What heart rate do you sit at

hippy wrote:


Is there a way to tell when you are done building base?

Also, is there a disadvantage to building it quickly
by sitting in 70-85% HRmax rather than say 65-75%?

hippy



I've based my training this year on "The Triatlete's Trainign Bible" by
Joe Friel. He breaks the training schedule into Base, Build, Peak and
Compete phases. The Base is all about establishign a level of fitness so
that when you increase the intensity your body can cope. The Base starts
after a break between seasons. Build is where you start getting into
some aerobic action (obviously there's more detail to it than that),
which luckliy co-incided with the start of BR rides on Sunday. At Peak
you drop the hours but keep the intensity up and start to taper.

If you're startign from scratch the Base can go from 8-12 weeks, Build
at 6-8 weeks, Peak for 2 weeks and race for 2-3 weeks. But once you've
got that base, the theory is you can drop back to the Build phase if
you've got two lots of competition without enough time to go all teh way
back to Base. It's also based on periodisation theory so you have 3 hard
weeks and one easy where you do some time trials to test fitness.

The basic idea is you can't stay at a peak all year and you need some
rest and recovery time both physically and mentally at some stage of the
year. In my case I started from scratch after an accident, peaking now
for a couple of races over the next few weeks, then a lazy week and back
into the Build phase for the coming triathlon season.

Hope this helps.

DaveB