“Fatigue Seeker vs. Fatigue Manager”
Ken Dobberpuhl, CPT, MAT
The “if a little is good, more must better” concept permeates many sports training regimens but is especially pervasive among endurance athletes. I suspect this happens as a result of the types of individuals that are attracted to such activities. Most endurance athletes are rugged individualists with a huge work ethic that can suck them right into overuse, chronic fatigue and injury situations.
Exercise physiologists probably haven’t done a very good job at explaining how little stimulus it often takes to bring about an adaptive change and to maintain it. There have been hundreds of studies to show that periodic progressive overload can bring about the physiological changes necessary to handle longer events.
If you look at most training programs, i.e. an 18 week marathon training program you see this pattern of a longer run each week over the eighteen weeks. Usually it culminates with the classic 20 miler several weeks before the race followed by a taper period. So assuming you take a couple of weeks to absorb your race effort you can maintain this endurance level with as little as one long run (18-22 miles) every 3-4 weeks. Many athletes mistakenly feel they must maintain the upper training volume mileage from that point on. Once you have developed the energy pathways that support these extended efforts do don’t need to keep pushing them weekly.
This is where learning to be a “fatigue manager” instead of a “fatigue seeker” comes into play. It’s very easy to get caught into trying to maintain high volumes and intensities of training but what you really need to consider is your personal ability to recover from these efforts. I think this is one of the hardest lessons to learn in sports training. Remember the exercise is the stimulus, the rest/recovery is when the adaptation occurs (strength/endurance) so if we keep pushing (seeking fatigue) without adequate recovery we never reap the full benefit of the work.
Please read that again, maybe even post it on your mirror to remind you that not every training session is supposed to leave you “trashed or fried”. This will take some effort for some of you to identify the purpose of your various training sessions. It is far better to error to the side of under trained than to keep pushing every session. It’s simply not sustainable.
Intervals are an excellent example of fatigue management within the context of a single workout. When you have the correct interval (for you) and you are able to maintain your pace and recovery within the prescribed time, you are in that fatigue management zone. If either your pace or recovery drops off you are entering a fatigue seeking mode and continuing is not going to make you stronger or faster. This takes discipline and courage to stop at this point. Especially in group training because you need to do what’s best for you on that day regardless of what the “schedule” call for. You want to save your heroic efforts for racing not out on a training run with friends. Whether we are talking about running, swimming, or cycling, they all use the same principle. For example, if you are supposed to do 8 repeats of 3 minutes at 85% MHR with a recovery down to 110 BPM or 3 minutes. If after 4 reps you can’t get your heart rate down to 110 within three minutes which is a 1:1 work to rest ratio you are probably not going to benefit from pushing through 4 more and never getting you heart rate down.
Your measure of fitness improvement will come when you see that you are starting to recover faster after the same or faster effort. Learn to manage fatigue in each workout, each week and within the whole training cycle. When other athletes are talking about how many miles they ran (rode/swam) that week before the race just be confident in knowing that you are not only trained but rested to give your best possible performance.
FUNCTIONAL
FITNESS
