David Warden – 80/20 Endurance

Call me strange, but I love building training plans. It’s one of my favorite activities, right up there with training itself. That’s why I got together with David Warden to create 80/20 Endurance, which, as you well know, exists for the primary purpose of creating training plans for endurance athletes of all types and abilities.

Nevertheless, I recognize that training plans aren’t perfect. They have a fixed duration, a fixed weekly workout schedule, a fixed volume progression — everything about them is fixed. We try to overcome this limitation by creating lots of different options so that any given athlete is able to select a plan that’s close to perfect. But close to perfect still isn’t perfect.

Some degree of post-selection customization is almost always required to take a readymade training plan from almost perfect to perfect. The most common issues are as follow:

The weekly workout schedule doesn’t match up with the athlete’s life schedule (e.g., the athlete prefers to do long rides or runs on Saturdays, but the plan schedules them on Sundays).
The plan is X weeks long, but the athlete’s “A” race is either fewer or more than X weeks away. In other words, the plan is either too short or too long.
The athlete wishes to do one or more “B” races during the plan period, but these aren’t necessarily included in the plan.
The athlete will be unable to complete some of the workouts in the plan due to expected travel or some other scheduling conflict.

Let’s take a brief look at how to handle each of these scenarios.

Adjusting the Weekly Workout Structure

In most cases, this is the easiest type of adjustment to make. A couple of key principles will help you modify your training plan’s weekly workout structure to fit your routine.

Don’t schedule hard workouts back to back.
Don’t schedule similar workouts back to back.

The first principle is the hard/easy rule, which stipulates that challenging workouts should not be scheduled on consecutive days. When shuffling workouts around, be sure to insert at least one lighter day of training between days containing long endurance sessions, high-intensity intervals, or any other workouts expected to result in a high level of fatigue.

The other key principle is balance, according to which the various workout types should be distributed as evenly as possible throughout the week. Suppose you’re a triathlete who swims, bikes, and runs three times each per week. In adjusting your training plan to fit your schedule, avoid setting up your week so that you swim on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, bike on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and run on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday! Obviously, this is an extreme example, but milder forms of workout “bunching” should be avoided as well.

Adjusting Plan Length

Suppose you’ve selected a training plan and aligned its end date with the date of your event, but there’s a gap between now and the plan’s start date. How should you fill the time? If you haven’t been training recently, or if you’ve been training at a lower level than will be required of you in Week 1, the answer is obvious: use the time to gradually ready yourself for a smooth transition to the plan. If you’re already fit enough to handle Week 1, use the time instead to focus on another priority that will help set you up for success. Examples of such alternative priorities are strength training, technique work, and dietary improvements.

In cases where you don’t have enough time to complete the entire training plan before your race, the simplest solution is just to skip the first part. If your plan is 17 weeks long, for example, and your race is 15 weeks away, go ahead and start at Week 3. But this solution only works if your recent training is similar to the weeks you’re skipping. If it’s not, you might be getting in over your head or setting yourself up for injury.

When you find yourself in this type of situation, your best move is to modify the first few weeks of the plan, beginning at the point where you pick it up, in such a way as to give yourself a chance to catch up to the training. Specifically, you’ll want to reduce the overall volume and the difficulty level of key workouts so that you’re not required to make big leaps in training load. Returning to the example I gave above, suppose Week 3 of the plan includes a high-intensity interval workout and a tempo workout, but your recent training has consisted entirely of low-intensity work. A sensible adjustment here would be to replace the interval workout with a fartlek-type session containing just a handful of brief surges and to replace the tempo workout with a “cruise intervals” workout containing a few short efforts at threshold intensity instead of one or two big blocks.

Adding “B” Races

Scheduling “B” races can be either simple or complicated, depending on when these events fall within your training plan and how many you wish to add. The ideal timing for such events is in recovery weeks, where they simply replace the workouts planned for that particular weekend. The two days preceding the race should also be replaced with lighter training, and the three days immediately following the race should be replaced with a combination of rest and lighter training.

Things get more complicated, though, when a planned “B” race does not align with a designated recovery week. In these cases, dialing back the training that precedes and follows the event is likely to result in too much time away from harder training, especially when the week in question comes right before or right after a designated recovery week. To avoid this issue, make your adjustments more nuanced with half-recovery weeks (i.e., weeks in which the first few days are heavy and the last few are light or vice versa) and partial recovery weeks (i.e., weeks in which the training load is reduced, but only slightly). Consider both the logic of your plan’s training load variation and your own sense of what your body can handle in making these types of adjustments.

Things get even more complicated when you want to do more than one “B” race. But the same principles apply, with the basic idea being to preserve the plan’s intended balance of heavier training periods (typically two to three weeks of gradually increasing load) and lighter periods (typically one week of recovery every third or fourth week that’s about 20% lower in volume than the preceding week).

