again. Still others have extremely busy schedules with work and family, and they want guidance on fitting their training and exercise into that schedule.
Whether you are trying to find an effective program, increase your motivation, or fit exercise into a busy schedule, you need to develop your template.
What is a Weekly Template?
Every day when you wake up, you have many choices on what to do for a workout. Hard day or easy day? Long or short? Intervals or aerobic. Swim, bike, run, and/or lift.....the combinations are almost infinite. Moreover, certain patterns or sequences of workouts are more manageable or fruitful than others. The simplest example is a hard day/easy day pattern.
What I suggest is to look at your schedule, and fit in certain slots which remain the same every week. Perhaps this is your long run on Saturday morning. Or maybe it is a group swim workout every wednesday night. Or an intensity run tuesday morning. The idea is to plug in a certain number of workout slots that are usually the same every week. Thus you have formed the foundation or TEMPLATE of each week.
The mental benefit of an effective template is it takes the mental energy out of planning your week. If you do big spin every Saturday, then you (and your body) know to expect that. It wouldn't make sense then to do long hard workouts on Thurs and Fri. Somewhere leading into Big Spin you are going to get a recovery day in there.
Then around your template you "fill in the gaps." On good training week you are able to get more training in. Perhaps you do an intensity bike session later in the day after your fast run, maybe even add some weights in there. That day is "on" and when you are "really on," well, might as make hay when the sun is shining.
But go hard on the hard day only. If Tues, Thurs, and Saturday are your big training days, then it follows that some of the other days need to be recovery days. The point is, this all doesn't have to be worked out in advance. If you have a good template, you can rely on it to structure the week. Your hard days are hard, long days are long, and easy days...are the days that the "honeydo" list gets done.
How do I know if my template is correct?
I'm a pragmatist; it is correct if it works. If you feel yourself getting fitter after a few weeks it works. If you are dragging or unmotivated, then tweak the template.
I CAN tell you that there are certain templates that we know work well. First, you have to have adequate recovery built into your template. A couple years back my coaching schedule had me doing a long hard session Thurs, Fri, Sat, and Sunday. Every week when this happened, I found that I was dragging by the Saturday or Sunday. I was getting hurt. And it would take me all week to be ready for the next 4-day push. What I finally realized was that I needed to take one of those days easy; so I sat out, coached off the bike. My energy went way up and I found that by doing 3 of 4 of those sessions, I corrected my template into a much more effective pattern. Recovery was key.
We also know that your template should be sport-specific. If you are training for an iron distance tri or an ultramarathon, then your templated sessions should be the long stuff. The bottom line is that you need to go LSD 2 out of every 3 weekends. The stuff during the week isn't nearly as important, so long as you get recovered and you are ready for those mega weekends. Conversely, if you are focusing on short course triathlon or competitive half marathon, then your intensity sessions are the most important. Structure those each week and fill in the gaps with some (but not a lot) of aerobic endurance time.
Over-Under-Just Right
While writing this piece I just got off the phone with a client from Des Moines, IA. Rachel said she has enjoyed the training plan that I designed for her, but is concerned that she has only completed 8 of the 9 workouts assigned each week. NO WORRIES. She is substantially completing the template in this case. As long as she is not skipping the intensity session each week, or the long session each week, then we are completing the substance of the training plan.
Likewise, some of my more motivated clients are always wanting to do more training. More is better right? Not always if it leads to injury or burnout. For them I program in recovery days. You can do extra on the hard days, but the recovery days have to stay short and slow. This keeps the flow and avoids the tendency to do too much.
Origin of The Template
I created the concept of the template in response to my training groups program. As the number in the program has swelled to over 50, I have added more and more offerings. Now there are 12+ workouts in a typical week, everything from Big Spin to beginner swim to beginner run to 22 mile trail runs in snow. Some people get confused on what sessions to attend. Some what to attend everything. Some are overwhelmed so they skip a whole week with no attendance. Some miss one workout, then feel they've "blown it."
To all these scenarios, I say "figure out your template," then build from that. Make sure that certain workouts are done EVERY WEEK religiously, then fill in the gaps and build from there.
