Planning your training schedule: vindication!

Smart call! After rollerski intervals on Saturday, I drove to the gym to lift weights. I had both a quality rollerski session (except when the glue to my pole grip decided to fail during intervals and I had to roll back to pick up my pole shaft off the pavement...) and a quality weight session.

Sunday was a different matter. I went road bike riding with Ryan Robinson. I felt pretty good and pushed fairly hard up the first real hill. But that was it: my legs had nothing left for any remaining hill. I struggled the rest of the ride unless I kept an easy pace.

So what happened? My quality weight session included two season highs for squats and seated leg press. I do heavy squats using a Smith machine - the bar follows a track so you don't need to worry about balance. (I also do free squats, but at a lighter weight). After a warm-up set, I pushed two sets of 315 lbs - more than twice my body weight. Seated leg press machine? Three sets using every weight on the machine.

So my legs were tired for Sunday's ride - even though initially they felt fine. Clearly, if I had chosen to do intervals the day after weights, the session would have been of low quality.

This reinforces the lesson from my last post: Plan your training schedule around your most important sessions. Make sure you have energy and strength for the sessions that really count. Don't overdo it the day before a hard session.

Plan your training schedule around your most important sessions

I think weight lifting has been affecting my quality training sessions. Example: Monday I did a short weight session in the gym. My upper body was still a little sore on Tuesday when I started classic intervals on my rollerskis. I lasted two intervals and abandoned because my second interval over the same distance was much slower than the first.

Maybe I was not totally recovered from five and a half hours of biking, running and rollerskiing over the weekend, but I don't think so.

In past years, I found that doing rollerski intervals first, then driving to the gym for a weight session worked best. My muscles were warm and flexible from the interval session, and the 30 minutes of changing shoes and driving to the gym allowed my muscles to recover from the aerobic effort. I'd have a quality weight session without impacting the quality of the interval session.

So why am I doing weights on days between intervals or distance sessions? I don't know... But it's going to stop now. Starting tomorrow, it intervals then a weight session.

The key to training is to make sure you're rested for hard sessions, so you can get your heart rate up.

Lesson: Plan your training schedule so you're rested for your most important sessions.

Wall-Mounted Vasa Ergometer Much More Ski-Like

Greg and I met to set personal bests on the Vasa Ergometer after I mounted it on the wall. Here's the results:

Personal Bests on Wall- Mounted Vasa Ergometer
as of July 1, 2007 (Best score in bold).

	Level	Mike	Greg
Fixed Distance		Time
100m Doublepole	3	1:16	1:06
100m Single Pole	3	1:24	1:20
Fixed Time		Distance
Doublepole - 3 minutes	1	231m	235m
Doublepole - 4 minutes	3	319m	-
Single Pole - 4 minutes	1	260m	-

So what's the difference between using the Vasa Erg as it ships (horizontally) versus mounting it on the wall? Everything! Our times came down because we could use out abs; the motion felt MUCH more ski-like; we could get our heart rates up higher. And it was easier to see the power meter.

We meet again this coming Thursday, July 12 at 6:30pm if anyone else is in the Wixom, MI area.

Greg doublepoles on the wall-mounted Vasa Ergometer