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Personalizing Your Training Program
by Daniel Dutrisac
Before personalizing your training program you need to ask yourself what you want your training to provide you and what your objectives are. Are you focused on short, long (marathon) or ultra long distances (100k plus)? Are you more interested in speed, strength, or endurance? Are you training to improve your overall conditioning, to race or to lose weight? Answers to these questions will dictate how you should personalize your training program.
Generally speaking, your training program should consist of no more than six workouts per week. The nature of each of your workouts should be tailored to align with your training objectives. I would recommend a mix of workouts to provide variety and balance, while focusing your efforts on one specific workout per week to help you reach your training objectives.
Different types of workouts are defined below to assist you in personalizing your training program.
LSD (long slow distance) workouts should be done no more than once per week and should be for a non-stop duration of 1-3 hours depending on your level of conditioning. These workouts are ideal to build your conditioning base and help you with your overall aerobic capacity. LSDs are also the workouts that maximize calorie consumption. These workouts should be done at a very comfortable pace with distance/duration being the objective rather than speed. As a guide, you should be able to hold a conversation throughout your versation throughout your workout. Sunday skates on the parkway are ideally suited for LSD workouts.
Speed workouts are designed to help you improve your skating speed and acceleration. These workouts should be done no more than twice per week. Shorter intervals (10-30 sec.) will help you with your sprints and starts, while the longer intervals (2:00 plus) will help your overall race (10k, marathon) pace. These workouts tend to be the most intensive in terms of level of effort. They usually consist of repeated high intensity accelerations over a set distance and/or set time interval. The number of repetitions varies from 8-10 repetitions for the shorter intervals to as few as 4 repetitions for the longer intervals. After each acceleration you should allow your heart rate to recover by skating slowly until you can do another acceleration. Our typical Tuesday workouts focus on speed work.
Strength workouts are designed to build your muscular endurance and over-all strength. These workouts can consist of hill, resistance, weight training or dry land training with plyometrics. Workouts on Thursday night in Gatineau Park are ideally suited for strength training.
Form or maintenance workouts are designed to fill the gaps in your weekly training with short (30-60 min.) workouts where you can focus on form, technique and drills. These workouts should be done at an average level of effort. Cross-training workouts (e.g. bike, swim, run) are alternatives for this type of workout.
Recovery workouts help your body recover and help build resistance to the stress and strain the other workouts have put on your body. These workouts should be relatively short in duration (e.g. 30 min.) and at a very low level of exertion nice and easy pace. These types of workouts are often neglected but are critical to your bodys recovery.
These very high-level workout de- scriptions are by no means set in stone. There exists an infinite number of varia- tions of these workouts to meet your spe- cific requirements. This short article could not go over all the potential varia- tions. View it as a starting point to help you personalize your training program. Our club has a number of skaters who have been training for a long time and who can help you customize your training program. If you have any questions, dont be shy, we will find you an answer.
Happy training.
