Most athletes have experienced some of the effects of getting overly dehydrated when out on their long runs/bikes etc. but few really understand the underlying physiological effects on performance as dehydration begins to take its grip.
Managing your hydration is not something that we want to leave to chance, if the aim is to have your best performance. Let’s investigate.
Dehydration and performance: So what happens to your performance when you become dehydrated? It is worth understanding a layman version of the physiological challenge you will place on your body when out training and racing, so that you are able to adopt a plan to avoid some of the effects. I will aim to make it highly approachable, and won’t blind you with scientific jargon.
Deliver oxygen to the muscles to create energy for the work you are doing.
Deliver heat generated from work to the skin, to avoid harmful heat build.
Shift blood to the abdomen, to assist with absorption of any calories consume.
All sound important enough. You have, give or take, about 6 litres of blood in your body. This blood is made up for red blood cells (the red part!), and plasma (the clear fluid, or white part!). As you begin to get dehydrated, a part of the fluid you lose is the white plasma. In other words, there is less blood to go around. In short, as you become more and more dehydrated, there is an ever-increasing competition between the three roles stated above.
Some dehydration is normal: Realise that some dehydration is normal, and one could argue, even a benefit. Most of the negative performance effects of dehydration only occur at about a 4% rate of dehydration. Before that loss, it can be assumed that there is no real performance loss with the minimal dehydration. This is important, as it influences our approach under different conditions.
Imagine you run 60 minutes in a cool environment, it is unlikely that dehydration is going to be a massive performance limiter within that run, assuming you began the run fully hydrated. Now extend the run to multiple hours, and add the environmental cost of heat and humidity. Your first 45 to 75 minutes won’t deliver any negative effects, but your mission will be about setting yourself up for success. While running, it is close to impossible to replenish all fluids you are losing, so the aim should be to prevent yourself from ever getting down to below that level of ‘performance dehydration’.
I should also note that, in addition to simply looking through the performance lens of hydration, you should also look at the fluids you take on as having the role of ‘diluter’ or ‘transporter’.
As mentioned above, your GI system becomes highly inefficient at absorbing calories during exercise, and even less so when becoming dehydrated. The fluids you consume will help offset the potential dehydration, but also should help to dilute the concentration of calories consumed to fuel your exercise.
The more dilute the calories, the easier for an inefficient gut to absorb. No matter your fuel source, it is important that your hydration of choice be a very diluted solution that assists absorption, instead of inhibiting it. A general rule would be for your drink choice to be less than 3% concentration of carbohydrate, with some added electrolytes within the concentration.
If you prefer drinking just water, I would add a dash of salt and a squeeze of citrus, just to get closer to natural body water chemistry, but a sports drink should be highly dilute and not a form of caloric replenishment in itself.
Know the weather: Realise that you require more fluids in hot and humid conditions than cold conditions, as well as the fact that hydration becomes much more important for sessions lasting more than 60 minutes, over short sessions under that duration.
10-12 ml/kg/hour: A general rule tends to be for about this amount of hydration per hour.
Frequent and often: If you are planning a longer session, begin early and drink frequently and often. I prefer athletes to consume fluids every 6 to 10 minutes, consistently, right from the start of the session.
Dilute those kcal: If you consume any calories, ensure you take on fluids. Similar to above, and realising that for every 100 kcal you consume, it requires about 12 ml of fluid to dilute, quick frequent hits are better than a calorie bomb consumed only when you feel the need.
Re-hydrate between sessions: Even if you nail your training and racing hydration, it is normal to finish in a dehydrated state. To facilitate recovery, limit stress, build a platform of health, and retain balanced energy in the day, ensure you re-hydrate between sessions.
Just because you can, doesn’t make it great: It is very common for me to hear athletes tell me ‘Yes Duncan, but I can go on a 3-hour run and not consume a thing’. This may well be true, but is this approach maximising your performance during the session or the adaptations from that session.
