Three Pillars
If you are like most people, you work to a 7 day cycle. In life and training. The world works that way and in most sporting circumstances we work that way also. This has led me to use my 3 pillars as part of my coaching philosophy.
It works like this…..
Pillar 1 : Bike intervals and / or strength
Pillar 2 : Run intervals and / or strength
Pillar 3 : The endurance weekend / block
What do we do in between? Recover from the pillar days and build our aerobic foundation. It’s important to note also right here and right now that your “in between days” you will carry fatigue. You won’t be jumping out of your skin as your body is still recovering from the “Pillar Day”.
Now our week starts to look like this :
Weekly Set-up: Monday - Active recovery from the endurance weekend
Tuesday - Bike Intervals (plus aerobic run and/or swim)
Wednesday - Aerobic foundation / recover from Tuesday
Thursday - Run Intervals (plus aerobic bike and/or swim)
Friday - Aerobic foundation / recover from Thursday
Saturday - Endurance Bike
Sunday - Endurance Run
How does swim fit into that ? I believe that for 90% of the year any hard efforts get built into each session. It gets sprinkled through the week according to the athlete’s strength’s / weaknesses and goals. I do use hard / threshold swim days - but only at specific times in a block and only sparingly.
What if your situation is different? Say you work on Saturday? Or you cant do the quality runs on Thursday ? All good !!! we still use our 3 pillars - but adjust the days to a best fit for you !!
An advanced method on this concept. For those building at the top end you can try double threshold days where you would do threshold bike and run on the same day - then use the next day for recovery in a normal manner. You dont take this sort of day lightly but and you need to control your intensity and build yourself towards doing it.
Take home message - Whilst every session is a “key session” in endurance training we do have key days to focus on specific outcomes. The 3 pillars approach allows a mental switch to occur and a focus to be applied to different parts of the week.