Planning for Anticipated Missed Training

When you know ahead of time that your training is going to be restricted during a certain period, your best strategy is to bookend this period with sensibly modified training. For example, suppose you are following a triathlon training plan and you are planning to take your family on vacation to Yosemite National Park during Week 9. In this seven-day period, you will be able to squeeze in a little running but your swim and bike training will be paused.

In this scenario, it would be wise to reduce your run training and increase your swim and bike training in the week that immediately precedes your vacation as well as in the week that immediately follows it. These adjustments will not only minimize any negative effect of the trip on your swim and bike fitness but should also help you worry less about it.

This evening you will be visited by three sprits: the Ghost of Fitness Past, the Ghost Fitness Present and the Ghost of Fitness Yet to Come.

Let’s face it, you need this intervention. COVID, politics, and the death of Eddie Van Halen left you reeling in 2020. A spiral of event cancellations and doom-scrolling transformed you from an optimistic athlete into a curmudgeon. Only this miracle can help you discover the true meaning of Fitness.

The Ghost of Fitness Past will arrive as the clock strikes one and will appear in a spritely form resembling Mirinda Carfrae. Don’t let her diminutive figure fool you. Her legendary power-to-weight ratio will speed you from memory to memory, revisiting your happiest and most bittersweet racing moments and reminding you why you fell in love with endurance spots.

When the clock strikes two the Ghost of Fitness Present materializes. It’s Eddie Van Halen. He explains this assignment is a recent gig. Eddie projects visions of empty swimming pools, abandoned weight rooms, and sobbing race directors now driving for Uber. The endurance sports picture is presently bleak, but you knew that already.

As the hour approaches three you feel an encroaching sense of dread. At the third chime, to your pleasant surprise, it isn’t a ghost at all. It’s Joe Friel (who is alive and well to be clear). Joe explains that although your Fitness future is indeed bright, Fitness is a journey, not a destination. Whether or not you compete in a single event in 2021, the process of continuous improvement and the benefits of a healthy lifestyle are why you’ll remain an athlete in 2021. That’s the true meaning of Fitness.

Several years ago I got an idea for a book called A High-Mileage Manifesto. The title pretty much says it all: It was intended to be a hard sell for high-volume run training and an antidote to things like CrossFit Endurance and Run Less, Run Faster, which were leading so many athletes down the wrong path at the time.

I come up with a lot of book ideas that I never take beyond the conceptual stage, but this one was an exception. After a brief gestational period, I fully committed to making A High-Mileage Manifesto my next published book after The New Rules of Marathon and Half-Marathon Nutrition, sitting down and scribbling out a chapter outline and then writing a proposal and sample chapters to shop around to publishers. Soon, however, I got stuck. Something just wasn’t right, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was on the verge of scrapping the whole project when it hit me: I had it backwards. Instead of telling runners, “You need to run a lot, but in order to make that work, you’ll need to slow down,” what I really needed to tell them was, “You need to slow down, and if you do, one of the benefits you’ll discover is that you’re able to run more.” And thus A High-Mileage Manifesto became 80/20 Running.

The most successful runners run a lot and they do most of their running at low intensity, but it’s the mostly-low-intensity part that has to come first. Once I got that straight in my head, the book practically wrote itself. This was no guarantee that its message would be well-received, but I’m happy to say it was. Since its 2014 publication, more than 50,000 copies of the print, electronic, and audio versions of 80/20 Running have been sold. Online versions of the plans in the book have also been hot sellers, and there are thriving 80/20 Running Facebook and Strava groups.

Very soon after the book’s release, I began to hear from triathletes expressing interest in a triathlon-specific spin on the 80/20 concept, which applies to all endurance disciplines. Although I recognized the value in a sequel, I was in no hurry to write it, as I had a backlog of other ideas (two of which became How Bad Do You Want It? and The Endurance Diet). In the end I decided that if I was ever going to satisfy triathlon fans of 80/20, I would need to enlist some help, so I asked David Warden, who had already developed a suite of online 80/20 triathlon training plans on my behalf, to coauthor 80/20 Triathlon with me.

There aren’t many people I can partner with successfully on any sort of writing project. I like to be in control, and I have high standards. But David was the perfect pick. He is disciplined and conscientious and has a sharp analytical mind, a great work ethic, and a wicked sense of humor. The last thing I wanted 80/20 Triathlon to be was a find-and-replace version of the original, with “running” substituted for “triathlon” and everything else the same. Thanks in large measure to David’s contributions, I got my wish. While the underlying philosophy is the same, of course, 80/20 Triathlon is a very different book, and I’m proud of it.

It’s been a long time since a seminal triathlon training book was published, and I truly believe 80/20 Triathlon can be just that. There are two reasons for this. One is that the 80/20 method really works, and works better than any other way of training for the sport. Beyond all the scientific proof, David and I know from experience that the 80/20 method is superior to every alternative because hundreds of triathletes have already put the method to the test with our online 80/20 Triathlon training plans, and almost every day we get feedback like the following from Cathy Berry, who recently used one of our plans to win the women’s 45-49 age group at Ironman UK:

“I can’t recommend Matt Fitzgerald’s 80/20 Triathlon training plans highly enough. I have qualified for the Ironman World Championships both times I have followed his plan. Like many triathletes, I juggle work, family, and training; and although I wasn’t always able to follow it religiously, by adopting the 80/20 training approach and the accompanying strength plans I was able to put in a great performance on race day.”

