Time to get excited about your plan. Right?
I sincerely hope
that every athlete reading this will have been successful with their
winter training independent of their chosen way. What I mean is that
there is actually no right or wrong way to train. It all depends on
what works for you the best. Time after time that changes – and
every so often athletes in media talk about changes in training,
sometimes drastic ones, so it is commonplace to juggle and tweak.
That is, because something hasn’t worked for them, something
unexpected has come or they’ve plateaued with their current
training. Time for change. However, this text isn’t about what is
the best methodology or what my preference is. This is about choosing
your methodology.
Training is
something of cyclical model; define your purpose of training, prepare
a plan, test, execute, perform, tweak and repeat – and along the
way numerous changes can happen. However, the first two stages of the
cycle do come with a huge opportunity and bit of threat. Keeping
things familiar is the safer bet, it may not yield such rates of
development as earlier. It works, and as the old wise words say
“don’t fix, if it ain’t broken”. At some point comes the
plateau and the rate of development diminishes and it is time for a
change.
Tweaking and trying
new things out may open you complete new ways for your training.
Talking about opportunity. Mixing things up may boost you, but trying
out new things is always surrounded by uncertainty, I’ve come
across this a lot. I’ve devised something that looks purely
awesome, but it frickin’ doesn’t work and backed off to the
drawing board. It isn’t that you’ve done something utterly wrong
and failed. It is that you’ve learned and then tweaked. Gaining
knowledge of your body as a response to different training is
essential.
But here is the
kicker: nothing is going to work unless you are excited about it.
If I would show you all the training plans, I’ve created and
demolished along the years I think It would add to fair few
spreadsheets, docs, notebooks and the list goes on. Sometimes the
plan looks a bit off one way and you scrap (or rather modify) it only
to find it is off another way, that’s part of the process. It may
take a fair few attempts to find your plan for success. But once
you’ve found, who is there to stop you from succeeding. So even
planning has a lot to do with excitement, motivation and belief.
It is important to
bear in mind that longevity and patience are virtues in training to
perform, so whether something works instantly is not the question.
Asking for gains in longer term is more important. For example, an
athlete has trained trained based on volume and plateaued and decides
it is time to go for more intense model to mix things up. It pretty
certain that the athlete actually feels crap and the respective
performance drops for a while due to the change in routines. Now,
patience is a virtue like in learning to play guitar (admittedly, I
never had the patience for that though); the change doesn’t happen
overnight.
Nonetheless, whether
you are planning to stick to your guns, adding volume, tweaking the
intensity, adding strength and conditioning – give your experiment
some time. It is said that the body really adapts to new stimulus in
6-8 weeks of exposure. But still, now that you have your plan for the
racing season ask: Am I excited about this?
The take home
message here: A plan that gets you excited has all the likelihood to
work.
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