Can You Train For Running Downhill? | GTN Coach's Corner.

Welcome back to another GTN Coach's Corner on this week's show. How to swim fast? Well, don't we all struggle with that? Whether you should put your goggles under or over your swim cap. How to prep for downhill running? Using a recumbent bike for training. And the evergreen, I can't stay in zone two. Okay, let's get to your questions. Firstly, some quickfire questions. Are we answering these ones? We're ready. Let's go. Swim ones. How long does it take to get used to my new wetsuit? Never. No, that's not true. No, sorry. Sorry. Sorry. It won't take long at all. You can get used to your wetsuit in four or five swims and it'll feel so much better than that first swim where it feels really restrictive and tight and uncomfortable. Make sure you put it on properly. We had a video about this just the other day, how to make sure you pulled it on properly, got some water in it, made it comfortable. Won't take long at all for you to get used to it. Next one. Will I swim the same pace in race as in the pool? No, but sort of, because your pool, you're going to stop, you're doing tumble turns, et cetera, which is kind of a little break, so your pace won't translate directly, but you will also swim more consistently and better when it's a race pace and you tape it and everything else than you do in the pool. The difference is not as big as people think it's going to be. They swim a certain pace per 100 in the pool, and they think, well, I'm going to have to go like 10 seconds slower in the open water, and it turns out that they're almost the same pace. Also, don't forget, you might be swimming open water, that could slow you down, but then you're wearing a wetsuit, you're more buoyant, less drag through the water, improves your body position. Just wetsuits, man. Brilliant. Okay, one more quickfire swim questions. What are paddles for? For slapping you. No, paddles are for increasing the strength aspect of your swimming. To make sure that you're pulling more water with each stroke, essentially, it's like doing a gym session while you're swimming. You're working on all that strength, a little bit lower heart rate, little bit more strength, and obviously, the benefits of that are pretty obvious. If you get your stroke nice and strong, you're going to be able to swim faster when you take them. As you can probably tell, I've done a lot of paddle work over the years. Or can't tell, as the case may be. Okay, on to our questions. Leanne Stick says, hashtag GTN coach has gone out in swim twice a week and cover about 1,250 meters in 30 minutes, just regular swimming, but I probably have to take short recovery rest every 250 meters or so. I want to build in more variation in my training, but I have little or no power when I swim. I feel like I can't really swim fast if I try, or at least not that I can sustain for much longer than 50 to 75 meters. Do I just need to work on my arm, chest, shoulders strength, or will this come with time and increased training? I am training for a sprint distance triathlon. Wow. I know you're training for an endurance event because, well, sprint distance is an endurance event, I guess. That does require you to swim 750 meters nonstop. That doesn't mean you need to be doing mega long reps, endurance reps in your training at the time. Here's the kicker, 250-meter reps in the pool are long reps. I know they might not feel like it, but that is actually considered a long rep. Short reps in a pool are 25 meters or 50 meters. You're going to struggle to build that strength, that speed, that power over 250 meters. You need to reign it in big time and follow a nice structured session. Your high-intensity efforts aren't 50 to 75 meters long, they're 15 to 25 meters long. You need to start with 10 to 15 minutes of hard swimming, easy into the wall, good recovery, and then go again, just 10, 15 meters, and then build it up to 25 meters, maybe pushing it once you're really getting fit to 50 meters of hard swimming at a time. You're trying to do 50 to 75 meters off the bat. That's not really how swimming works. You need to really keep those high-intensity efforts short. The 250-meter efforts are only for when you really do an endurance-focused session. Mark Threlfall And then, yes, when we get to the endurance focus, actually, if you are feeling pretty tired after 250 meters, then actually reign that in as well and maybe start with just 100-meter reps, short recovery, go again. Before you know it, you'll be able to doing 200-plus meters, 400 meters non-stop, and it'll be a breeze. Fraser Hunt You'll get more out of swimming 300 meters with free bar 100 with five-second rest than swimming 300 meters straight. Don't be afraid to take a few seconds on the wall occasionally. Okay, next question. Mark Hamilton says, hashtag GTN Coaches Corner. A simple one for you, but I see both options in your videos. Goggles over or under your swim cap, or even between two caps. Thanks for the great content. Mark Threlfall I think you might be opening a can of worms here because there's a- Fraser Hunt Controversial. Mark Threlfall Personally, I would always put the straps under my hat, come from a swimming background, and diving in, the straps all right, rolling down the back of your head. You just want those goggles to stay firmly in place. Also, in triathlon, if you get knocked unintentionally, because that normally is what happens when you get knocked in a triathlon, it's not because people are trying to do it and they knock your goggles. Even if they come off your face, they're stuck under the cap and you can just grab them and put them back on rather than fishing around for them in the open water. Are there really any benefits to putting the straps outside the hat? Fraser Hunt Interesting because I would generally put them outside the strap, the hat, because you can adjust them. You can put them on after you've put your hat and you can adjust them. You can make them tighter. You can make them looser. Once they're under your hat and you put them on, there's nothing you can do with them. Mark Threlfall Are you stopping during a triathlon and just adjusting? Maybe that's why you're losing all your time, James. Fraser Hunt Also, if they do pop off your eye and they take the hat with them, then you're really in trouble. Mark Threlfall That is true. That is true. I did miss that one out. Fraser Hunt Get your hat all skew and on your head, halfway off your head with your goggles tangled in it. If your goggles just pop up, you can grab them, put them back on. Yes. Personal preference, there is no rule. Mark Threlfall If you're going fast, though, you probably won't want to. Fraser Hunt Next one from Justin Hammer. I'll be taking a second crack at the Utah Valley Marathon in June. This marathon has a lot, which is