Do you have the discipline?
Based on the latest research, for most people, the answer is no. If you are training for an event or trying to set a new personal best, you are probably like most athletes and letting your workout intensity drift into the middle, not hard enough and not easy enough.
I really wish it wasn’t true, but I have seen it enough times to believe it. The good news is you are not alone. The other good news, if it is true, you can change it, easily, if you want to.
Research presented this week at the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) Conference by Professor Stephen Seller, and highlighted by Alex Hutchinson (author of Endure) in The Globe and Mail has proven what I have long thought to be one of the critical errors that recreational athletes make when training.
No intensity discipline.
Intensity discipline is the ability to stick to the prescribed workout intensity. If it is supposed to be easy or excruciating. As long as you are able, stick to the intensity recommended.
Do you have intensity discipline?
It could make the difference in reaching your training goals successfully. It is also something that you can change, easily, at your next workout.
All you need is the discipline.
To go slower.
To stick to your plan, with 80% of your endurance workouts, being comfortable and 20% that should be harder than you are doing now. You are probably not doing either. If you are like most, you are in the middle.
Your performance will suffer if you are spending all your time in the middle. The research supports my observations from years of experience trying to convince people to make most workouts easy and a few really, really hard.
Elite endurance athletes, the successful ones, spend the majority of their endurance workouts at an easy pace. if they are running they are walking up hills, they are spinning in an easy gear on the bike, they are spending a lot of time at a very comfortable pace. Very comfortable.
There is no glory or gains to be made in pushing the pace during most of your training. Let me repeat that, there is no benefit in making every workout hard, or sprinting to pass that one person in front of you, to go all out at the end of your workout, to push the pace because you are feeling good.
You are supposed to feel good.
The whole point of the majority of your workouts should be to feel good, comfortable. To maintain a steady state and keep that pace for the entire workout, not just until you feel like going harder because we know that it is tempting to do.
At the ACSM conference Ball State researchers found that in female athletes
As the athletes let their training “drift into the middle” not easy enough, not hard enough, they don’t get the benefits of their training plan. Another study from the University of Wisconsin Professor Carl Foster says that most athletes believe that the easy days are too easy and then they can’t recover adequately to make the hard days hard enough.
Hard is really hard.
It is also the smallest part of your training. 20% of the time you are maintaining the discipline to push yourself and you can’t do that if you don’t have the discipline to go easy the rest of the time.
Think your workouts are too hard? Or maybe you are wondering if you are sticking to the best plan? Is every workout exhausting? Or do they all feel easy? Tell me about your intensity discipline.
Change your mind, change your health,
Shayla
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