When Can You Add More Training? - Coach Tip Tuesday

“When can I do more?”

Some variation of this question is one of the most common questions I hear from athletes who I am coaching.  Humans - and therefore athletes - are extremely biased toward solutions that involve addition.  In the context of endurance sports training, this means that athletes believe that doing more - more training, more volume, and/or more intensity - is the best way to accomplish their goals.  It is exceptionally rare for me to encounter an athlete who is seeking less or who believes that doing less will lead them to success.  And so, asking about when they will be able to do more is one of the most common queries they have when they are either beginning training or when they are in the middle of training for a goal.

When You Can Do More Depends on Many Factors

The answer to the question “When can I do more?” is the same answer I give to so many questions that athletes ask me: It depends.  Generally speaking, athletes are implementing and following a training protocol that involves the principle of progressive overload, which is a training methodology that involves gradually increasing the frequency, intensity, or volume of an activity over the course of a training plan in the interests of stimulating desired adaptations in the body to help endurance athletes reach their goals.  These desired adaptations in the body can include (but are not limited to): fatigue resistance, muscular and soft tissue strength, cardiovascular endurance, increased bone density, increased heart volume, lower blood pressure, and lower cholesterol.

Practically speaking, what the principle of progressive overload looks like is this: Workouts in one week are slightly longer or slightly more intense than they were in the previous week.  After 2-3 weeks of building week over week like this, there is a recovery week or a “down” week where volume is slightly reduced from what it was in the previous 2-3 weeks.  Collectively, these periods of up and down weeks are called mesocycles.  After several months of following a program like this, your training plan will contain workouts that are significantly longer or more intense than your workouts were at the beginning of your training plan. 

You Must Train Where You Are Based on Your Current Training Capacity

How long these workouts ultimately are - aka how much more you’ll be doing week over week - is first and foremost dependent on where you start from ability, capacity, and fitness-wise.  You can only ever train where you are; if you train beyond your current capacity, you will sustain an injury.  Planning for training loads that are under your current training capacity is the way to be able to successfully consistently be able to add more to your training over both the course of an entire Annual Training Plan and over the course of many years as you build toward your goals.  The ability to be consistent (aka to not have disruptions to training, especially those caused by injury) is the key to unlocking the ability to be able to add more to training continuously over time.

You Must Be Absorbing Your Current Training Well

The second most important element to determining when you can do more is assessing how you are absorbing the training you are doing.  In essence, you need to prove (to yourself and to a coach if you are working with one) that you can handle a given training load.  An athlete’s ability to handle training loads is subject to a lot of factors: their current fitness level, their available time to train, their motivation to train, their support system (aka family, friends, etc.) for training, and more.

If you are absorbing training well, you can do more.  Training is not just about checking a box and completing a given workout or a given series of workouts.  You need to both complete the training and absorb the training.  “Aborbing training” means that you need to be recovering well enough after each session to execute subsequent sessions with high quality.  It’s not enough to nail one session; your ability to execute consecutive training sessions with high quality is necessary to see progress over time.

You Need to Be Seeing Signs of Training Adaptation

Additionally, you also need to be seeing signs of adaptation to your training.  Adaptation is the process by which an organism adjusts to its environment; as the environment changes, the organism must adapt to survive.  In the context of endurance sports, the “environment” is the constantly varying workloads that athletes are experiencing via their workouts.  Thus, training adaptation refers to the adjustments and changes and improvements that manifest physiologically in the body in response to training and workouts.  It should be noted that training adaptations can also be psychological; the adjustments and changes to training that happen in the mind are just as valuable as the physiological changes that happen in response to training.

Training adaptation takes on many forms, and there are both objective and subjective indicators that it is taking place.  Objective indicators that you are experiencing desired and positive training adaptations include (but are not limited to): decreased average heart rates for similar workouts, a decrease in the amount of time that it takes one’s heart rate to return to normal after an interval or a workout, increased speed over similar workouts or intervals, increased cadence, and more.  Subjective indicators are your own self-assessment of how you are feeling before, during, and after workouts, and positive feelings about training generally indicate that you are experiencing positive training adaptations.  

Subjective indicators - aka an athlete’s feedback - are very valuable because objective metrics such as heart rate, power, and speed only tell one part of an athlete’s training story.  Seeing those metrics alongside what an athlete’s feedback is completes the picture and gives a comprehensive account of how training is going in all the ways that matter.  That being said, subjective indicators can be on the deceptive side because it’s easy for athletes to fall into the trap of saying what they want to be true (that Everything is Awesome) versus what they actually feel and what is actually true.  

