base building

Doesn't hurt to refresh on some basic principles for base building, especially when their from Mark Allen.

Hope this helps.

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Building Blocks (from March 2004)
By Mark Allen

Each part of your training season is important. The end-of-the-year taper fine-tunes the fitness that you build into your body from the beginning of the year. The interval phase leading up to the taper provides the raw material of speed that the taper refines into race performance. But perhaps the most important segment of your training season is what you do during your base building phase in the early season.
This period is what will determine the size of the internal athletic engine your speed and taper phase have to work with. If an athlete does the right kind of workouts in their base period, that athletic engine will be like a powerful race car. If not, the engine will be more like a lawn mower motor. If this base of fitness is executed properly, it will have the most positive impact on your race performance at the end of the season of anything that you can do in your training. Period!

The mantra during your base period is going to be patience. A large fitness engine is put together gradually over time. Early speed work will not speed things up, and if it is brought into your training too early in the season, it will limit the size of the athletic engine that you put together.

What to Do
In a nutshell, your aerobic base is your ability (or lack thereof) to burn stored body fat as a major source of fuel during exercise. As an endurance athlete—which physiologically all distances of triathlons qualify as—you require a significant aerobic base to excel. How can you develop this ability? By working out below a heart rate that will become the holy grail of your base building period. This number is called your maximum aerobic heart rate.

So before going any further, let’s figure out what that number is for you, the number that represents the upper limit of your effort during your base period.

1. Take 180 and subtract your age.
2. Take that number and correct it by the amount next to the statement that best describes your level of fitness:
a. Subtract five beats if you are recovering from a major illness or injury that has kept you from training for six months or more.
b. Leave the number where it is if you have been working out about two to three days per week for at least a year.
c. Add five beats if you have been working out more than three days per week for at least a year.
d. Add 10 beats if you have been working out more than five days per week for at least five years without recurring colds, illnesses, injuries or long periods of burnout.
(Note: if you are trying to decide between two of the above statements, it is much better to pick the one that gives you a lower training heart rate than the one that will give you the higher training heart rate.)
e. If you are older than 55 years old or younger than 25 years old, add an additional five beats to whatever number you have right now.

The number you just calculated is your maximum aerobic heart rate. This is the most significant number you will need to know during your base period. All of your swims, bikes, and runs during your base period should be done at a heart rate that is at or below this number.

Why this Number
If you go over your maximum aerobic heart rate, you switch off your aerobic development, your fat-burning endurance systems, and turn on the anaerobic development, which is your carbohydrate-burning speed system. During your base, this is not a good thing to do consistently.

First, once you turn off your fat-burning system, it stays shut off for seven to nine hours, even after your heart rate has dropped back down to resting once your workout is over. If you do this consistently, you will never develop an efficient fat-burning aerobic engine. You will be stuck with a lawn mower motor and never get your Maserati racing machine!

Second, going over your aerobic maximum heart rate causes you to turn on your adrenal system. This is the system that enables people to deal with stress. A little stress is good because it strengthens your entire body and helps your whole system function better.

However, if you turn on your adrenal system consistently—which is what happens when you go over your maximum aerobic heart rate—you end up reducing your ability to respond to stress; you build up fat in your cardiovascular system; you reduce the output of DHEA, which is the hormone that enables you to look at life as a good thing; you can become depressed and lose motivation (not a good thing for being consistent with workouts); you can become unable to sleep deeply in the way that is needed to recover your body; and ultimately you will end up not having the reserve necessary when the big race rolls around. In other words, you will get burned out and actually lose fitness with regular anaerobic high heart rate training over time. There is a time for the speed work, but the base period is not that time.

What to Expect
So calculate your maximum aerobic heart rate, strap on the monitor and go work out. If you are older than 55 years old, you can probably continue to get faster with just aerobic training for close to six months. If you are younger than 25 years of age, you might improve for as many as two months and then plateau. If you are between those two ages, you can count on reaching a base plateau at a point somewhere between two and six months that correlates to your age between these two.

In the early base, you may have to walk hills, keep your bike in the little chain ring, and plop yourself in the easy lane of the Masters swim workouts to keep your effort low enough to keep heart rate low enough. This is normal. This is fine. This is what base is about. It takes patience. If your pace seems easy, enjoy it. You will get faster, and later when you switch to speed work, you will have plenty of opportunity to feel the burn by going just about as hard as you can go.

