Top Tips:
1. Don’t forget to strength train:
It can be easy to get wrapped up in the time commitments of training for an endurance race and we often find that this can mean the time dedicated for cross-training, or strength training, is the first thing to be sacrificed. Although this can be tempting, we highly encourage you to prioritize your cross-training workouts. This is essential to maximize injury prevention and improve your endurance and recovery by becoming a stronger, more well-rounded distance athlete. By building capacity in the muscles that are targeted during your race, we can ensure you won’t run into any injuries throughout your training or on race day. This also often allow for faster times and improved endurance by having enough stores to cope with the loads asked for these long races.
2. Incorporate mobility work:
Ensuring to incorporate cross-training workouts that involve elements of mobility training, Pilates, or yoga, we can be sure that you are also targeting your smaller stabilizers muscles which help to support our global movers that we often first think of when we think of strength training. The two working in harmony can be a major advantage for injury prevention and will enable you to maximise each of those crucial seconds during your transitions on race day. By becoming more supple and stable you will be able to get from one part of the race to the next with ease.
3. Ensure adequate recovery- sleep, stress, nutrition, hydration:
It can be easy to let work and life stress impact our recovery when training for a major endurance race on top of the typical day to day demands. Be sure you are prioritizing and addressing any areas you may be neglecting. Aim for 7-8 hours of quality sleep each night which is crucial for recovery. Make sure you are getting in appropriate nutrition for the demands of your training, looking at things like adequate protein and carbohydrate intake to help muscles recover, maximize strength gains and keep you fueled and energized to optimize each of your training sessions. Along with our nutrition, we need to be mindful of hydration. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends 5-6ml water per kg of body weight in the four hours before your training. This is essential on top of daily water intake guidelines and post-exercise hydration. Pay attention to thinks like urine colour to ensure you are keeping your body hydrated enough. Finally, managing day to day stress is crucial for your body’s recovery and ability to adapt to the stress demanded on your systems during training and competing.
4. Load management:
Building on stress, we don’t only want to pay attention to psychological and day to day stress, we need to be mindful of the stress on our body, or what we physiotherapists call “load management”. Being mindful of gradually building up time and distance during training, keeping on top of your cross-training, and modifying load at the first signs of any tissues not coping with your current volume, is absolutely pivotal for both our pro experienced and new endurance athletes. Injury is almost always the result of a load being applied to a tissue that it doesn’t have the capacity for. When that load exceeds capacity- something has to give! This leads us into our final tip.
5. Get on top of niggles before they get the best of you!
If you start to experience any niggles or new pains while training, it’s best to consult a physiotherapist or health care practitioner so we can address this before they snowball into something more serious and result in injury. Often times there can be slight biomechanical variances that trained professionals can look for and pick up on. Together we can create the right combination of training, load management and if necessary, the right kinds of corrective exercises for you to ensure you stay injury free and maximize your race results!
