Going Faster...in sha Allah (God willing…)

This document is a brief summary of a very fine book by Joe Friel about training effectively (FN#1). Friel’s sports are cycling and triathlon but the principles applicable to these sports and long distance outrigger competition are very similar; each is an aerobic endurance sport with periods of high effort and at times extreme anaerobic effort within (over-efforts that cannot be sustained, such as a race start in outrigger). On a bicycle and in running there are sprints and hill climbs, and in paddling, passing a canoe, coming out of a turn, or catching a wave.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce some concepts that are utilized by coaches in attempting to achieve high performance from their athletes.

Friel identifies the 10 commandments of training listed as follows:

1. Train moderately
2. Train consistently
3. Get enough rest
4. Train with a plan
5. Train in groups infrequently
6. Plan to peak
7. Improve weaknesses
8. Trust your training
9. Listen to your body
10. Commit to goals

These ideas are largely self-explanatory. The one that perhaps needs explanation is Number 5; train in groups infrequently. Remember that Friel’s sports are for the most part individual activities. One of the things that inevitably happens when groups of athletes get together is that they ignore their training schedule and they begin to race each other.  You cannot achieve Numbers 1, 2, 4, 8 or 9 if you are always ramping up the intensity of your training. Discipline is important in every aspect of our sport; paddling smart means training smart too.
The overall structure for training for an endurance sport is periodization. The idea is that an athlete can improve performance by changing the training stresses over the training period. Put simply if an athlete paddles at a HR of 140 BPM every day for a year, the athlete will not improve past a certain point. The limiter is the training and not the ability of the athlete to perform better.

Periodization invokes the idea that the athlete must alter training from the general to the specific over the training period.  Another way of putting this for the paddler is to move from “seat miles”, or time in a canoe early in the training period, to training that simulates racing the nearer the athlete gets to the goal events.

In order for an athlete to improve there must be training stress. Stress alters the body to permit more work to be done. That is the goal of all training; to be able to do more work. That stress is described in the following ways:

1. Frequency of training    }
2. Duration of training    }        =        Workload
3. Intensity of training    }

Not all athletes are alike. Athletes vary in dimension, in muscle mass and type, in innate aerobic capacity, some are limited by physical ailments or injuries, some by life stressors or scheduling difficulties, and most by some form of a psychological hurdle or barrier.

In order to effectively train, consideration must be given to these athlete limiters (not all of which are unchangeable) and the factors to be considered are the following:

1. Individualization – From each according to ability, to each according to need…
The idea is that we have to train our bodies according to their innate and acquired abilities and skills. Of course that is easier said than done. We do not do any VO2 max testing, we do not do lactate threshold testing, we have yet to do anything like a maximum HR test. But we do know from watching someone’s effort, from seeing how they respond to effort, from observing whether there is a deterioration in technique, and from talking to our athletes, whether they are going too hard, too soft or just right.

2. Progression – the 10 Per Cent’ers…
This is the basic rule for training; thou shalt not increase thy training by more than 10 per cent per week. We honour this rule in the breach of it; taken to its extreme you would never get off the couch. But we do try to keep the training increases reasonable and manageable for the athletes we are training. Ten per cent per training period is a good rule of thumb.

3. Overload – A Bridge Too Far…
We actually want to reach for something we are not capable of grasping. When you overload, you stress your body to prepare itself for more work. I cannot explain this as I am not an exercise physiologist, but I accept it is true because what I cannot do well today (paddle at 90-100% for 8 times 30 minutes) is something that I will be able to do by Molokai if I keep overreaching my current state of training by, say, 10 % or so. There is a huge body of scientific evidence to support the idea that athletes adapt to greater workloads by overloading.

4. Specificity – So You Wanna Race Outrigger (and not tricycles)
Friel says this is the key to periodization and it makes the idea simple; build a huge aerobic (endurance) base, and then approach the race by training as you will race at your goal event. Train like you will race…it is very simple.

All of this is all well and good except that we cannot make our training programs perfect for every athlete. Obviously in the context of a crew sport like long distance outrigger, adapting a training program to accommodate each individual athlete in the canoe is not a simple process. There are far too many differences between athletes to permit the creation of a perfect training schedule to realize the potential of every athlete. So I will introduce a new concept that is the overarching consideration when training for and racing crew outrigger canoes; compromise.

Compromise is the most important consideration when training athletes for a crew activity, when choosing a crew, when teaching a technique and identifying a style, when selecting paddles, when choosing a course on race day, when deciding on waves to catch and waves to let go. The goal is to find the very best compromise that allows the athletes to perform at their collective maximum output over time.

Ultimately the goal of periodization is to peak for a particular event or competitive time frame. If one did not have a goal event, one could not determine how to move from the general to the specific and over what time frame.

One of the most important considerations in determining a training schedule is the intensity of the work. There are physical ways of measuring the intensity of the effort by an individual athlete including:

1. Energy production system – lactate production in the blood
2. Muscular system – power measured in wattage
3. Cardiovascular system – the athlete’s heart rate (HR)

These are described by Friel as “peeks” into the body to see how it is performing. Another way to describe it would be to say that each is a window into the body while exerting effort and each gives a picture of the actual experience of the body under load (doing work).

None of these are particularly adaptable to crew outrigger training and so we revert to the one that is still recognized as the best gross indicator of intensity; perceived exertion (PE). In our training we use the percentage system to identify what the training intensity is in any stage of our training or racing. Below are examples of some of our typical efforts:

• 50% - very very light (reading War and Peace aloud without taking a breath)
• 60% - very light (quoting limericks)
• 70% - fairly light (nose breathing, speaking a sentence)
• 80% - somewhat hard (breathing every stroke, no complete sentences)
• 90% - hard (single words..but don’t talk)
• 100% - very hard (grunts, screams, shouts)…SURFING!!

It must be remembered that these efforts are all assessed as effort over time. They are subjective measures of effort; perceptions of effort. For example 90% over 2 minutes is a much different effort than 90% over 6 hours. 
Save
PE is extremely important to our training. Although it a subjective measure of an individual athlete’s capacity for work, if honestly assessed, it is the best measure in crew canoes. We all of us know the hammerheads that cannot go at anything but 100% and it is no surprise that those same hammerheads are the ones who blow up before the finish leaving the rest of the crew hauling their smoking carcasses across the line. This is not a way to ingratiate yourself to your crew. It is also the hammerheads that are often injured during the season; they simply do not gauge effort and training very well.

Of the athlete limiters listed above, the one Friel identifies as most important is intensity. I would add that it is intensity over time that we are working on. The more we can manage long efforts at high intensities, the faster we will go.

In summary then we train from a base to build to a capacity to race as we need to in order to succeed. The broader the base, the higher the peak. The peak is achieved by increasing the intensity of the efforts. The intensity of our training must be balanced against the capacity for work and the need to rest in order to permit the body to adapt. In a crew sport, we must approximate the best program for the range of athletes we are training.

I am hopeful this little summary will benefit those of you who are interested in why we are doing what we do. If you are interested in additional information, go to www.joefrielsblog.com. He is a great coach and makes the concepts simple to understand.

BV Bagnall
May 2010

1. The Cyclist’s Training Bible, by Joe Friel, 4th edition