Cold Plunges Could Be Killing Your Performance | GTN Coach's Corner

Welcome back to another GTN Coaches Corner where we answer your triathlon questions for you. You can send in your questions in the comment section down below using the hashtag GTNCoachesCorner. We'll then pick it up and answer those questions for you. Into today's questions, first one from David Allert. He said, how do you accelerate proper recovery post Ironman? I qualified for feel 90% fine, HRV 51. I have Kona coming up in October. Also qualified for World 70.3s in 2025. I'm 57, been racing 34 seasons. I recover fast, diet, weights, and solid training, but would appreciate your wisdom on recovery and best practices. Well, hi, David. Congratulations. You've got quite a quick turnaround there from Wisconsin to Kona. Now, as you'll know, an Ironman gets you in a very different way to shorter distance like an Olympic distance triathlon. For example, an Olympic distance triathlon, obviously, intensity is that little bit higher, but it's shorter. Actually, afterwards, whilst you might feel sore for two or three days after because you can actually feel really quite sore from these events, sometimes more so the longer distance events because you push that bit harder, you actually still recover quite quickly and can find you can do some pretty intense workouts that next weekend or even another race. Whereas for an Ironman, yes, as you've probably experienced before, feel pretty sore the first two or three days after. Then again, you start to feel all right and you maybe make the mistake of cracking back on with training. This is the big mistake that you often see a lot of people making is they think they're all right after a week or two and crack back on with some good training because maybe like you, they've got a race coming up. Actually, you end up with an Ironman and these long-distance even ultras with this deep residual fatigue and that should not be underestimated because what can end up happening then is a month down the line, you've got carried away and it starts to bite you in the backside and everything starts to fall apart. It might be injuries, just training, you feel really fatigued and then actually you have to go back to square one and you lose all sorts of time. Now, what I would suggest, general rule of thumb, give yourself at least three weeks of just really gentle training. Just get your body really nicely recovered. It doesn't mean no training, but I would probably predominantly focus on just aerobic training. You don't need to do tons of intensity in there. You might even want to just do a little bit more swimming in place of some other workouts because swimming is non-weight-bearing. Actually, you can get in some good time there aerobically without putting too much stress on the body as a good way of keeping things up. Yes, well, that's a good question though. Thank you very much. Next one from SebastianM1995. Hi, GTN. Hope you're well. I've recently completed my first full Ironman distance and loved almost every minute of it. For my second full distance next season, I'm planning to train with a specific time goal in mind. I've always wondered how people go about doing this. As I previously understood, racing an Ironman is almost all done in zone two, but I also hear the term Ironman pace a lot, implying that it's different to zone two pace. My question is, how does one know how high of a pace heart rate power he, she is able to push in an Ironman outside of zone two? I'm sure this is different for pros and for age groupers and so on and so forth. Great question. Firstly, what you want to do is with that goal time, you want to try and break that down into the individual splits for swim, bike, and run and figure out what is realistic. That may even judge whether that time goal is actually realistic in the first place. Now, for the swim and the run, you can easily then from those splits work out the pace that's required and then you can train to that. The bike is a little bit more complicated because obviously, you can work out the speed over that time taking distance and time, but ideally, you want to know the effort or the power that you work at. Now, you did mention zone two for Ironman and you're absolutely correct in this, particularly if you're a novice or you're targeting a slightly slower time. As you advance and you'll find this with a lot of competitive age groupers or even pros, they actually race predominantly actually in zone three, which might be the Ironman pace you've heard of. Now, actually, here's a rough guide. I'll pop it up on the screen right now for the pace or percentage of FTP for an Ironman. You'll actually see if you go right down to 15 to 16 hours for an Ironman, 64% to 66% of your FTP and that is comfortably in zone two, whereas you go right up to 10 to 11 hours, 74% to 76%, that is well within zone three then. There's the table as a bit of a guide for you, but yes, make sure you work out the splits and make sure it's realistic for you. Next question from Very Sweaty Turbo, what are your thoughts on cold plunges after workouts? How often, how cold, and for how long? Good question. There's some interesting research around this actually. Now, the idea of a cold plunge is that you do it almost immediately after an intense workout and it's there to aid and help in recovery by reducing inflammation and prepare and just help the recovery of the muscles for subsequent workouts. I actually used to do this a lot after hard track workouts when I used to race short course or short distance triathlons because the workouts were really flipping hard. We jump straight in the ice baths after and hopefully recover as best as possible for the next day's training. There's actually some research that's suggested