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Chuckie V: The Fundemental Law of Training
By Chuckie Veylupek
4/21/2009 |
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While hosting the Spring Fling Triathlon Camp a few weeks back, I was approached by one of our participants with a beer in his hand (this, by the way, is not an unusual occurrence at our camps, except that each hand usually has a beer in it). He wanted to know what I felt was the most important principle of training.
I responded with a quick and curt, "It doesn’t matter what I feel. It is what it is."
"And what is it?" he responded, cracking open the 24-ounce can.
"It," I replied, "isn't so much an important principle as it is a law: it is the (thee) fundamental law of training."
"And what is it?" he repeated, knocking back some brew.
"Ultimately, the success of any specific training strategy---no matter how well-thought-out and designed---is dependent upon it. Neglecting it results in more failures than all other mistakes combined."
"And what is it, damn it?!" he responded, for the third time, showing a hostility I hadn't ever seen from a camper before. The beer obviously hadn't taken effect yet.
Finally, I gave him the answer he was looking for, though one might imagine he was already well-aware of it, inebriated or not: "The fundamental law of training is pretty darn simple," I said. "Every training stress incurred needs to be balanced-out with an appropriate amount of recovery, to allow for optimal performance progress." And while my tongue wasn't quite so eloquent, that's effectively what I said, though I may have thrown in a few curse words for emphasis. For what it's worth, I had not been drinking.
He looked at me and quipped, "I was expecting something a little more insightful," and proceeded to walk away. This time I bit my eloquent tongue and held my curse words in.
I wasn't sure whether he'd been hoping for a secret of some sort, if even as cliché as the rhetorical "there are no secrets", but by the looks of it my answer failed to suffice.
The thing is, it's the truth…the "golden rule": If you're going to train hard, you better rest equally as, um, hard. If I were out to sell you something I'd clean it up, polish it, and package it as such: Stress plus Rest equals Progress. Catchy, eh? Simple too. (The opposing expression might go like this: Stress plus Inadequate Rest Equates to Anybody's Guess.)
Sometimes, though, the simplicity of training can be so overwhelmingly confounding that it befalls complexity. This is perhaps why there are so many who seem to want to make triathlon a science and no longer a sport. Scientists can be a competitive ilk, but let's face it: science isn't really the arena for competition. You nerdy lab types need to seek the truth, not the triumph. And anyway, if you find the truth won't you have your triumph?
But that's not why I'm writing. I'm writing to drive home the importance of balancing stress and rest, and "chillaxing"---as Angela calls it---when the time is called for (and it's called for far more often than most athletes and coaches might realize).
But here's where things get tricky; chillaxing (chilling and relaxing) isn't enough. You need to HASTEN recovery if you're truly interested in maximizing your athletic potential. Sitting on your ass all afternoon is good recovery, no doubt, but lying on a massage table is even better (particularly if someone if actually massaging you at the time, while an IV concurrently fuel-injects the right recovery fluids into your bloodstream). This way you can train with quality that much sooner, and no doubt, he who out-trains you will out perform you. Yes, more is better, but only when your body is ready for more.
Now I'll be the first to admit that mindlessness is great recovery. In fact, I know plenty of athletes, myself included, who make such mindlessness appear as though it was their true calling. But mindful recuperation will outshine it every time. If you can speed recovery, you will speed development. Beer, incidentally, does not speed recovery (though it does help anesthetize those training pains, in addition to making us ugly people look less ugly).
So there you have it: the golden rule and a smidgen on how it should be applied. And while I've never been one to stick to the rules, this one overrules even the unruly.
For more detail on all this, please head over to AC's latest blog. He hits the nail on the head, as per usual.
For more from Chuckie, check out his blog!.
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