Is it optimal? Being able to ‘survive’ a session with hydration isn’t the same thing as maximising what you hope to achieve from the session.
Is race season really here? While you can race triathlon year-round these days if you’re willing to travel, we are very close to the Season kicking off.
I think it is critical that we all understand the value, approach and lessons to be gained from the initial races of the season. For athletes that race throughout the spring and summer and even autumn months, building out a season of races, you should be aware that you cannot expect or hope to hold your top performance through an entire season.
I urge all athletes to maintain a wide-angle view on your personal seasonal progression. The vast majority of athletes have key races in May to July and/or August to November time. This means that early season races need to play an important part in your journey progression and be viewed as stepping-stones.
* Refine pacing strategies and allow lessons to arrive from them.
* Use as a fitness booster and mental skills development (the perfect simulator of a KEY race).
* A benchmark of current fitness and performance – note that this is different than a judgment of training success!
Your success is determined throughout an entire season, not through early season races. However, you DO want to make these early races as specific and valuable as possible. You should also aim to integrate positive habits that will feed into the key races upcoming.
* Race day protocols: Follow your key race day protocols with respect to pre-training, pre-race dinner and breakfast, fueling and hydration approach.
* Nail pacing: While it might all be a little slower, set yourself up for success with conservative pacing that mirrors the pacing strategy you would implement for a key-race.
* Racing Mindset: You still want to retain a mindset of racing and high effort. Just because it isn’t a goal race, doesn’t mean effort should drop.
* Arrive prepared: Course knowledge, equipment readiness, emotional readiness. It is STILL a race.
You can race with a smile and without pressure.
You have nothing to lose at this time of the season!
Best wishes for your races!
This weeks theme is “the busy athlete,” which is a bit of an oxymoron since I challenge you to find anyone that claims they’re “not busy.” Throw training for swimbikerun into the mix and many triathletes are juggling a fairly hectic schedule.
At SISU Racing, we encourage athletes that it is completely possible to maintain balance in their busy lives, even in pursuit of personal triathlon goals.
I think the first important thing to say is that it is critical that athletes be really honest with their relationship to the sport and their training schedule. Some athletes, including many SISU Racing athletes, are completely dedicated to high performance (or elite performance), meaning that they sacrifice things across many elements of life most feel would be normal and healthy.
Our pro and elite athletes are chasing very high-end performance. This does not mean that every SISU Racing athlete has to subscribe to that level of commitment. At the same time, every SISU Racing athlete can expect to seek improvement and results.
o Patience: It takes time!
o Progression: We always aim to progress the load and training stress.
o Specificity: We need to nail specific training to facilitate evolution/change.
o Consistency: The big one. Improvements come about from stringing together many months of consistent and valuable training load.
Underlying all these is the fact that the goal of our training is to prepare ourselves to race. As simple as this sounds, it is important to understand as many athletes fall into the trap of thinking of the goal of training is “hard work”. It is not as simple as that.
We only train in order to perform, hence, effective training is when we gain positive adaptations. If you have this as a bedrock, or foundation, of your training, then you can make smart decisions.
Now busy athletes need to consider how often and how much to train. A SISU Racing training week is always built around key or foundational, training sessions. These are the ‘do not miss’ sessions that provide the main specific training load of any given week.
Every athlete should place their emotional and physical emphasis on achieving these sessions to the best of their ability in any given week.
When each athlete maps their training week, they should look ahead to their personal, work and social calendar. Firstly, they schedule the key sessions within the training framework.
Remember, the lens should not be ‘How much training do I need to do?’ Instead, refine the thinking into ‘How much time do I truly have?’ Then add training to this. It is a subtle but a key shift in thinking.
We recommend athletes walk through the following process when determining their training availability.
o Question 1: Go through your weekly schedule and identify the slots of time you nearly always have to add in training. How much time is this? What time of the day? These are slots that are rarely disrupted by work, family, life etc.
o Question 2: Identify the time slots that you often can train or have to yourself but are more likely to be disrupted.
o Question 3: Identify any slots that are typically designated for ‘life’ activities, whether work meetings, commuting, family or whatever.
