Stoch Sports Blog

Many of you athletes are either taking a break or are going to be taking a break from your training in the very near future. The season has just about ended with most of the calendar ending in October. Should athletes even take a break from training? Should the athlete perform other types of activity to stay in shape during the break? Or should the athlete just keep up with the training, keeping the program going through to the new season?

The off-season should be argued as the most important part of the training year. If you have a great off-season you will most likely have a great success the following season. Have a poorly planned off-season with too much time off, with emphasis on the wrong types of training and you just may be in such poor shape that you have to start your season at the same fitness level of the last.

The off-season program should be designed to allow you to be mentally rejuvenated, while minimizing the loss of physiological adaptations that were gained during the season that has just ended. Detraining is defined as the partial or complete loss of training-induced physiological adaptations due to reducing or stopping training. Detraining is important to understand, as minimizing detraining in the off-season is important for maintaining adaptations and building upon the previous season’s gains. By preventing dramatic detraining in the off-season, you can build upon training adaptations and become stronger every year.

During a period of training cessation, VO2max, endurance time, and lactate threshold will decrease rapidly in highly trained athletes. Capillary density appears to be maintained for as long as 12 weeks in highly trained endurance athletes who have been training for many years. In highly trained endurance athletes, mitochondrial volume decreases rapidly in the first 8 weeks of detraining.

Much of an athlete’s performance potential will be decreased but not all of their physiological adaptations, so avoiding the pitfalls of not training is of utmost importance. However, a reduction of training levels is the way to rejuvenate your body AND your mind. So what should be done to minimize the loss of training adaptations during the off-season?

The answer is to decrease, but not stop training. But by how much should training decrease?

It is impractical and mentally very difficult to maintain race fitness year round. Thus, during the off-season, training should be reduced in such a way to maintain fitness gains from the current season, allowing you to become stronger each year.

Frequency: The frequency of training sessions plays an important role in the retention of physiological adaptations during a period of reduced training. In order to maintain physiological adaptations to endurance training, frequency of exercise bouts should not decrease more than 30%. In other words, if you currently train 6 days/week, training should not drop below 4 days/ week during the reduced period.

Volume: As long as the training frequency does not drop by more than 30% it can be safely assumed that training volume can be decreased up to 70-80% with no decreases in submaximal exercise performance. Performance is only maintained when the intensity of training is not reduced from pre-reduced training levels.

Intensity: The training intensity must be maintained during the period of reduced frequency and/or duration in order to maintain training adaptations. Exercise intensity must be maintained or only decreased by 10-20% in order to maintain training adaptations. Greater drops in training intensity will result in proportional decreases in your fitness.

Frequency: how often to train during the week.

Volume: measured by either time or distance.

Intensity: prescribed by either heart rate zones or wattage.

By Alan

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