out there that has suggested the contrary to all of this, that actually by reducing the inflammation, it actually affects and reduces the body's ability to adapt to those stresses. Their research basically showed that some athletes that weren't using the ice baths after some hard track workouts were actually adapting to the intensity and the stresses better and turning it to the next week and not feeling the effects of that as much. Interesting. It's a hard one to really prove. As with anything, there will always be research out there for and against. The most important thing is that you do what you want to do and it's right for you. Now, duration-wise, a lot of people jump in the ice baths or in these cold plunges for minutes and minutes on end. Really, it only needs to be as much as two to absolute most five minutes just to get those muscles nice and cooled and flushed through. Actually, in an ideal world, what you do is go hot, cold, hot, cold to really flush through. Our experts actually recommend starting between 10 to 15 degrees Celsius, which doesn't sound like much, but actually will be pretty fresh. Over time, just reduce that down to as much as three degrees Celsius. You don't need to go any lower than that. Otherwise, it might start to hurt your skin quite a lot. Next one from JJ Triathlon. As always, thank you for the excellent content and wealth of knowledge you share with us. I have a question regarding cross-training in sports. Do you have any tips or recommendations for substituting some of my bike, run, or swim sessions with other sports like tennis, soccer, or ice hockey? Cool. All right. Now, obviously, the real aim of cross-training is that it has a lot of positive benefits to triathlon or whatever sport you're training for. If I'm honest, tennis, soccer, ice hockey would probably be quite low on the cross-training list for specific sports that would help with triathlon. That said, if they're sports you love and you'll happily go and do time and time again and you do them often, then that is worth more than anything. The main thing then is to work out when you do this. Now, what most athletes do, particularly I'm talking about professional athletes here when they do cross-training, is they'll do it in the off-season. You'll see a lot of athletes doing things like cross-country skiing, mountain biking, hiking, skinning uphill on skis. Even my favorite, my idol, Kylian Jornet actually spends most of the off-season just skiing. He doesn't do any running or very little running and still is literally one of the best ultra runners out there when it comes around to the season. You can do it very well. The main thing, be careful with some of these more dynamic sports, such as football, tennis, if you're not used to them, because we as triathletes are very used to linear exercise, running in a straight line. Suddenly, if you're doing tennis and leaping from one side to the other, you're using different muscles and in different ways and you could run the risk of injury. Build it up, take it easy. Also, just, as I say, work out when you do this to make sure that you are doing it in the off-season, you still allow yourself plenty of time to get that specific training in ahead of whatever goal race you have. Cool. A final question from Jeff Glover. I've started reviewing how I was using my arms and shoulders in the reach and rotation portion of the stroke. I wanted to learn more about how much reach forward to engage my stroke and how much to drive my shoulder down or twist my body to start the stroke. Is it a C all above for the correct answer? It's probably better for me to show and explain in the pool because you're asking quite specific stuff here. Essentially, let's just run through the stroke here. When the hand enters, it should enter, I'll do this head on, it should enter almost in line with the shoulder. Don't make the mistake of thinking your hands need to enter in the center, it should be entering in line with your shoulder. Then you're trying to get this catch, but what you'll see is I'm pushing my shoulder forwards, but in doing so, my body is rotating around. I'm into a really nice strong position here. I'm leaning down onto my hand and you'll see that my hand's now starting to come across into the center. This is just happening naturally through the rotation. Then you're going to get this catch and you're going to pull right down your center line, it's a nice strong position. Of course, if this isn't something you currently do, you won't suddenly find that you'll be able to do this, you'll feel A, very unusual, and you'll also just not be conditioned or flexible enough to do this. You also want to be careful as you start to do all of this and start to get this catch early on and do this rotation. I would actually work up to it gradually, don't just suddenly leap into this big rotation, just work on it. I would suggest doing it with drills initially. In particular, the bit that goes for a lot of people and they feel it is their shoulder, they get suddenly loads of shoulder issues. Another exercise you can do actually is therabands on poolside to just strengthen things up and get things conditioned. In summary, technique, you're rotating around, getting that catch, the shoulder does come around to almost touching your chin, nice strong position there. I hope I've explained that as well as possible without being in a pool. If you'd like more advice, I would head on over to one of our videos. We've got countless on our channel that run through catch and also rotation. It's probably best to have a little look through all of those. Thanks again, everyone, for all your fantastic questions. As always, keep them coming in using the hashtag GTN Coaches Corner. I'll see you next time.