Good training and talent are essential; so are mental toughness and self-belief. And that last element, self-belief, is where I believe a lot of the marginal gains come from. Whether it’s belief in your coach, or belief in the training you’ve designed for yourself, or belief in the new nutrition or recovery technique you’ve just adopted, having a reason to believe that you can do today what you were incapable of doing yesterday is an incredibly powerful force. So that’s my first and most important piece of advice: whatever you’re doing now, make sure you’re 100 percent committed and believe in it. If you have doubts, identify them and make changes to address them.
Still, I don’t believe that sports physiology is just a big illusion. While the margins are small and individual results vary (which means you should never assume something works for you without testing it), there are techniques that provide real performance gains. The list of possible performance-boosters is pretty endless, but here’s a list of some that I consider to have enough evidence to be worth trying, if there are good ones you think I’ve missed, please add them in the comments:
Supplements
Caffeine works. The traditional dose was 6 mg/kg of bodyweight, but recent studies suggest you can max out the benefits with 3 mg/kg. You can take it all at once about an hour before competition, or spread it out (e.g. with gels or flat cola). For cyclists and marathoners, getting at least part of your hit late in the race appears to be effective.
Beet Juice – I think the evidence is pretty solid for enhancing endurance. There are still questions about how effective it is for really elite athletes, but the truth is that almost any training intervention is going to produce marginal improvements at best in someone who’s already close to their limits. There’s more info on dose and timing here; in brief, I’d take a shot or two the night before and another 1-2 shots two or three hours before racing but don’t forget to try it in training before hand!
Recovery
The evidence here is all over the map. There’s some debate about the possibility that too much “enhanced” recovery can attenuate the body’s adaptations to training, but for athletes doing elite-level training loads with multiple sessions a day, I think the need for recovery likely outweighs any hypothetical downsides. That said, the principle I’d suggest here is using the “minimum effective dose” that allows you to achieve your training goals in the next session. Use enhanced recovery because you need it, but if your body can recover on its own, let it. When you get closer to big races (and certainly between stages of a multi-day race, for example), use as much recovery as you can get.
There’s very little solid evidence about what works best for recovery, so I’d use what’s easily available and don’t stress about what’s not. Ice baths are easy to do at home; a good recipe is ~10 minute at ~15 C. More and/or colder isn’t necessarily better. Medical-grade compression tights/socks for about an hour immediately after a hard workout may help. Massage is nice if you can get it. The fancier versions of these things (cryosauna instead of ice bath, pneumatic legging instead of compression and massage) may have benefits like convenience, but I haven’t seen any evidence that they’re better than the plain vanilla versions. Who doesn’t love vanilla ice cream?
Not to state the obvious, but sleep is probably the best thing you can do.
There’s some individual variation, but as a generalisation, if you’re training at an elite level and not spending nine hours a night with the lights off, you’re not doing everything you can to get better. Depending on your daily schedule, a nap may help too. But one way or another, you need sleep. It may take time (and discipline) to develop a good sleep routine where you don’t lie awake and get to bed at a regular time, but it’s worth it.
Nutrition
Again, a complicated topic where the evidence is contested at best. One piece of advice I’m pretty comfortable giving is: whatever the amount of vegetable and fruit you’re eating, increase it. High quantity and as much variety as possible. Emphasise leafy greens and berries, but it’s not about one magic food, it’s about balance and variety. Increasing calorie intake when training for a marathon is also highly beneficial.
There’s an interesting debate about fat versus carbs as endurance fuel right now, but for any sport contested in the Olympics or that requires high-intensity surges (hills, finishing kick), I believe you need good carbohydrate intake. That doesn’t mean you eat plain white pasta every night and drink only skim milk though. One of my favorite examples of that is all the articles that talk about Simon Whitfield as an exam
ple of a high-fat endurance athlete. If you ask what that actually means, though, his estimate is that his diet breaks down as 50 percent carbohydrate, 20 percent fat, and 30 percent protein – which is right in line with conventional sports nutrition guidelines.
