Explaining more about what he will cover, Jim says, “This webinar will be covering how to track fitness patterns and prevent performance plateaus in WKO+ software, using advanced charts and graphs. Many coaches utilize WKO+ software to assess an individual session, but miss the opportunities to track overall fitness, recognize performance plateaus sooner, and make training decisions based on all the data available in a bigger picture, encompassing all sessions.”

“The webinar will show how to create alternative charts, enhance the data given in the Performance Management Chart (PMC), and how to interpret these to make better training decisions. If you are a coach or self-coached athlete, this session will help you to better understand how you or your athletes are adapting to training stresses.”

Learn more on Jim’s blog and sign up for the webinar at Performance Webinars. Coaches, let us know if you’re also planning to give a webinar by emailing us at info@trainingpeaks.com so that we can share the news!

Triathlon coaching in the modern hi-tech world of the internet has created its own challenges for coaches and athletes alike. The key to being a successful coach is being organized. Coaches typically take on more than they can handle and the athletes get less attention than they want. Many times as a coach, you’ll feel overwhelmed with how many phone calls you need to return or how many emails are in your in-box. In addition, you have schedules due to your athletes and training logs to review. If you aren’t careful this can turn into a vicious circle of always playing ‘catch up’.

Depending on how many athletes you coach (more on this below), you can break your athletes into three groups. For example I coach 12 athletes and I break these athletes into 3 groups of 4 athletes and the maximum number of schedules I write is 4 schedules per week. I like to create my athlete schedules in 3 week blocks and go through the cycle every three weeks.

Knowing how many athletes you can coach is usually different than how many athletes you can coach well. What you think you can do and what is reality is usually very different. It took me a number of years to realize that I couldn’t coach 30, 20 or even 15 athletes at a time. I know my ‘sweet spot’ in the number of athletes I can coach and I set a limit. Quality coaching is in high demand, even in these economic times – if you can do a superior job, typically you will get rewarded quite well for it. Trying to coach 20 athletes at $150/month can be much harder than coaching 12 athletes at $250/month. Once you can establish yourself as a high quality coach, you will be able to cut back on the number of athletes you coach and ultimately charge more for your services.

Why is this important to your success? Organizing and managing how many schedules you write keeps your stress in check and allows you more time to meet with and to actually do the all too forgotten ‘in person’ coaching.

Since we’ve started the internet coaching era, coaches do less ‘coaching’ than ever before. One of the best ways to actually see how your athletes are faring in their workouts is to actually ‘see them’ training – even if it’s just once per month. Setting up a weekly or monthly training session goes a long way to keeping multiple athletes happy and on track to their goals. A group session let’s you view multiple athletes at once, and it allows your athletes see you coaching which will create a lot of credibility with your athletes.

The internet is an easy way to keep in touch with remote athletes and believe it or not you can actually see and converse with your athletes live with web cams. If your athletes can get videotaped while swimming, biking or running, you can also see how they are training and make adjustments without actually being there. Nothing will ever take the place of actual in person coaching, but there are ways to successfully coach from a distance.

At D3 Multiport, we use an incredible training program system from www.TrainingPeaks.com – this system allows us to load our plans quickly, keep track of our athlete’s progress and to know when an athlete has completed a workout. On top of that we have access to food logs, as well as downloaded power and heart rate monitor files. I know when an athlete has completed and logged a workout on TrainingPeaks when a simple email is delivered to my inbox, with the athlete’s comments. I can check this rather quickly and if action is needed I can email or call the athlete immediately.

This makes managing my athletes quite easy. I typically set aside Mondays to look over the training week to see how the actual time spent training compares to what was scheduled. On Tuesday and Wednesday I have my scheduled phone calls taken care of and on Thursday morning I write my next block of training. This leaves me with Friday to either follow up on athlete questions or make changes to schedules if needed. Once again, there is no perfect week, but I try to stick to this schedule as best I can and if something comes up unexpectedly I have the time to take care of it. Being able to have the time to be accessible to your athletes will go a long way towards promoting yourself as a high quality coaching service that delivers the goods that your athletes expect.

Coaches: get started with a free trial TrainingPeaks account today!

About the author:

Mike Ricci is a Level III USA Triathlon Certified Coach and has been coaching endurance athletes since 1989. Mike founded D3 in 2000, and has slowly added top-notch, USAT certified coaches each year to handle the demand for high quality triathlon coaching. In the past five years, D3 Coaches have coached hundreds of athletes to their first triathlon and hundreds more to become Ironman Finishers. In 2009, D3 was awarded the job of writing the training programs for the USA World Championship Teams for the seventh consecutive year.

This article is based on presentations given at the US Olympic Committee’s recent Altitude Symposium as well as my own experiences coaching endurance athletes over the last decade.

Is altitude right for you, or your athletes?
Far more important than your elevation is the quality of training that you achieve at your training camp. My #1 piece of advice would be to go to the location where the training is best.

Endurance athletes that struggle to pace themselves in a group situation, or who rely heavily on their anaerobic fitness, will have a difficult time at altitude. For this reason, I think that mature athletes will tend to do better than young athletes.

You may have heard of “non-responders” to altitude. In my experience, it is far more likely that you are dealing with a slow responder; a poor pacer; or a lack of basic endurance for the workload of the training camp.

If you place yourself in a hole at altitude then you are likely to be staying in that hole until you get home. So if you get sick then best to pack it in, head home and learn for next time.

However… don’t give up on altitude! It is often reported that athletes gain strength with each altitude exposure. Learning how to adjust to the stress altitude will make you a better athlete at all elevations.

