The Top 5 Endurance Sport Training Errors

I have spent many years as a physiotherapist fixing injured athletes, especially runners and triathletes, and have heard many a tale of running injury woe. On further analysis, most of these tales of injury have a common theme.

When you review the sports sciences research on running injuries, you find that there is just one factor, the common theme, that correlates directly with the onset of these problems.

Is it “biomechanical mal-alignment”, with issues such as leg length discrepancies or excessive foot pronation? No.

Is it any specific type of running shoe (or lack thereof)? No.

The one factor that correlates directly with the onset of running injuries is, imagine this, training.

“Training error” is common in most endurance sports. Sad as that may be, there is a beauty in knowing this. Why? Because training can be readily adjusted and optimized. Adjust the training plan – and minimize the risk of injury. And better yet, optimize your performance in the meantime. Now that is a “win-win” if ever there was one.

Here are the top 5 errors that I have found in the training plans of endurance sport athletes.

1. Misuse of the concept of periodization. As the word suggests, “periodization” is all about using various periods and phases in your training program. For example, many endurance sport athletes will have a plan that employs many weeks of “base” training (typically long, slow miles), which then moves into a phase of faster, interval-type work, which is then followed by a “taper” and race phase. 

What is forgotten is that there is a de-training process that occurs as well. If you don’t continue to train the key mechanisms of performance throughout the season, you will lose that capacity gradually over time. For example, the cyclist that is doing 4 to 6 weeks of interval work to build their power output and capacity is lost by doing a lot of long slow miles in the off-season or the following base period. It only takes 7 to 10 days to start losing that highly-coveted power output. Periodization needs to be built around physiological responses to training (and de-training), not arbitrary phases and time periods.

2. Training cycles that are too long. Most training programs have training cycles that last 4 weeks in duration. For most, this involves 3 weeks of hard training, with a fourth week that is, for all intents and purposes, a relative rest week. By the time you get to week 4, you are in dire need of rest. A training cycle that is too long inhibits your quality of training.

3. The importance of recovery is forgotten. Here is the typical endurance athlete mantra: “Just keep training. When you get tired, train some more, because you are supposed to feel tired. Take a day off only if you need to do so, or you are sick. Time off is for wimps'”.

Yes, that is about the extent to what I hear in my office – except for the part about the wimps. Athletes never verbalize that part!

Training is only as good as your ability to be able to fully recover from it and adapt to it. If you don’t optimize recovery, you are not getting as big a return on your training investment as you could be getting. And if that’s the case, why do the training?

4. Too much, too soon. Most training programs have a rate of progression that ignores the body’s training adaptations, and does so in an arbitrary fashion. The running world has two great examples. Runners tend to build a long run on a week-to-week basis. There are many marathon training programs built around this concept - “if you add a mile to your long run every week, then in 26 weeks you are ready to run a marathon”. Add to this the arbitrary pattern of progression known as the legendary “10% rule”. What ever made 10% the gold standard? Now you have a training program that has little to do with methodical progression and a lot to do with some coach’s arbitrary numbers – numbers that probably have little to do with human physiology and more to do with the successful outlier athletes they coached in the past.

5. More is better. It’s the way North American society operates anymore. Endurance sport athletes – be they cyclists, runners, triathletes, you name it – live and die by the number of miles they log in on their training logs. It becomes a badge of honor to know that you have put in so many training miles this season, or so many more training miles than your training partner. Simply “doing more” is no guarantee for success, but it can relate to the onset of a training injury.

In true David Letterman fashion, let’s extend this list out to the Top 10. With that in mind, Part 2 of this three part series will round out the Top 10 endurance training errors, and Part 3 will deal with solutions to these common training maladies to both improve your performance in any endurance sport AND prevent injury in the process.

Photo credits: abesselink