Start your workouts with a distance in each sport that feels sustainable for the next three weeks. After this initial adaptation phase, start to build your long workouts as well as the overall consistency and weekly volume. Add about 10-15 percent onto your long workouts and the weekly mileage each week for one or two weeks in a row, then back off about 5-10 percent for a week, then continue to build back onto the previous high amount. This will give you a building up in volume and workout length that is not linear, but more like a stair step. For example, if you can run one hour with comfort, then next week run roughly 1:10 on your long run, the week after that roughly 1:20-1:25, then the following back it down to about 1:15; then on the build, go back up to around 1:40-1:45 and so on.

What About Working on My Weaknesses?
Base training in the perfect time to correct any weaknesses you might have. How you do this will be different for the three sports, however. If, for example, swimming is your weakness, bringing it up to a strong bike and run level is best done by attending a swim technique clinic. Bad form in the pool is not corrected with mileage, but rather with stroke work. If cycling is your weakness, identify what aspect you have difficulty with. Some people find that they lack the ability to climb hills. Others just cannot generate power on the flats.

But regardless of what you want to improve on the bike, the single most effective cycling tool you can use is a stationary bike trainer. Do at least one of your shorter rides each week on one to improve any problem you might have on the bike (other than bike handling issues). If your climbing needs improvement, do the stationary bike workout mostly sitting up with your hands on the top of the handle bars and your body slid slightly back on the seat. If the flats give you trouble, ride on the trainer in the aero position and use as large of a gear as you can push and still keep your revolutions up and your heart rate low enough.

And no matter what you would like to improve on the bike, everyone can practice some one-leg spinning to improve their cycling. Start with just a few minutes at a time on each leg and gradually work up to 10 to 15 minutes on each side.

For the run, running slow during your base phase is the perfect time to work on running fast. This may sound like a contradiction, but it is not. When you are not under the pressure of running fast, you have the ability to really focus on your running form, stride length and turnover rate. No matter how slow you may be running, run with an upright body posture and the leg turnover of someone who is running at a fast pace. Make this the goal of every run you do in your base period. Teach yourself to run with a turnover rate of about 90 foot strikes per minute counted on one side. For most triathletes, at first this feels totally awkward. But training at this high of a cadence will do several things that you want to have happen.

First, it will teach you to shorten your stride and land on the middle of your foot and not the heel. This helps you run like a runner and not a triathlete. Secondly, it will pattern into your muscles the speed of muscle firing that you will need during your races later in the summer. A slow turnover, no matter how fast a person is actually running, makes for a slow runner. Conversely, a fast turnover, no matter how slow one is running, translates into a fast runner.

Legal Cheating
Base building is slow at first, especially if you have never taken the time to build your aerobic base. It might feel like speed is another world away from you at this time, but resist the temptation to throw in some fast surges or the occasional speed session just to make sure you can still do it. Patience!

That said, however, there is one thing you can to do that is a physiologically legal way to cheat on this credo of aerobic patience. It is to incorporate some short running races into your training. And what I mean by short is anything from a 5k to a half marathon. A full marathon does not qualify as a short running race. You can do this once every three to six weeks depending on how you feel. If you decide to try this—and I highly suggest that you do—go into the race without doing any speed work and go as fast as you possibly can. Yes, just blast it! This will help bump up your fitness without hindering your aerobic development.

But there are two criteria that you must meet before you do a running race. One is to make sure that you have not been sick in the two weeks leading up to the race. The second is to make sure that you do not get sick in the two weeks following the race. If you do get sick after or have been sick in the two weeks leading up to the event, it is advisable to hold off doing another running race for several weeks.

Two More Things
Two more very important elements of a successful base period are strength training and flexibility work. Both of these are best done now before the high-intensity speed sessions start. Most people find that in the early season when their bodies are getting used to the rigors of regular training again is when they get the stiffest. Develop flexibility now! There is one caveat about flexibility work that will probably go against most conventional wisdom on this topic. And that is to do as little stretching as you can do and develop the flexibility that you are after.

The reason for this is that flexibility causes inflammation in the muscles, which requires your body to do more work to take care of that state. Inflammation is also what can happen in your body when you are under continuous stress. So as a modern-world person, we want to make our fitness as low stress as possible. And part of that equation is making sure that you are doing enough flexibility work without overdoing it. Strength training is also an absolutely essential tool for great racing. It is doubly essential if you are older than about 35 years old. But, as with the flexibility work, there is enough, and then there is too much. In a nutshell, two days per week on a total body-strengthening program is perfect. Two sets of 12 to 15 repetitions on each exercise is perfect. A maximum of 12 exercises in each session is perfect. More days, more sets or more repetitions are not perfect.

There you have it: the essentials of a great base-building period. And with that, you have the tools that will enable you to build the fitness now that will enable you to have the race of your dreams at the end of the season!