Maintaining Fitness When Your Race is Postponed By Weeks to Months Due to Ongoing Pandemic
Confusion exists among athletes when it comes to training changes when sports events are postponed due to on-going pandemic. The new race dates can be several months into the future. This is the state of affairs now in many parts of the world.
The story is a bit like this. You’ve given blood and sweat for more than 10–12 weeks on the knowledge that event will be on X date, but with 1week to go, you’re notified that X date is moved to Y date, only 5 months away.
Its a catch-22. If you stop training altogether, you slowly but certainly lose what you just gained in aerobic fitness, which is a big waste of time. If you continue to hammer on for additional months till new race date, you could lose vision, or risk getting “stale” and bored.
Can science help give some insights?
In elegant studies done in the USA in the 1980’s, groups of healthy runners and cyclists were asked to reduce their training frequencies to 2 days/week or 4 days/week with reduction in training volume of up to 33–66%.
Before reducing their training, they were made to train for 10 weeks at 40 min/day, 6 days/week and increased their VO2max by 20–25% from baseline.
Remarkably, both “reduced-training” groups continued to show the same maintenance in new VO2max for the next 15 weeks when monitored at 5-week intervals.
In other words, the “minimal” dosage in training required to maintain the increased VO2max was 2 days/week but exercise intensity was the key variable for maintaining performance over time.
So if you’re someone in this confusing situation, two training strategies you can adopt can be as follows :
- Mode#1 — “Maintain My Fitness” : 2 days/week of reduced endurance training while keeping intensity the same. A “polarized” training scheme with reduced hours will be attractive.
- Mode#2 — “Increase My Fitness” : Considerably more training volume is needed to increase aerobic fitness beyond baseline during the new period of training till new race date. You’ll need to think about a renewed training scheme and commit more hours to paper. A discussion with your coach is probably required to draw up a new plan of attack.
You can switch from a period of using Mode#1 to Mode#2 as the new race date approaches. The idea is to be in shape when that time comes to start the new training phase.
With reference to Mode#1, the polarization of the weekly training can involve plenty of low intensity days combined with short high intensity days.
You can even “sprinkle” some intensity into low intensity days, as this recent study showed. Cyclists who included some short 30 second sprints plugged into their low intensity days made better improvements during a 3-week transition period than those who performed only low intensity sessions.
But some athletes like marathon runners might interpret this and go “wait a minute, I only have to exercise 2 times a week to keep my marathon shape up?”
Clarification : This is not what Mode#1 is suggesting. 2 times a week of endurance training was the minimal dosage reported which “maintained” the VO2max gained earlier from more regular endurance training.
It’s unlikely you’ll hit your marathon PB with just 2 days of training a week and very little specificity. As with any other source of information, the reduced-training literature has nuances. But maintaining where you are in training status is the key.
A more recent study from 2020 confirmed that it was lower intensity endurance training, and not decreased frequency HIIT-only training, which maintained blood pressure and glucose tolerance over simply laying down stretched on the couch.
So, if you’re a marathoner, you’ll need to be “on the move” with low intensity activities on all days of the week. Since weight gain is the most riskiest outcome from reduced training loads, you’ll need to have that “internal stove” burning to keep blood sugar under control.
Feel free to reach out to me if you have comment, corrections or thoughts on twitter.
