The Foundation of Endurance and Adventure Performance isn’t Flashy –
Its not Brutal 20 minute workouts, Its not chasing exhaustion, Its aerobic fitness and the hard part to understand is, you need to slow down to get faster. Some insight from my 29 years of coaching and working with athletes across Endurance and Adventure.
What I want to do is actually take this time to get you to believe in what the process is. Now, there’s lots of training stuff always flying around all over the place on social media and different platforms, but the truth of it is, I’ve been within this industry now for 29 years, and before then I was kind of like studying the elements of endurance.
The thing that hasn’t changed is our aerobic fitness. So everything that has come and gone, HIIT stuff, CrossFit sessions, now high rocks, all these other different things that are going on, the underpinning for our fitness within endurance and adventure performance is our aerobic system.
Now, this takes some buying into. It means you’ve got to accept that slowing down can actually make you faster. Now, everyone I have worked with over the last 29 years that has bought into this has achieved incredible goals. And these aren’t made-up people like Robin, Jan, here’s a picture, here’s a picture. This is three-time World 24-hour single speed champion Steve Date. Okay, so when I started working with Steve back, I think, 2007, he was very much a push-it-hard, believing that if he’s not working hard, he’s actually not achieving his goal. No world title. We started to work together. We started to slow things down, and Steve will attest to this. Suddenly, there was a step change. Okay, I say suddenly. Over time of locking into the process, there was a step change.
It took us about a year before Steve’s riding actually got to the level where it… Potentially should have been. The people that I’ve worked with that have gone to the South Pole, six successful athletes out of six. Again, they have applied this approach of understanding what their aerobic training actually is.
Kona Ironman athletes. I’ve trained seven people that have qualified for Kona. Myself personally qualified for the world’s 70.3s. Again, understanding the value of the underpinning aerobic fitness that is required, even if you want to do the high-end stuff, which you do need to do. If you haven’t got that underpinning of aerobic fitness, the top end will flag as well. It won’t be as strong as it could be.
So genuinely locking into that slow process will see you achieve your goals. It’s not glamorous. No one’s really able to upbeat sell it on social media because it’s not glamorous. Doing a 20-minute hot sweaty session looks amazing. Doing something steady state for a few hours doesn’t look amazing.
People will say, but I don’t have the time to do steady state. Yes, you do. You’re trying to teach your body a pattern. It doesn’t have to be four, five, six, seven hours. It doesn’t even need to be two hours. It could even be a half hour. If you’re teaching the body the correct intensity, but repeatedly through consistency, the system will develop. Your aerobic system will improve. And genuinely, I have hundreds and hundreds of athletes that can attest to this. It does really work. It’s not a fad. It has stood the test of time. It’s still kind of like there in the background because again, it doesn’t sell on media.
So don’t get drawn into that hard, fast fix kind of approach, or this is the latest thing, because there’s always the latest thing. Look at the longevity of something. If there’s a theory that has been around for, I mean, this is going to be when I was at school, you know, 40 plus years at least that I can actually say it has been around for, and it’s still going, and top-end athletes are still utilising it, why aren’t you?
If you want to learn more about your aerobic fitness and how you can try and build that into your weekly training plans and your lifestyle and everything you’ve got going on, then do drop me a message or send me an email. I’ll happily discuss it. It costs nothing to discuss these things. I really enjoy chatting about it. So if you want to learn more, you know what to do.
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