Matt Fitzgerald - Triathlete Magazines Essential Week-by-Week Training Guide: Plans, Scheduling Tips, and Workout Goals for Triathletes of All Levels

T his book is not like a novel, which you need to read from start to finish, without skipping anything. Its more like a big recipe book that you can and should use one recipe at a time. There are 40 complete training plans (plus a pair of off-season training plans) in these pages, at least one of which is a good fit for you today, given your current fitness level, schedule, and event goals. But of course you cant follow multiple training plans simultaneously. So the way to use this book is to choose the best plan for you, complete it, and then pick another, and so on.

This chapter, however, is required reading. Its purpose is to give you the information youll need to choose the right training plans to follow and to get the most out of them. First Id like to explain the key features shared by all of the plans in this book. Understanding the rationale behind each of these key features will help you assume greater control over your training. In my experience, triathletes train with more motivation and discipline, and therefore get better results, when they truly understand and believe in their system of training.

There are six key features of the training plans presented in this book that you should understand before you begin using them.

Each plan has a more or less even balance in the number of swim, bike, and run workouts scheduled every week. (Note that bike and run workouts are sometimes combined into brick workouts.) Most age-group triathletes tend to do more workouts in their favorite discipline, which is almost always their strongest discipline. This is not the best way to improve as a triathlete, because you have the greatest potential for improvement in your weakest discipline, so it makes no sense to marginalize it.

On the other hand, some coaches advise triathletes to do the greatest number of workouts in their weakest discipline, precisely because it offers the greatest opportunity for improvement. I see nothing wrong with maintaining this sort of strategic imbalance for short periods of time, but in the long term triathletes who take this approach tend to lose fitness in their strongest discipline, which is also undesirable. By doing a roughly equal number of workouts in all three disciplines you get something close to the best of both worlds: You get stronger in each discipline and weaker in none.

Theres an exception in some of my middle-level half-Ironman and Ironman training plans, which include three swim workouts versus four bike and four run workouts in a typical week. At these longer race distances the swim leg is proportionally shorter than the bike and the run legs as compared to shorter race distances. Triathletes who are trying to keep their total training volume relatively moderate in preparing for longer races cant do four workouts per week in each discipline. One of them has to give, and it makes the most sense that its swimming.

One of the most common problems in the training of self-coached triathletes is a lack of variation in their workouts. They fall into a rut of doing basically the same few workouts over and over. But youll get fitter faster if you challenge your body in a variety of different ways in your swimming, cycling, and running workouts. Each of the training plans in this program incorporates a diversity of workout types, which youll learn about in the next chapter.