The One Thing Seminar
Going Deep On Performance
I was running with Jonser and discussing long term development for athletes. I wasn’t satisfied with my on-the-run answer so recorded the seminar below1.
What To Do
Highlights from the seminar:
Think as far out as possible.
Two to three year time horizons are appropriate.
Focus on one thing at a time.
Resist the urge to cram everything into a week, or even a month.
Get the volume first.
This requires humility with endurance intensity targets.
Respect hitting new levels of fitness.
Each time we achieve a new level, schedule an unload before starting the work required to get to the next level.
The case study in the seminar shows the above, in action, across ~1,300 days.
Where To Focus
Three metrics you want to see improving:
Baseline lactate lowers.
You have the ability to train at 1 mmol of lactate in each sport you do.
This gives you a truly easy “gear” in your main sports.
This allows you to recover while moving.
Pace/Power in your Green Zone improves.
At LT1, you see higher power/pace peaks each season.
Improvement is NOT continuous, you will see performance declines during your offseason, due to illness and each time you are intermittent with loading.
What matters is establishing a long term positive trend.
Long term volume slowly rises
Think in terms of rolling 12-month load.
Long term thinking helps maintain composure during inevitable setbacks and disappointing weeks. Embrace 1,000-day pacing.
Learn from errors and remove the choices that create disruption.
With well established general fitness, you will be able to insert a six-week specific preparation block to bring yourself into race fitness.
Don’t do race focus blocks all that often.
In the seminar, you’ll see I do one per annum.
I hope the seminar helps you achieve your goals. It’s 12 minutes long.
Resources:
No jumping squirrels appear in the seminar because my Social Media director is focused on The Lemon to Legend Online Course at our YouTube channel, which has a lot of fun animation inserted.
Looking forward to reviewing the seminar. The longer I do this stuff, the more obvious it is that getting enough rest and doing enough training is THE silver bullet for success. When the volume is at a high enough level, the problems, be them swim technique, weight, ability to focus at higher intensities just seem to melt away. Well, at least for swimming + cycling.
I like to think of myself as a 1000 day thinker...
How might you think about these observations and recommendations in a 62 year old athlete (me)?