Once you have completed this, you now have a clearer picture of where to aim to integrate the KEY sessions of the week. Supporting sessions can be placed in the slots defined in question two.
Much of this depends on how busy (work, family, social) your week is, what your background is and how much fatigue you are carrying.
If you have a very busy week or are tired, then you may decide to scale back on the number of optional workouts. If you are fresh or have more time, you may include more workouts.
o How much sleep will I typically get?
o Do these nights of sleep allow me to get 8 hours at least twice weekly?
If you are restricted on the above three questions, you need massive awareness, and maybe a refinement of the plan. Ensure you avoid simply chasing the number of workouts you can cram in or rigidly sticking to a full quota of weekly workouts, no matter what. Instead, nail the key sessions then follow your life, time, energy and commitments to feed in those supporting workouts.
I would MUCH rather see 12 excellent hours of your training over 16 hours of up and down fatigue-ridden training!
To find out more about SISU Racing coaching plans and how we craft personalised plans that fit into your busy lifestyle, check out our coaching page.
Whether you dread or look forward to it, most athletes at least recognise the importance of setting goals.
But setting the right kind of goals, the ones that inspire action and positive change, can be tough.
We all want to have a better swim, bike, and run. But if you’ve been training for a while, you probably realise that prioritising is a must in order to continue to improve.
Instead of viewing it as a boring off-season, think of the winter as an exciting opportunity. You’ll never have the chance in May to put your run on autopilot while you bring up your bike, because too many races will interfere. Take advantage of this time period to improve your weaknesses.
An example of a performance goal is to finish a run race with a time improvement instead of a certain placement. Keenan advises to pick your goal based on variables you can control as much as possible. For example: Don’t worry if the world champ in your age group shows up, focus on your own time rather than on your performance relative to theirs.
Start with your big goal for the season, then work backward to figure out what you should be doing between now and then. Keenan says to think of this as backward planning, or walking down a “set of stairs” with the bottom of the stairs representing your current fitness. This will help you determine goal checkpoints along the way. Smaller goals as you go will keep you accountable and the motivation high.
Not only does the goal, “improve swim form,” sound not fun, but it’s also really tough to measure. Choose an exciting goal with metrics to quantify your progress, like to improve your turnover by 10 percent.
By “big payoff” we mean getting the most you can out of your effort and time. For instance, if you’re new to cycling, you can probably make a lot of improvements with some focused training. Conversely if you’re a former competitive cyclist, then it probably makes more sense to focus on another sport.
Keeping their goals to themselves. It’s important to let others know and ask for support to facilitate accountability, motivation, and helpful feedback.
Trying to change too much too quickly. Don’t go “all-in” too fast and then risk getting overwhelmed or burned out.
Lack of documentation. It’s not enough to think about a goal, it’s more effective to write it down, whether you use journaling or a tool on your phone.
Setting unrealistic goals. You want your goal to be huge, but not impossible.
Not putting in the work. Truly going after a long-term goal is about taking small actions on a daily basis to get slightly closer to the end result.
Your running style has a direct affect on how much energy you expend at a given speed. One way to improve your technique is to have your gait analysed by an expert with a video camera and a treadmill.
Research suggests that video feedback is an effective way of improving your gait, but it can take several video sessions to make a real difference.
Another method is visualisation or proprioceptive cue.
With that in mind, here are five cues for you to try. You’ll get the best results if you use one at a time throughout the entire length of every run you do. You don’t need to master one before moving to the next, just pick a different cue for each run.
No matter how good your stride becomes, you’ll always benefit from using them regularly.
What you should eat will depend on the type of training you plan on doing.
This could play an important role in optimising endurance performance as the sparing of muscle glycogen will help to delay fatigue. This mechanism provides rationale for why athletes might want to try fasted training; however it must be noted that fasted training should only be carried out for exercise of a low intensity.
