Sunday, April 27, 2008
Great Sportzhub article: Accuracy is what counts
Sportzhub.com, although very NZ-focused, is still my favourite place to go hunting for meaningful and valuable AR-specific news and articles. Here's a nice article i've reproduced from it (see here).
When you ask an athlete about how their training is going you will usually get one of the following answers:
* They talk about how much mileage that they have been doing.
* They talk about how hard they have been training
* They talk about the amount of the hill work they have been doing.
It's interesting because not a single person that I have ever talked to, has mentioned how accurately they have been training.
High performance is all about:
* Setting a goal
* Defining a sequence of tasks to reach the goal effectively
* Actioning each task as well as you can in the right order
To describe this in a little more detail:
1. Setting the goal
Setting the goal is pretty obvious.
Where do you want to go?
What do you want to do?
You might end up with the goal of doing your first triathlon, doing the Coast to Coast, training for Ironman, a Marathon or 160 kilometre bike ride. You have your goal. You have answered the ‘what' question.
Example:
Goal: I would like to be a stronger 10km runner.
2. Defining a sequence of tasks to reach the goal effectively
You now have to work out how you will achieve the goal. You have to define a series of step by step tasks that will take you from where you are now, through to achieving the goal. This can be set as a plan or training programme. This plan allows you to clearly pinpoint the actions that are most likely to get the result that you are looking for in the most efficient way possible. The better the plan, the less training time and energy you will waste.
I have often asked athletes what their goal is and most people can state quite clearly what they would like to achieve. When I then ask them how they intend to achieve the goal, more often than not there is a stunned silence. They have the goal but have not worked out a process to achieve it. A goal without a plan is
* at worst a ‘wish'
* and at best a haphazard series of efforts that are moving in the right direction some of the time. (a lot effort and time is unproductive.)
A goal and a plan should always occur together.
3. Actioning each task in the plan as well as you can
This brings me to the point of this article. Once you have the goal and the plan, you're now ready to put the time and effort into training because you know that it will be spent wisely.
Once you walk out the door it is all about the accuracy with which we carry out the workout.
Here is an example of a workout in your plan. You would make sure before you went out the door that you:
* Know what you're doing today (Hill Efforts 4 - 6 x 400m)
* Know how it fits into the overall plan (the ‘big picture')
* Clearly understand how this is moving you closer to your goal
* Know what you need to do to get the most out of this workout (key points, heart rate, speed etc)
* Know when to back off, stop or when you don't need to keep pushing
If you do this, the accuracy of your training will be very high providing the most result for the least time and effort. Most people think that this is the domain of the ‘time starved' ‘nine to fiver' but it applies to the elite athletes as well. The best athletes get more result from each workout.
Another word for accuracy of training is quality. The more accurate you're training, the higher the quality of the workout. Most people once again talk about doing a ‘quality workout' when they mean doing a very intense training session. It's not a ‘quality' workout unless it's accurate.
Top quality training is not about the training volume, the training intensity or how many hills you did, they are all subsets of how well you fulfilled the objectives that you planned. Therefore if someone asks you how your workout went today, you should be most interested in telling him or her what your objectives were and how accurately your training was. For every workout that goes by, for every week that goes by, for every month that goes by, if you are focused on accurate training, you are improving just that little bit more than you might have done. Over time this adds up to a significant difference!
Accuracy of training is what separates most of the good athletes from everyone else.
Jon Ackland is an exercise consultant for Performance Lab, who has been training athletes (Novice to Elite) for 15 years. The author of a number of books including the best selling "The Power to Perform", as well as "The Performance Log", "Precision Training" and "Spinning". .Jon is the director of Performance Lab where he tests and consults people of all levels helping them to train for sport, recreation and health. Ph 09 480-1422, Fax : 09 480-1423
When you ask an athlete about how their training is going you will usually get one of the following answers:
* They talk about how much mileage that they have been doing.
* They talk about how hard they have been training
* They talk about the amount of the hill work they have been doing.
It's interesting because not a single person that I have ever talked to, has mentioned how accurately they have been training.
High performance is all about:
* Setting a goal
* Defining a sequence of tasks to reach the goal effectively
* Actioning each task as well as you can in the right order
To describe this in a little more detail:
1. Setting the goal
Setting the goal is pretty obvious.
Where do you want to go?
What do you want to do?
You might end up with the goal of doing your first triathlon, doing the Coast to Coast, training for Ironman, a Marathon or 160 kilometre bike ride. You have your goal. You have answered the ‘what' question.
Example:
Goal: I would like to be a stronger 10km runner.
2. Defining a sequence of tasks to reach the goal effectively
You now have to work out how you will achieve the goal. You have to define a series of step by step tasks that will take you from where you are now, through to achieving the goal. This can be set as a plan or training programme. This plan allows you to clearly pinpoint the actions that are most likely to get the result that you are looking for in the most efficient way possible. The better the plan, the less training time and energy you will waste.
I have often asked athletes what their goal is and most people can state quite clearly what they would like to achieve. When I then ask them how they intend to achieve the goal, more often than not there is a stunned silence. They have the goal but have not worked out a process to achieve it. A goal without a plan is
* at worst a ‘wish'
* and at best a haphazard series of efforts that are moving in the right direction some of the time. (a lot effort and time is unproductive.)
A goal and a plan should always occur together.
3. Actioning each task in the plan as well as you can
This brings me to the point of this article. Once you have the goal and the plan, you're now ready to put the time and effort into training because you know that it will be spent wisely.
Once you walk out the door it is all about the accuracy with which we carry out the workout.
Here is an example of a workout in your plan. You would make sure before you went out the door that you:
* Know what you're doing today (Hill Efforts 4 - 6 x 400m)
* Know how it fits into the overall plan (the ‘big picture')
* Clearly understand how this is moving you closer to your goal
* Know what you need to do to get the most out of this workout (key points, heart rate, speed etc)
* Know when to back off, stop or when you don't need to keep pushing
If you do this, the accuracy of your training will be very high providing the most result for the least time and effort. Most people think that this is the domain of the ‘time starved' ‘nine to fiver' but it applies to the elite athletes as well. The best athletes get more result from each workout.
Another word for accuracy of training is quality. The more accurate you're training, the higher the quality of the workout. Most people once again talk about doing a ‘quality workout' when they mean doing a very intense training session. It's not a ‘quality' workout unless it's accurate.
Top quality training is not about the training volume, the training intensity or how many hills you did, they are all subsets of how well you fulfilled the objectives that you planned. Therefore if someone asks you how your workout went today, you should be most interested in telling him or her what your objectives were and how accurately your training was. For every workout that goes by, for every week that goes by, for every month that goes by, if you are focused on accurate training, you are improving just that little bit more than you might have done. Over time this adds up to a significant difference!
Accuracy of training is what separates most of the good athletes from everyone else.
Jon Ackland is an exercise consultant for Performance Lab, who has been training athletes (Novice to Elite) for 15 years. The author of a number of books including the best selling "The Power to Perform", as well as "The Performance Log", "Precision Training" and "Spinning". .Jon is the director of Performance Lab where he tests and consults people of all levels helping them to train for sport, recreation and health. Ph 09 480-1422, Fax : 09 480-1423
