Into 2022

 With 2021 disappearing over the horizon and 2022 rising in the east what should we be thinking about when planning the year ahead?

Looking back on 2021 how did it go compared to what you had planned this time last year? Did you achieve your goals? Well done if you did but if things didn’t quite work out for you, what went wrong?

Several studies have shown that there is a thin line between training hard enough (consistent and progressive) and training too hard leading to injury and poor health.

The main factors which trip people up are:

Completing your planned training

Being able to complete more than 80% of your planned training weeks leads to a 7 times greater chance of achieving your goal. So you don’t need to be perfect but good is best.

Staying injury free

Most likely closely linked to the above is the ability to avoid injuries and therefore be able to meet that 80% target.

But how best to ensure you do sufficient and effective training while avoiding getting injured?

Monitoring and managing training load

There are many ways to keep track of training load from simply tracking how many miles or hours per week of running; using apps such as Training Peaks, Runalyse, WK05 or by running with Stryd and Stryd’s Powercenter app; or spreadsheet recording of sRPE x Duration.  Details of these various options need to wait for another day. But generally they are tools to attempt to guide the progression of your training within a safe margin to improve fitness without raising the risk of injury too high. 

It is often when t things appear to be going well that the temptation is to ramp up the training a bit more and to suddenly find yourself with an injury that puts you back several weeks. Just stick to the plan. Healthy but a little less fit is better than super fit but injured. We are not all training to be Olympic champions  

Sleep

It is well understood that adequate sleep promotes good health and better performance but it also leads to better recovery from exercise and leads to a reduction in injury risk. Regular tracking of morning Heart Rate Variability can give an indication of how well recovered you are and whether ready for higher intensity training that day. Low HRV can be an indication of increased stress which can lead to a greater chance of injury or illness.

Dealing with minor niggles

We are probably all too aware of the little niggle which just doesn’t go away. In an effort to avoid losing out on valuable training days we push on through it and end up in a worse condition in the days leading up to our key event.

Summary

It all seems so simple to follow the above guidelines but it does require considerable mental strength to carry it out without falling into the traps. If you have fallen foul of these in the past why not try a different approach in 2022.

Good luck and a good New Year.

To read about the above in more detail see the article by Andrew Sheaff in Peak Performance Bulletin in the following link.

Health v fitness (update)



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