Hard sessions on consecutive days?

[paulmitchell]

At the minute I tend to do a hard running session on a Thursday evening, then do a tough swim session on Friday morning.
I'm finding that since starting the running training on Thursday nights, that my swimming performance is worse that it was.
Is this to be expected, even though different muscles are being used?
Could it be mainly down to not having a sufficient carb intake?
Can I do anything to mitigate this?

[Mark Cannon]

Hi Paul

My two cents; It's all about how you're going about your recovery after each training session. Ensure you do an appropriate length warm down (static stretching), some sort of recovery food (or drink) and a good nights sleep is very important too. Are you doing these? It's probably more mentally fatigued you are given different muscles are being used. Besides the above there's not a whole lot you can do save for staggering your training sessions to ensure sufficient time to recover between hard sessions.

[naomigilker]

Paul,

The training plan I was following for the Dublin 70.3 had me doing something similar (i.e. a couple of session a day, and hard on consecutive days). I did the Thurs evening long run followed by Friday a.m. swim with Belpark. I would agree with Mark's suggestion - try your best to maximize sleep & recovery. My additional comments are to ensure you are fuelling during your sessions and immediately afterwards to avoid getting into any deficit, even during the ones earlier in the week. If you are properly hydrated for the Thurs run it won't bring you down as much and leave you in less than ideal condition for Fri morn.

After anything longer than an hour, I like to use Endurox recovery drink. It's got the 4:1 carb to protein ratio and if drank within the 'recovery window' it in theory helps the athlete be ready for the following training session. By recovery window, this means that you have the length of your training session to get recovery fuel onboard after your workout -> so if you ran for 1 hour, you have 1 hour to consume your recovery drink plus water to rehydrate. After the recovery window, you can then have meal or whatever else.

I also lowered my expectations during 6am swim session on Friday morning because my legs just weren't playing ball most weeks :-)

Enjoy your training!

[helenfrench]

Hi Paul. I also agree with
Mark and Naomi. Ideally I would avoid 2 hard back to back sessions if less than 12 hours between. Some very good tips in this article about the types of sessions which triathletes should do

m.triathlonmag.com.au/training/swim/7036-twice-daily-workouts

[David Power]

Paul - good question...it reminded me of the multiple training presentations and talks we have stored on our Members Training Resources section of the website.
Go to www.belparktri.ie then click MEMBERS menu, then TRAINING RESOURCES. Log in and you'll see 15+ presentations and documents from top coaches. Many discuss training periods, recovery, etc.
www.belparktri.ie/training-material/

[paulmitchell]

Thanks for all the good advice.

[richtwig]

I'd say that you should think a little differently. Like Naomi says lower the expectation for Friday morning - of course you'll be tired / less than best the morning after a hard session in any discipline, and as long as you aren't overdoing it, going again the day after without fully recovering isn't a bad way to build endurance. Performance only matters on race day, so you should only compare those weekly 'tired' training sessions with the same one the week before. If things improve week on week then the non-tired sessions and race fitness should get better as well.