How to Balance Your Training: Things Fitting for YOU

How to balance your training:  Make things fit for you!

“Triathlon is complicated, how can I fit it into my life?”  That’s a great question!  The first thing is to set a starting point and to be adaptable.  The next, is to invest a few minutes per week to adjusting/and tuning your planning for the week ahead.  Finally, stay as adaptable as possible, ready to adjust on the fly.  Those key points help us overcome challenges that come up, and most important, help us keep training load fitting into our life soundly.  Here are a few key’s to keep in mind to fit tri into life, without losing your life:

• Pick a weekend day/time, and every week at that time, look at the training you hope to do and the life activities (work and family/friends) on tap for the week, now compare how those relate.  Adjust training so that workouts fit, WITH a little slack!  Dont fill every second with life and training, build in a little down time.

• Workouts you should protect as much as possible: the longer, most race like workouts.  If they need to move around the week, that’s fine, but try not to lose those.

• Workouts that are easier to move, shorten, modify to fit life - intensity sessions.  Think intervals, track workouts, hill repeats.  Things like that.  Those are important high value workouts, but they come with a stout recovery cost, and offer a big stimulus.  Shortening those workouts if logistics are tough, is super valuable to keeping you healthy and able to recover and keep happy and well.

• Very easy workouts to move, and sometimes drop are any shorter steady “Z2” style workouts.  Those are important, but if life is tossing curve balls, these are the best sessions to drop, or dramatically shorten if needed.

• If you are strength training (good idea), and life is busy, drop to 1 sessions per week.  If even that is super tight, just try to maintain a bit by doing a few sets of body weight squats or lunges after one endurance workout, maybe some pushups after another and maybe band rows after another.  This takes less than 5 minutes after 3 workouts per week, so can really save you a lot of time over the week!



Those strategies can be used to help marry your training and life ina  way that sets you up to enjoy both, and perform really well!

Will Kirousis, MS, CSCS, CISSN
Tri-Hard | Director
USA Cycling Certified Coach

USA Triathlon Certified Coach
Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist

Certified Sports Nutritionist

508.633.2708 | will@tri-hard.com | www.tri-hard.com | @willkirousis

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