I don’t know about you, but my body gets a little beaten up over the course of a triathlon season. For 95% of my life I haven’t done these things, and I still feel a constant nag to rest.
It’s like hibernation theory and I am ready to snore.
I was noodling around and found this article about 5 Off Season Rules on Competitor.com that has some nice points. Here’s a summary:
1. Their first rule is don’t run a marathon in January. Their basic point is that doing long distance training in your recovery season is a great way to get injured or burned out.
2. Focus on short/intense workouts. They say volume is easy to add back in later and now is the time to boost your power and lactate threshold.
3. Gain Weight. The point being when you train at a heavier weight it makes you stronger. They even go as far as saying eat ice cream sundaes before bed.
4. Swim, swim, swim. They argue that swimming is usually the weakness of most triathletes and the best way to perfect the most technical sport is to practice. The suggestion is to swim every day for 10-14 days, which I completely agree with because it worked for me (though I did it “in-season”).
5. Hit the weights. “You’ve spent the season breaking down the house, now it’s time to repair it.”
For me, this sounds like a good plan. One of my major goals for this off season is to create muscle balance, so I plan to at a ton of yoga into this mix as well. And of course Little Debbie.
