When most athletes think about limiters, they think in and around the qualities that go together to make up their events. If Johnny Kona has a functional threshold of 320W and yours is 280W then you might consider that a limiter to your event specific goals. Perhaps it is, however, early winter is not the time to be thinking about these event specific qualities. Early winter is the time of year to consider some of the more basic and often ignored qualities that go together to make up the qualities that might eventually limit your performance in your specific event.

These qualities lack the glamour of the more advanced abilities (after all, everyone considers themselves to be “advanced” right?) but don’t be mistaken, a lack of these basic abilities will set the ceiling for the level of specific fitness that you’re able to attain at the end of the season. A long time ago, legendary Romanian coach and periodization guru, Tudor Bompa, suggested that “the limits to specific performance are set during general preparation,” and that is still true today whatever your sport may be.

So what are the basic qualities and what are their purposes?

Strength
Muscles move stuff. Whether that stuff is a squat bar loaded to 900lbs or your body over 140.6 miles, it takes a certain amount of muscle to perform the respective tasks. Muscle is also fundamentally limited in the power per unit that it can produce aerobically, assuming average economy, in the vicinity of 13-14W/kg (Beekley et al., 2006). So, while it is a worthy and necessary goal for ironman athletes to make their muscles as aerobic as possible, they must also begin with sufficient mass to “get the job done.” There is a reason that we don’t see 120lb Kenyan runners dominating Kona. While they are perhaps the best aerobically trained athletes on the planet, they lack the size and strength to propel themselves plus the mass of their bikes at the required speeds to be competitive. It takes a good amount of aerobically trained muscle to pull this off. This is not just an issue at the front of the field. If your open running is noticeably stronger than your biking or you perform far better in long races than short, then basic strength/muscle mass may be a limiter for you!

Aerobic Base
I’m not talking about event specific endurance here (that will come later in the year), just basic metabolic fitness. An aerobic base serves an important purpose in determining your overall work capacity and for this reason, is important for all athletes in all sports. An aerobically fit athlete will recover more quickly from any given type of work (due to improved vascularity and metabolic processes in the Type 1 fibers) and for this reason, it is an important component in the training of any athlete, even if the work that he or she will be recovering from in the late season is strength or power based. The only “negative” of aerobic work is that it will de-train the athlete’s anaerobic power and shift the fatigue curve down and to the right. Therefore, allowing sufficient time to re-train the anaerobic systems is important for an athlete who may need them in his/her event (not a concern for ironman athletes)

The biggest two issues with this quality for ironman athlete are:

1. Too much long endurance stuff in the early season. Many overdo aerobic endurance (and neglect strength and mobility) early in the year.
2. Athletes who have tough winters to deal with will often kick off their year with an intensity block (FTP/VO2) before this aerobic base is established. This is a mistake and will ultimately compromise the load that they can handle both in the early season and during the specific preparation for their event.

Mobility/Stability/Muscle Balance
Maybe the most important and most neglected basic ability for the high volume endurance athlete is mobility. Nearly all of our sport specific training takes place in positions that:

• Limit range of motion, such as sitting bent over on a bike for 6 or more hours, running so slowly that we never fully extend the hip or flex the knee.
• Are in one plane of motion. Everything is a forward movement, we’re (hopefully) never moving sideways during the course of the event.
• Involve resistance in one direction of motion. We do a lot of shoulder internal rotation against resistance in the swim but no external rotation . We do a lot of hip/knee extension against resistance in the bike and run but no hip flexion against resistance.

It is not surprising then that despite the whole three sport thing, triathletes are rarely “balanced” when it comes to weakness/tightness across the body. We use some muscles a lot that tend to become very tight (and need supplemental stretching to prevent future injury) and other muscles very little that become weak and in need supplemental strengthening to prevent future injury.

The early season is the ideal time to correct these imbalances and head off the potential future injuries that often destroy a season’s worth of preparation at the pass.

In future articles I’ll look at each of these in a little more depth and talk about some recommended standards that should be achieved before the athlete moves on to a focus on specific preparation for their events. Until then…

Train smart