Racing is a very tenacious branch. It’s as much psychological as it is physical. The demands are arduous because it requires constant testing, usually against other athletes as well as against your own goals and that great truth-teller – the clock. It requires constant recuperation and resting, too. I’ve been asked more times than I can…
This period of training is a favorite for many athletes. The peaking phase is the time when you put all of the other branches together into one: endurance, strength, and intervals. It is the variety branch. It is the time when you are incredibly fit and loving it. It’s the time when you get to…
If you want to race fast, train fast and train strong. This is the phase that builds upon the lower three branches by adding your first Red Line workouts with short or endurance intervals. It’s the branch where you start time trials at specific heart rate points to test improvement. It’s the period of seeing…
It’s time to add that all-important exercise stimulus: resistance training. Following many of the same principles that weight lifters use, athletes stimulate muscle power by applying appropriate resistance stimuli to the specific activity they are training for. That is, it is known that if you “overload” the specific muscle by repeatedly asking it to work…
This is the starting point of any training program. Base training is slow, easy, fun. It is the lower three zones; endurance training is the same as basic training. The purpose of spending time in the first branch is to develop your cardiovascular endurance to the point that you can easily sustain a workout without a…
Climbing trees has always been fun for me. Even as a kid when my three older brothers and I had a tree fort and played games in the fort, it was adventuresome. It’s the same today. I love to climb trees and I hope that you fall in love with climbing this tree because it…
If you’ve made it to the Red Line zone, with heart rates from 90% to 100% of your maximum heart rate, you have arrived at the top of the heap. Maybe we should say, if you’ve made it to the Z5 Red Line zone on purpose, you have arrived. Like the Threshold zone, this is…
Welcome to the Threshold zone! Even if you don’t choose to train in the Z4 Threshold zone, it’s a place you’re no doubt familiar with, though maybe you are unfamiliar with its name. Here’s a hint: this is also known as the “shortness of breath” zone. Sound familiar? It’s the zone where you feel the…
The Aerobic zone gives you the most “bang for your buck.” Here you’ll get the most benefits in the least amount of time. If you said, “I want everything from exercise,” this is your zone. The Z3 Aerobic zone gets you fitter, gets you faster, gets you thinner. That’s why it’s been touted for decades…
As a life-long athlete, I’ve never had the sort of intimate relationship with the fat battle that some people have, but a woman named Lisa brought reality home to me with her experience. “I was 135 pounds before the birth of my first daughter, but 210 pounds after the birth of my second. One day,…