a lot, maybe it's Canadian, sorry, of downhill running in it. Even though I felt prepped for the distance last year when I first ran it, I was not prepared for how running downhill made everything hurt so much more and it really affected the second half of my race. I'm planning on trying to find some routes of significant elevation drops to add to my long run so on and so forth. This is pretty good timing because, James, you are training for a very, well, mountainous ultra. James Reardon Yes, everyone fears the uphills in these ultras. They're like, oh, this race is 6,000 meters of climbing, but it's the downhills that actually do the damage and really hurt your legs and you do need to prep for it. It's pretty simple how to prep for it. The main way is to run downhill. You have to actually spend a fair amount of time seeking out downhills and then not just gingerly prancing your way down them. You actually have to run down them hard, like smash your legs a little bit to get that eccentric loading and get those little muscle damages, those little tears in your muscle that then recover and get stronger because it's those little tears in the muscles that can really hurt. You're essentially getting what are called DOMs, delayed onset muscle soreness. In a long race like a marathon, you can actually get it during the event, your muscles start getting to that point where they are really, really hurting from that eccentric loading. Mark Threlfall Brings back horrible memories, doesn't it? That feeling, it's not nice. Yes, also just before, if you're new to all of this and jumping into it, I wouldn't necessarily tell you tomorrow to just start hammering the downhills. Maybe add a little bit of strengthening working before. That may actually mean doing some hill reps, so yes, actually working hard on the uphills, that's going to just improve the strength and stability in your hips, around your legs. Still running the downhills fairly hard, but then build into, as James says, those downhills just to give it a little bit of a welling. You can also do eccentric loading in the gym, so with actual weights where you actually are lengthening the muscle as you contract it. As you are taking the weight, you're actually lengthening the muscle and it's pulling the muscle apart. There are various exercises, we won't go into them right now, but you can start doing some of that in the gym to get you prepared. Okay, next question. Chris Marshall says, hashtag GTN Coaches Corner, is a recumbent bike useful for bike training when you don't have access to a regular bike? I imagine this is a bit of a niche question. It might often be the other way around, but yes, I guess. As we've said before, it's all circles turning circles. If your legs are turning circles, it's better than doing nothing and there's going to be a fair amount of transfer. Not exactly direct transfer because there's a lot less weight bearing on a recumbent bike. The position is very different, so the application of that power and probably the muscles that you're using are going to differ, so don't expect to then just jump over onto your road bike or TT bike and it'd be all easy. All the stabilizer muscles and stuff that you use when you race won't be trained, but yes, it's better than doing nothing. Nice one. Final question from Sam Rawlings99, a big fan of the channel. My hashtag GTN Coaches Corner question, last year I ran the bad path. Hey, local guy. In 1 hour 45, I spent the whole time in zone 4. Starting this year, I thought I'd do some zone 2 heart rate training. Oh, here we go. Based on the 80-20 model. However, I seem to struggle to stay in zone 2, especially in the morning where I can't even do a slow jog without creeping into zone 3. My Garmin, hey, tells me that my resting heart rate is 51 beats per minute. I swim, run, cycle twice a week, so my fitness should be okay. I'm very happy. Sat in zone 3 for a 20k run, 70k cycle, a 2.5k swim. Just can't seem to stay in zone 2. Any advice on how to fix this? Well, we get this question a lot. We do get this question a lot. We're going to answer it again because it does keep cropping up and clearly people are not getting the answer, but they're looking for the answer. Essentially, what's happened is you've trained your zone 3 running really, really well because every time you went out and run, you slot into that comfortably hard effort level, which is zone 3. Then you train that and you get really efficient at it. You never actually do the really easy in between before that where it feels like it's easy and you train that zone. Now, you're really efficient in zone 3. You haven't really trained zone 2, so now zone 2 feels awfully uncomfortable and awfully slow. It just perpetuates and perpetuates and you just never touch zone 2. The other thing to add as well is a lot of people are basing this zone 2 off what Garmin is telling them. A, you need to make sure that those zones are correct, i.e. your threshold that has been put into it to create these numbers and these zones is correct. Also, things like Garmin do tend to use a fairly rudimentary 40% to 50%, 50% to 60% zone. It's not that accurate. Yes, we'd actually suggest if you're a beginner, you adjust that zone 2 instead of 60% to 70%, which Garmin will tell you it is, to more like 60% to 75% of your max heart rate because you do have a wider range of that easy and 70% is roughly where most people's zone 2 ends but not everybody's. The more beginner you are, the higher your heart rate will be even in zone 2 even when you're still working purely aerobically. Adjust it to a bit more like 75% and then actually spend some time training in that zone 2. Rigidly set yourself, right, this is an easy run and I'm going to stay below 75%. Mark Threlfall, I'm going to do a little bit of a name drop here, but I once ran with Javier Gomez. I know, I did. I kept up with him because I was amazed just how slow. It was probably one of the slowest runs I've ever been on and he's like, yes, I run all my easy runs like this. It was amazing just to experience that. One of the best triathletes and runners in the sport at the time that- You or him? Both, obviously. Also, with that, don't feel like you need to be a slave to the numbers. Very often, we'll just go on an easy run and if it feels easy, it probably is easy. You'll see the Kenyans running ridiculously slow even though these guys can run marathons at under three minutes a day. I imagine most of you are probably running quicker than them on the easy runs. On the easy runs, yes. Okay, I hope that answered that question. I know that we'll get it again next week or the week after, but we'll answer it again. Thanks for sending your questions. If you have any other questions, hashtag GTN Coach's corner below this video or any other one. We'll see you next week. Cheers.