Recently signed up for a duathlon sprint distance at the end of august. Though running is not a new stimulus for me ( just did my first 5k this past weekend) cycling will be. On top of that my running distances will now increase. And I also have it in my head to try a sprint distance triathlon next year.
with this in mind, I’m running into a roadblock on how I approach my lifting. Should I keep volume the same and just adjust intensity, keeping it low as to not affect my running and cycling too much? Do I cut volume in half ? I understand that building muscle is gonna be extremely hard but I’d like to hold onto as much muscle as I can. Currently lifting 4x a week, two of those are squats and deadlifts. I’m not so much worried about my upper body training as the cardio doesn’t mess with that at all, it’s the lower body I’m worried about.
Brett,
I think this probably is best handled via a coaching consult, as how-to program for you a very specific situation for an individual requires additional background info, time spent discussing ideas, etc.
In general, we would recommend continuing resistance training during preparation for nearly any non-barbell sport. Depending on your conditioning volume you’ll be doing for the 5/20/2.5 and time you have available to train, you can probably lift 2-3x/wk doing whole body sessions and not a lot of change from what you’re currently doing now until you want to peak, which should likely start at the beginning of August.
-Jordan
Thanks for the input Jordan I appreciate it. I would definitely like to have a coach I just can’t spare the funds right now unfortunately so I’ll be doing my own programming
Unless you do 1 time coaching consults ?
Yeo, we do 1-time consults as well.
One way to think about structuring this is in “stress units”, which would be determined by the RPE of a session x the duration. Say you did a lifting workout that was 1 hour long and sRPE (session RPE) 7, the stress units would be 7 (RPE multiplied by duration in hours). Then, say you had a running workout that was sRPE 9 and 30 minutes, yielding 4.5 stress units. You might start by tallying up your current stress units for a given training week and then aiming to maintain that value (or close) for a few weeks while shifting where the stress is coming from, e.g. conditioning over lifting. Then, small increases in total stress can be applied, if needed, to drive additional adaptations.
The above is 100% made up and there’s not really a large body of evidence on specific programming how-to’s . This might be useful conceptually though.
-Jordan
Jordan last night I went to the coaching part of your website and filled out the questionnaire , is this the best route to set up a 1 time consult or should I email you directly?