An advanced nutritional technique that I would consider is “train low” sessions. Overall carb intake remains high, but certain sessions are performed with low carbohydrate stores, either by training before breakfast or deliberately depleting carb stores. This can be risky, as it will compromise workout performance and raise injury risk, so it needs to be approached cautiously and gradually.
You can apply similar logic to dehydration, though in this case it’s not a question of deliberately dehydrating yourself – rather, you allow yourself to become dehydrated during some training sessions (which will generally happen naturally if you just drink to thirst). There’s some evidence that dehydration is a trigger that induces increases in plasma volume, which in turn boosts endurance performance.
Mental Training
The simplest advice: one change I’d make if I could do my career over again is see a sports psychologist. When I was younger, I tended to be skeptical of things I couldn’t measure, but I’m increasingly convinced that the role of the mind in sports is at least as big as the clichés suggest. Sports psychology – mental imagery, self talk, etc. – make be a relatively blunt instrument, but I think it’s probably the best tool we’ve got at the moment. I’ve messed up countless races and championships, often when I look to have a shocker its due to my head. Prime example was in 2014, I won the Northern Championships 3,000m indoor title solo first race of the season in a faster time than I ran the heats of the World Championships just a month or so later having ran 7:46 just a couple of weeks earlier to qualify for the championships. My head and my chimp had got the better of me and stress defeated me.
I’d highly recommend the Pressure Principle as a top read in terms of mind management along with the Chimp Paradox. Check out further book reviews here.
For now, try and avoid mental fatigue before competitions. Do anything you can to keep life simple and unstressful in the days leading up to competition. That doesn’t mean just lying on the sofa thinking about the race – find ways to distract yourself. But don’t do your taxes the day before a big race just because you have some extra free time.
Race Prep
Two things to get right are your taper and your warm-up. The general rule for taper is gradually drop volume starting two weeks before the race, with about 50 percent of normal volume in the last week, while maintaining intensity (so you don’t lose fitness). There’s lots of individual (and event-to-event) variation, though, so experiment. In particular, one idea I like is planning the taper minimum three or four days before the race, then doing a medium hard session a couple of days before the race.
There’s even more variation in the right warm-up, with very little needed before long events. For shorter efforts where you need to be ready to put out a good effort right from the gun, there’s increasing evidence that a relatively hard “priming” effort can help make sure your VO2 is firing on all cylinders right from the start. A common protocol in running is a moderately hard 30-sec effort finishing 10 minutes before starting.
I won’t get into altitude training here as most won’t have access to it on JM Run Club unfortunately. I think it’s likely helpful if you have access to it, either through a trip to high elevation or an altitude tent/house, but getting it right is tricky. Consult with someone who knows what they’re doing before embarking on it. Happy to chat if you have opportunity to travel to altitude or looking at purchasing a tent. FYI, I came out of my tent as I felt my sleep quality was severely compromised and outweighed the benefits of the altitude stimulus.
Another option, though, is heat training and easier for most. It’s fairly standard for athletes preparing for a race in a warm climate to spend a week or two acclimating to heat prior to the race. More recently, there’s been evidence that heat acclimation training can also boost performance even in cool conditions. It may be related to dehydration-induced increases in blood plasma volume (as mentioned above), though there may be additional factors at work. You can get a decent effect in 5 to 7 days, doing sessions in 25 to 35 C heat – it’s something you might do a few weeks before a race. I’d highly recommend Vilamoura in Portugal as a perfect warm weather training venue, extremely popular with British athletes.
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Hope that’s not over complicated things and sorry for rambling on… Whatever you do, don’t try everything there all at once! Pick and choose some ideas that seem to fit best with your current situation and goals, and perhaps address current weaknesses. Make changes to your routine one at a time, and monitor how your body (and mind) react. And remember that all of this stuff just is the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake – it won’t get you far if there’s no cake underneath.
If you haven’t yet signed up for your own personalised training plan I’d highly recommend it to get structure and guidance in place and start putting some of the theories above into practice.
Smart consistent training gets the best results.
This is absolutely brilliant and incredibly useful! I can’t believe how many runners I know of who are reading about the chimp- I love this book! Thanks for such useful and concise information!