In my experience, this is the number one way athletes get injured; they dismiss what their body is actually telling them because what they are feeling is in opposition to what they want to be feeling, and then they overdo it and cause an injury.  So for instance, it’s not uncommon for an athlete to say that they feel good about their training and workouts because they want to feel good about their training and they want to be able to do more; it’s not uncommon for athletes to say this even if they have a niggle or they are feeling tired and worn down by training.  That being said, being honest about how you are feeling is necessary if you want to successfully be able to add more to training; the ability to be truly self-aware and accurately state how you are feeling - even if (and especially if you don’t like it) - in response to training is the mark of a mature athlete.  If you are not honest about how you are feeling and you try to add more to your training, you will ultimately exceed your training capacity and will likely end up injured or burnt out.

Absorbing training and seeing positive training adaptations combine to become the green light to be able to add more to training.  “More” can come in the form of additional volume, intensity, or both.  It can also come in the form of a new activity (such as adding in running to a training plan that currently includes swimming and strength training) or a new mechanical/postural element (such as riding a different bike fit position).  It is only safe and reasonable to progress your training - aka to add more to your training - once you've adapted to the stimulus you've been recently imposing in your training.  “Recently” means over the last 3-8 weeks.  You may have had a high level of fitness in the past, but what you’ve done in the past is not the most relevant piece of the puzzle when it comes to determining what training is best for you right now.  What you’ve recently done - aka where you currently are - is the most relevant and important thing to consider.

How Can You Tell When Doing More in Training Isn’t Appropriate?

There are many signs that you should not be doing more in training.  As I mentioned earlier, it’s very common for athletes to discount or outright ignore these signs if the signs are not in alignment with what they want to be doing in training.

When a given workout session feels difficult or a given week of training feels difficult, this is a sign that you either need to hold there or even regress slightly (remember: there is value in subtractive changes).  “Difficult” can mean many things:

• That the session itself was too hard for you to complete successfully or with quality
• That you felt more fatigued than normal after a given workout
• That you felt a niggle or some discomfort during or after a workout
• That you weren’t able to execute a subsequent training session in a week well after completing other workouts in a given training week

If you find that you are experiencing any of these things, the wise choice is to forgo progressions, to reassess your current training, and to either hold where you are in your workouts or regress back to workouts in which you were feeling stronger and better.  Once you’ve started to feel better in your workouts - either in the “holding pattern” workouts or in the regressed workouts - you can safely progress from there.

How to Safely Add More Training to Your Training Plan

Assuming that you are currently absorbing training well, how do you safely add more training to your training plan?  You generally can safely change one variable of your training at a time or you can impose one new stimulus at a time.  In the context of endurance sports, training stimulus refers to the specific type of stress you are imposing on the body in workouts that is intended to elicit specific responses in the body that result in desired adaptations such as improved endurance or faster paces.  If you try to change too many variables and or/ impose multiple new stimuli concurrently, you will likely be doing too much too soon and exceeding your current capacity.

Examples of changes in stimulus include (but are not limited to):

• Volume - How long a workout is and how much overall training you are completing in a training week
• Intensity - How hard an interval or workout is
• Frequency - How often you are doing a given type of workout
• Number of workout days - How many days you are planning workouts in a training week
• Workout Discipline - What type of workout you are doing (cycling, running, swimming, and strength training are all examples of workout disciplines)
• Rest time - How long your rest intervals are within a workout
• Number of intervals - How many intervals of intensity that you plan within a workout
• ‍Mechanical changes - i.e. changes to your running form, swimming mechanics, or Bike Fit

Generally speaking, you only want to change one of these at a time.  So, for instance, you would want to increase your volume before changing the intensity of your workouts.  (This principle is one of the fastest ways to get faster in training.)  Or, if you want to add something else to your training (such as strength training or running), you should scale back on the volume of what you are currently doing workout-wise so your overall training volume remains the same when you add in the new discipline.  By changing one variable at a time and ensuring that you are responding positively to that change, you will have a higher probability of being able to successfully change more variables in the future and to add more to your training over time.

The Bottom Line

Over the course of an Annual Training Plan, the ability to safely add more to training is the goal of almost all endurance athletes, no matter what goals they are training for.  This ability to safely add more to training is dependent on many important factors, most especially your current training ability and capacity as well as how well you are absorbing and adapting to training.  By monitoring your training and being honest in your self-assessments of your training, you can safely and successfully navigate the path to adding more to your training.