Waves

Posted by Coach Mark

I listened to a great interview this year with Mark Allen’s coach, Luis Vargas, and his philosophy on “waves”.  The idea, while not novel or complex, is incredibly simple to understand and makes complete sense to us at TeamMPI.  Luis talks about how everything is made up of waves – light, sound, etc. - and we can apply that to training and racing both physically and mentally.

During training, both in the singular event of training and the days, weeks and months of training, athletes physically feel great and poor at different times.  Emotionally, the same thing happens as well.  One week an athlete feels incredible (hopefully leading up to a race) while three weeks later during higher intensity and/or volume the athlete feels beat-up, run down and tired.  The key is for the athlete and their coach to time the “highs” to occur just before racing and for both to expect the “lows” to sometimes occur during those heavy volume or intensity blocks.  Understanding one’s body and training program allows athletes and coaches to be in control of the “waves” of physical and emotional training.

Now step back from this micro view and apply it to an annual plan and THEN to a multi-year plan.  Is it possible to have some peak years while also having some recovery years?  You bet!  This really applies to older athletes racing Ironman or Ultra.  In fact, as I write this, Jonas Coulting is competing in the Ultraman World Championship in Hawaii.  Before the race he talked about needing a couple of years to recover between his heavy years of training and racing. He’s won the event in 2004 and 2007.  This makes total sense to us at MPI as we strongly believe that an athlete doesn’t get faster by doing speed sessions, but rather speed sessions AND recovering.

At MPI, we continually talk about “consistency”, “frequency” and “knowing your body” as being keys to a long and very rewarding triathlon life.  Part of this is understanding the natural occurrences of peaking and recovering: from the individual training session to multi-year performances. 

Finally, as our 2011 season comes to a close, both our athletes, Coach Peter, Coach John and myself could not have had such great success without our #1 recovery supplement and performance enhancer, Master Amino Acid Pattern (MAP).  If you haven’t tried MAP, now is a great time to see what all the fuss is about.  I’ve been using MAP for many years and my wife and two teenage kids use it as well.  It’s an essential part of our daily lives.  Thanks Dr. Minkoff and Bodyhealth.com for creating such a wonderful product! (Check MAP out by clicking here.)

Smarter, Stronger, Faster!