3 Reasons Why You Need to Master the Technical Side of Endurance Sport
Do this before anything else to reduce injury and build a lasting foundation
I’m guilty of starting my endurance sport life thinking I knew a lot about training. After all, I was someone who had run middle distance most of their life and just took for granted that you train lots and as a result injuries were part of the game.
I really couldn’t have been more wrong, I didn’t know what I didn’t know and really suffered for it in my first year of triathlon training.
There is a technical side to all endurance sport, whether it’s single or multi-discipline. What I now know is that if you are new to the world of endurance sport, spending time to master the technical parts is the best return on investment you will ever get.
Mastering the technical elements of your sport will make you incredibly resilient to injury, understand why you are training the way you are and what you can do to make sure you benefit from every session.
On the other hand, if you neglect the technical elements, things like; running technique, pedalling efficiency and swim form. You will cause yourself a lot more work down the road when these things become your plateau and you have to spend most of your time unlearning bad habits.
So, here are a few reasons and tips to get you started or to course correct your own journey!
1. Form & technique are everything
Most swimmers and triathletes understand that technique is incredibly undervalued in endurance sport, swimming is heavily technique based and any poor form will be instantly fed back to you.
Poor swim form will add considerable effort and time to your splits. Most swimmers will spend hours in the pool using things like fins and pull buoys in conjunction with technical drills to perfect their stroke, one aspect at a time.
However, runners and cyclists only seem to get the message later in their journey. They only investigate the form and technique elements of the sport once they are injured or hit a plateau that they cannot seem to escape.
If you start with building great technique, form and technical understanding of your sport, you will reap the rewards later down the line. You will be able to build consistency by avoiding injury and you will be able to focus on fitness building because technique has made you as efficient as possible.
If you spend time mastering your technique, it becomes like compound interest. Every minute & hour spent training will yield even greater results for those who spent time building great form. You will run faster, farther and pain free while your fellow athletes hit plateaus and suffer chronic injury.
It may feel like going backwards, I for one got slower before I got faster, but just like investing money the best time to start was yesterday, the second best time is today. Don’t wait to build great form, start today!
2. Ignore sport physiology at your peril
Many endurance athletes just love to train, I get that and I’m with you! I sometimes think I love training more than racing if I’m honest. However, training in ignorance of how our bodies work can lead to some big issues, especially if you’re going for ultra distances.
When we train, we are targeting specific parts of our physiology in order to get faster, stronger and be able to go longer more efficiently.
Many athletes don’t spend the time to fully appreciate why certain sessions are structured the way they are and what parts of our physiology they are designed to target.
Ignoring the “why” of your sessions can lead to a whole host of errors, the most obvious being recovery. If you aren’t aware of the toll a certain workout takes on your body, you will not be able to optimise your recovery to get the full benefit of the session.
For example; if you hit a threshold session and absolutely the smash your target pace and heart rate but then fail to replenish your glycogen stores immediately after, you will completely hamper your bodies ability to bounce back and train well again the next day. Not to mention minimise muscle growth and repair.
The same can be said for Zone 2 or Endurance work, if you fail to rehydrate and understand things like sodium loss and sweat rate after a 3 hour run, the rest of your day is gonna be tough. Dehydration is not fun and often you only realise how badly dehydrated you were after you correct it.
I encourage you to get nerdy about how your body works and why your training plan looks the way it does! You’ll notice you feel better and recover more quickly as a result.
3. Fitness does not guarantee speed
This one will be familiar to cyclists in particular, just because you can crank out massive watts for hours on end does not make you fast.
Don’t get me wrong, big numbers are important, however, if you do not have technical skills to back it up you’re gonna be middle of the pack.
Sticking with cycling as an example; if you can’t descend and take advantage of aerodynamics on the bike, all the watts in the world will not get you competitive average speeds. You will also end up working harder for the same results as other athletes you are racing with. Same goes for bike maintenance too, if you have an inefficient drive train because you don’t know how to maintain your bike, you’re increasing the effort required to maintain speed.
It’s important to grasp what makes a great athlete is not merely their fitness.
I’m a perfect example of this, I’m incredibly fit and my training numbers are in the top percentiles for my age. However, my race results are very middle of the pack. This is because I didn’t spend time mastering the art of racing, I thought it was just all about fitness.
You need to get good at understanding how your body responds to things like; food, heat, hydration and fatigue. Without knowing yourself well and how you respond to different stimuli, you can end up being quite average even when your fitness is top tier!
To go fast you need to be a technically minded athlete as much as someone who can grind out watts, strokes or strides. The detail matters and the sooner you build that knowledge base and ability to experiment, the quicker you will go.
I wish I had started my endurance sport journey differently and I hope you can appreciate why it’s so important to build solid technical foundations before just training like crazy!
Hire a coach and soak up all the wisdom they have to offer, you won’t regret the time and effort you spend on becoming technically proficient in your sport. You don’t need to be an expert to get great results, but knowing what good looks like will set you up for some incredible success in future!
Go out there and nerd out, I promise you won’t regret it!