These sessions place huge physiological demands on the body and therefore should not be done in the fasted state. Fuelling your muscles properly and maximising muscle glycogen stores will allow you to work to a much higher intensity; something which is very important for training adaptation.
Therefore, whilst fasted training may provide some benefits, it is very important that you do hard or strenuous sessions in the fed state to mirror race day efforts and maximise training potential.
If you’re an athlete that exercises at a high intensity in the morning, getting up even earlier to take on some fuel can be challenging. Food can take a long time to digest and therefore exercising just after you have eaten may leave you experiencing GI issues.
After these prolonged or intense sessions, it is important that you have a recovery strategy in place to encourage training adaptation. Try to get some nutrients in as quickly as possible. A great way to do this is in the form of recovery shakes. These typically contain both carbohydrates for muscle glycogen replenishment and protein to contribute to muscle growth and maintenance.
These can be consumed immediately after exercise to kick-start the recovery process. Remember to follow this with nutrient dense food at your next meal.
Breathing is such an important part of straight-line swimming and it’s also the number one thing that stops people from reaching their swimming potential. I always start with breathing when I’m coaching, whether the person in the water is a beginner or a time-chaser.
When I am at the pool I often see people sprinting 50 metres, then having to stop for about two minutes just to get their breath back. They’re not unfit, they just need to be more efficient when they breathe. The most important thing to remember is that it should feel really natural.
The problem usually happens because you’ve taken in such a huge lung full of oxygen that your natural instinct is to get rid of the same amount that you have taken in, which means your breathing starts spiking up and down erratically, and that just isn’t sustainable over any kind of distance. If you were going for a jog you wouldn’t run for a bit, then stop and gulp for air, then run again. You’d breathe as you were going along; make it a part of what you were doing. Swimming should be the same.
The key is to keep your breathing relaxed and consistent, and you’ll be amazed by how much easier you’ll find swimming.
The trick is to breathe in through your mouth when your head is to the side, and breathe out through your nose when your head is in the water. And that’s it. It doesn’t matter whether you only breathe on one side or on both (bilaterally); the most important thing is just to stick to a regular rhythm, and take in only as much air as you actually need.
Just like with breathing, getting this right means going against a natural instinct in this case, wanting to look forwards at all times to see where you’re going. The issue with doing this in the water is that it turns your body into a see-saw. When your head goes up, your legs go down and this means you’re battling against much more drag.
The good news is It’s really easy to sort out. Get your head into the right position and the rest of your body will follow, allowing you to swim further and faster.
To do this, you’ll need to start thinking about where your eyes are looking. What you want and it’ll feel a little odd to start with, but it gets easier very quickly is to be staring directly down at the bottom of the pool. This will make your legs come up automatically behind you, turning your body into a straight line. When you’re nice and flat there’s minimal drag, which means you can swim so much more easily. There will be a sweet spot that feels correct for you but start with your eyes directly down.
Rotating efficiently means you get an extra bit of reach with every stroke which in turn means you’re doing fewer strokes and expending less energy. Think of it as “free” (or lazy!) swimming you’re getting something for nothing. Another big advantage is that your arms are having to do a little less work, which reduces your risk of shoulder pain, or even injury. Good news all round.
Once you’ve nailed breathing and body position, you can move onto the final piece of the straight-line swimming puzzle: propulsion.
Propulsion is just how you move yourself forwards through the water. Anyone who swims will be using it to an extent, of course but if you want to make the process really efficient you need to think less about your legs and more about your arms.
When you’re swimming, it’s your arms that should be doing most of the work and if you’ve got your body position right, you’ll find you can automatically focus your attention on them. You want to make sure every ounce of energy is going into your progress through the water.
What you need to do is imagine you’re moving the water through the centre line of your body pull through from your fingertips and engage your lats (the muscles that run all the way down your back; there’s a reason swimmers tend to develop powerful shoulders!) by bending your elbows when your hand enters the water.