Ciro Tobar, coach and champion coach of Spain of Triathlon and Duathlon in medium and long distance, trains in Feedyourdreams with an extensive analysis of activities in the triathletes gym in preseason.
Now that practically we have all over competitions, it is time to plan and think how we are going to prepare next season and one of the eternal questions jumps to the forefront does the triathlete go to the gym?
Most decides to go at least a couple of months in the winter time, but
Do we really know why we do it?. We know that strength is important for the good performance of the three sports, but we also know that we can develop it outside the gym, for example making series of strength resistance by bike, using blades or swimsuits weighed in the water, making slopes, multisalts, etc., for the race on foot. So, what is the goal we want to achieve when we go to the gym, if we could apparently achieve the same without setting foot on it.
Next we will see the different objectives that we will try to achieve when we go to that place delimited by four walls and with a multitude of "irons" inside:
Increase strength
The best known and obvious objective but
Not necessarily the most important It will be the strength gain: since the force is a very important performance factor in the triathlon, especially in the cycling sector and swimming, one of the objectives will be to improve our strength values to improve our performance.
Balance muscles
Another objective will be to try to compensate for the muscle imbalances produced throughout last season. A balanced and compensated skeletal muscle system, both in the plane of the laterality (left, right) and in the agonist, antagonist plane (muscles that produce flexion or extension of the same joint) will be
fundamental to stay in this sport for many years. A decompensated musculoskeletal system will in the long run will give us problems. A very typical example: in swimming we develop thanks to the gesture of the stroke the internal shoes of the shoulder and if we do not compensate this in any way we will end up having an imbalance with respect to the external rotators that are already smaller and more weak muscles.
Prevent injuries
We will put special emphasis on
work eccentric In the posterior muscle chains of the lower train that are usually the most susceptible to falling injured: tendonitis in twins and ischiotibes over use are very common in triathletes with a certain training load. A good tone of the entire abdominal girdle will also help us protect the lower area of the spine, which is another of the anatomical areas where the triathlete usually suffers from pain especially from thirty.
Once we are clear about the objectives, we have to choose the exercises.
Thousands of exercises are today at our disposal, both online and paper we have huge amounts of information to develop gym plans, but among so much information
How to choose the most appropriate for our sport, the moment of the season in which we are?
We are going to try to shed some light on which exercises to choose, firstly the first doubt:
free weights or gym machines, because it depends on the moment and the type of work that we want to develop, with a machine we stable and safely a strong muscle, in machines they are the ones that guide us in motion, they isolate a muscle, with which we will only work that muscle in a specific plane, it is recommended in the case that we need to do so due to an injury or that we are in a rehabilitation process, also also
recommended if we are working with great loads eg 90% of 1rm (a maximum repetition).
In the first month it will be more interesting to work with free weights
However, to start the first month, in which we will not use high loads, it will be more interesting
Synergist muscles will also work (They help movement)
and the stabilizers, that do not participate in the movement but contract isometrically to give the necessary stability to adjacent areas of our anatomy.
Also for upper train we will look for
exercises that force us at the same time to work the waist stabilization, so if we make plates with the wheel in addition to dorsal we will be doing a very demanding job of abdominal, Serrato. If we make banking with dumbbells and on fitball instead of over bank
We will be multiplying the benefits, balance, laterality and symmetry, stability of the abdominal girdle ...
Today biomechanical studies are able to detect and produce more strength with one leg than with another on the bike, and they will also tell us what percentage it happens. If they have detected any decompensation of one of our members,
work more series with the weakest leg It could be one of the ways to correct this imbalance.
For lower train work, the exercises in which only 1 leg work will be ideal
Thus, the exercises in which only 1 leg work will be ideal for the lower train work, avoiding the typical ones in which we work with the two legs simultaneously, thus, thus.
We will avoid the press, for being a machine with guided movement as we have commented before and also
We will avoid the squat or half squat, which is initially a good exercise, but we can use others better, in which we work only one leg and then the other.
In this way the weight that our backbone and lower train has to endure
It is half or less for the same stimulus of force in the target muscle From the lower train, but now we are not looking for specificity, the work angles and the neuromotor stimulus is more similar to the pedaling and the race where the legs work alternately and not simultaneously.
The climb to bank or the Bulgarian squat, are two exercises that we could use, very complete and very suitable for this time of the season in which we try to strengthen and compensate for our imbalances.
Today we are not going to talk about hypertrophy, intramuscular coordination or other more specific forms of force development, we are in our first month of training and we only seek to tone, compensate and balance, so we could design a circuit of some some
10 or 12 exercises alternating one of the upper train with a lower train, we will perform the exercises with low loads, high repetitions, between 12 and 18.
You could start 2 laps to the circuit and go up to 4.
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