Here’s a breakdown of the contents of 80/20 Triathlon:

Foreword

The book’s foreword was written by none other than Stephen Seiler, PhD, the discoverer of the 80/20 Rule of endurance training. We couldn’t have asked for a stronger validation of our offering!

Chapter 1: The Most Effective Way to Train

The 80/20 concept is introduced.

Chapter 2: Going Slower to Get Faster

We present eight common barriers to training the 80/20 way and explain how to overcome them.

Chapter 3: The Science of 80/20 Training

In this chapter David and I share some of the science demonstrating the superiority of the 80/20 approach to the various alternatives and explain why 80/20 works better.

Chapters 4-6

These three chapters get down to brass tacks, showing how to apply the 80/20 Rule to swim, bike, and run training.

Chapter 7: Strength, Flexibility, and Mobility Training

Although the 80/20 Rule does not apply to non-endurance training modalities, no triathlon training guide would be complete without a thorough treatment of strength, flexibility, and mobility training.

Chapter 8: Getting Started with 80/20 Training

This chapter walks the reader step by step through the process of creating a fully customized 80/20 triathlon training plan.

Chapters 9-13

Don’t feel like creating your own training plan? We’ve got you covered with these five chapters, which present a selection of 17 training plans for all race distances and fitness levels.

Chapter 14: Race Day

The book’s concluding chapter offers tips on triathlon pacing, or the art of getting from the start line to the finish line in the least amount of time possible.

Order your copy today, click here!

Also available here:

Amazon.com

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Unless you’ve been hermetically siloed within the endurance space for as long as you’ve been exercising, you’ve probably heard of muscle confusion. Popular in the vanity-oriented fitness realm, muscle confusion is the idea that muscles undergo the greatest adaptation to training when they are subjected to constantly changing stimuli, and the corresponding practice of mixing together highly varied workout types for the purpose of maximizing muscular development. Tony Horton’s blockbuster P90X program is the best-known example of a system based on this principle.

Does muscle confusion work? It depends on what you mean by “confusion” and also on what you mean by “work”? If “confusion” means varying workout types almost randomly, with no thought given to the direction they take collectively, and if “work” is defined as achieving a specific objective such as maximizing muscle strength or size, then no, muscle confusion does not work. Any serious bodybuilder or powerlifter will tell you that the best results come when workouts are varied, yes, but within fairly narrow limits, and when they are carefully sequenced so that each session (or week) builds on the preceding.

The same is true of endurance training. To develop maximum fitness for a specific race, you need to subject your body to a limited variety of stimuli repeatedly, giving the process direction by increasing the challenge level of the same stimuli as your body adapts and by giving greater and greater emphasis to the most race-specific stimuli. Injecting extra variety for variety’s sake into this process won’t help you get where you’re trying to go.

While there is something to be said for introducing little wrinkles into training for the sake of fine-tuning the race fitness of advanced and highly fit athletes, in most cases it is possible to prepare optimally for any race with a limited variety of bread-and-butter workout types. In the case of running these are easy runs, long runs, short intervals, long intervals, hill repetitions, tempo/threshold workouts, and also race-pace workouts if these aren’t already covered by the other categories (as would be the case for a runner preparing for a marathon). The rest is details: designing specific workouts and sequencing them in the best way to maximize race-specific fitness on a particular date.

I’ve never encountered a runner who includes too much variety in his or her training. A much more common problem is failure to vary one’s training stimuli enough. Just look around: In the environment where you train, are the other runners you see not all doing pretty much the same thing? How often do you pass by someone running hill repeats?

One way to add the requisite variety to your training is to follow a structured training plan. And, to be honest, that’s pretty much the only practical way for most runners who aren’t knowledgeable enough to be coaches themselves to avoid the pitfall of excessive workout monotony. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a convenient way for athletes to select well-designed workouts to follow on an a la carte basis, so that they could vary their training stimuli in sensible ways even outside the context of a formal training plan?

Well, now there is! (You knew this was coming, didn’t you?) 80/20 Endurance Coach David Warden recently completed a Herculean effort to convert every single individual swim, bike, and run workout included in our online training plans into a discrete .FIT file that can be downloaded onto your Garmin device and taken on the go. This complete library of 80/20 workouts allows you to select the perfect training stimulus for every circumstance and receive step-by-step guidance from warm-up to cool-down. And combined with a calculator, this unique resource allows you to easily create your own 80/20 training weeks or plans.

What’s the cost, you ask? They’re free! Learn more about our new 80/20 Workout Library here.