Read more in the full article on why to go to altitude, how to use altitude, and what an altitude training camp might look like. Track your own altitude training in a TrainingPeaks account to see what effect it has on your performance!

Gordo can be found over at www.EnduranceCorner.com where he coaches endurance athletes and leads cycling-focused training camps. His triathlon training plans are also available on TrainingPeaks.

Director of Credit Suisse in Chicago and a father of five, David Hirsch doesn’t have too much free time left over for triathlon training. However, with the help of TrainingPeaks and his coach, he’s able to manage his schedule efficiently enough to put in the hours necessary for Ironman training.

“If I don’t get my training in during the morning, it usually doesn’t happen because there are too many things going on schedule-wise or I just don’t have any energy. With TrainingPeaks, I like the fact I can communicate with my trainer. I haven’t used a trainer up until the Ironman distance, so I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t overlooking anything… It was very valuable to have him check in and put little things on my calendar, make sure I was paying attention, and I’d try to give him some feedback, if something was hard or I wasn’t able to do a workout he’d say well, you know, make sure you get this or that workout in.”

Learn more about how David manages his training in the video interview, and find a trainer on our Coach Directory if you’re looking for some guidance in your own training!

Question: As a triathlete, should I be changing my diet through the year depending on my training? Like eating more protein in the winter, more carbohydrate in the summer, etc? In other words, do I change my diet throughout the training year?

Answer: This is actually a more complex question than you may realize! In training, we often hear the term “periodization” thrown around, which refers to splitting a training year into specific blocks that focus on specific aspects of training, like endurance, power or speed.

When addressing nutrition, periodization refers to dividing your yearly nutritional plan into several distinct segments that apply to daily, weekly, or monthly cycles of training. While there are many different ways to put together your annual training plan, the basic idea behind nutrition periodization is that your dietary habits should match your training habits.

Unfortunately, fueling your body for multi-sport training is not as simple as fueling a car. With a car, you simply put fuel in the gas tank when you’re running low or when you’re prepping for high mileage days. With triathlon, however, you not only have several different physiological systems, or “engines”, that you’re fueling, but you also have three different types of fuel: fat, protein, and carbs.

The key to nutrition periodization is to match the amount and timing of these three fuel types with the volume and intensity of your training (which affect which “engine” you’re using).

So you are essentially optimizing carbohydrate intake for glucose and glycogen derived energy, optimizing protein intake for lean muscle mass and immune system recovery, and optimizing fat intake for long fuel sources, as well as physiological balance of hormones and other fat dependent functions.

The final key is to manage your body weight (which ultimately affects your power:weight ratio) by adjusting your nutrition on days or periods of physical inactivity.

Sound complicated? A little bit, but not as much as it sounds. Let’s look at a few examples, using general terms to describe each period of the multi-sport season.

Base/Foundation training
This is the time of the season when you are laying down the groundwork of aerobic conditioning. Workouts are typically long and intensity fairly low, meaning that you’re using quite a bit of fat for fuel, and a good portion of carbohydrates as well. Remember, the lower the intensity, the more fat is used as a fuel for your “low-intensity engine”, and the harder you work, the more you turn to carbs as a fuel for your “high-intensity engine”. Not a huge amount of speed and force work is taking place, and with this decreased muscle repair demand, protein needs are lower (protein will be used to fuel your “muscle-building engine”). A sample carbohydrate/protein/fat percentage ratio might be about 60% carbs, 13% protein, and 27% fat.

Build/Intensity/Preparation
Your longer, harder efforts are increasing, and you are spending a greater period of time at lactate threshold. Many of your workouts include intervals and high intensity workouts, so dependence on carbohydrate as an energy source is increasing, and use of fat will decrease. Carbs now increase to 65%, protein increases to 15%, and fat drops a bit, down to 20% of total dietary intake.

Racing/Specialization/Peak
Efforts during this time of season are hardest, and involve difficult, high-intensity lactate threshold, above lactate threshold, and VO2 max efforts. A good deal of time is spent developing power, speed, and strength, which places a high demand on the body for carbohydrate (for high intensity energy) and protein (for muscle recovery). To enhance power:weight ratio, unnecessary amounts of subcutaneous fat should also be kept at a minimum during this phase, meaning your body fat percentage should be the lowest of the year. Ratios now increase to about 68% carbs, 17% protein, and decrease to 15% fat.

Recuperation/Strength/Recovery
As you transition into the off-season, and focus on goal setting, strength training, and cross-training, carbohydrate and total caloric needs will decrease, while protein will be more necessary for muscle building and recovery. A sample ratio would be back down to 60% carbs, with 18% protein, 22% fat.

Although it requires getting into more detail, these nutrient values can also be defined in terms of grams of fuel per kilogram of body weight. You have probably seen very high recommendations for protein intake in athletes, but the importance of carbohydrates and fat as fuel takes precedence for endurance athletes. At the most, protein only supplies about 15% of the total energy for exercise, and more than 1.4 grams of protein per pound of body weight has not been shown to give much benefit.

To help you have a more dynamic diet, I have created a periodized nutrition plan for TrainingPeaks called “Complete Nutrition Plan for Ironman Triathlon”. It can be used for Half-IM or IM triathletes, and it actually takes all these concepts and puts them together for you with zero guesswork. The plan is downloadable to your TrainingPeaks calendar. You can also check out Ben Greenfield’s Books on Amazon. Enjoy!

This article was also posted on TriathaNewbie.com, Guiding Beginner Triathletes into the World of Mini-Triathlons.