#7 Mastering Periodization in Triathlon Training

Unlock the secrets to optimizing your triathlon performance through effective periodization. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced athlete, this episode covers how to structure your training year, adapt to setbacks, and build a plan that supports longevity and continuous improvement.

In this episode:

• The core principles of periodization and why it matters
• How to break down a training year into macro, meso, and micro cycles
• The importance of building a strong aerobic base before adding intensity
• Strategies for adjusting your plan when life throws curveballs
• Common pitfalls of year-round training without peak phases
• Practical tips for injury prevention and training adaptation
• Personal stories illustrating the power of structured training
• How to align your training with race goals and avoid burnout
• The role of diary and purpose in maintaining motivation

Come find us Cartel Coaching — Swim. Bike. Run. Together.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Team, welcome to Cartel Coaching. I am Calla Millwood. I'm an ex-professional triathlete and three times IMN 70.3 champion. And now I'm getting a proper reintroduction into the sport of triathlon as an age grouper. I spent a number of years at the pointy end of the sport, and now I've got a business, a life, a family, and the same 24 hours as everyone else who is trying to figure out how to be competitive again. And I tell you what, it is super humbling and it's interesting. What I bring to the table is the elite side of things. I'm living the age group reality right now. Not going to pretend that they're the same thing. With me every episode is Tim Brazier, who coaches everyone from first-timers to Olympians, and M, our resident age grouper, who is keeping us honest. This is Cartel Coaching, and let's get into it.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Welcome back to Cartel Coaching. So, well, it's a big day for us, and um and it's been a big weekend as well here in Sydney. So firstly, uh congratulations, Tim and Cal. We're live. We're live on school with Cartel Coaching. So that's uh pretty epic.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Yep. It's been a big uh a big weekend, a big week. Obviously, we had everyone in Noosa here pulling together the last bits, and we're still ironing out a couple little things just to make it as user-friendly as possible. And I think this is what will separate us from a lot of other services is that we are offering a champagne service on a bare budget where you know you'll you'll get to understand um the concept of coaching and how it works. And I guess at the end of the day, what we're trying to really do is educate you guys to understand why you're doing what training you're doing and why you're doing it, and basically build out your toolbox uh so that you're self-sufficient during training and on race day, and we're gonna guide you through it. And today, obviously, we're gonna dive into that and talk a lot about periodization. Yeah, it's been huge.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

Like to think the culmination of six months' discussion, Kel has arrived. It's uh quite awesome. I'm pretty stoked on it. Um, but yeah, it's been a big week. We're really excited to try and bring this platform to everybody and for everybody to engage and learning the best they can about how they can have the best performances. And that's the key thing for us, right? We want to see people improving and doing well.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

That's right. And as part of that, that is what this podcast is about, too, because not everybody is in a position to join um up to a platform like school. So we still want to be able to share all the good nuggets here uh for free. Uh and today we are going to be talking about periodization, uh, and that comes off the back of some thinking that I've been doing. So this weekend, just down the road from me, actually, we had uh Iron Man Western Sydney. So the masses all came down to the Regatta Center, and um, you know, it was it was a big one. Um people know I'm from Sydney, so I had quite a few um of my peeps on Instagram reach out, and I actually had someone reach out a couple of weeks ago, uh, and it was probably about three weeks before the race, and they were they were gonna be in the race. Uh, but they had done not a great deal of training, like they were they were really honest about it, and they're like, I'm pretty undebaked. Do you think I should just get a coach now and start doing some work uh right now? So we're we're three weeks out from the race at at that point. Um, so I I guess that's what made me want to kind of talk about this today, Tim and Cal. And um, like what realistically could you do in that situation? Three weeks out from race day, there's your there's your situation. You haven't really done a whole heap of training, um, and you're trying to do a classic cram session. How does that work?

SPEAKER_02 4:06

Reverse taper.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Reverse taper? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Crank up the training. Crank up the training leading into the event. Actually, I do remember Dylan McNeese doing this a few times where you know you may be coming off the back of an injury, uh, say you've had a shoulder injury swimming and you've had a few weeks off, but you start to sort of crank it up leading into a race as opposed to unwinding and uh detraining. So, but yeah, to answer that question, it's it's it's difficult. And I guess maybe we should go back to defining what periodization is, Tim. And um, because it really is quite a simple concept. Uh so uh, you know, for me it's kind of um I see a lot of age groupers just training year-round with not too much guidance. And I think periodization is a way to allow ourselves to sort of segment different phases so we ultimately get the best out of ourselves. There's certain times of the year where we want to be unfit, and there's certain times of the year where we want to be fighting fit and racing well. Um, Tim, what's your take on periodization and what how do we sort of define it?

SPEAKER_02 5:12

Yeah, I think it's a really important part there is that we want to be fighting fit where we want to be fighting fit. You can't be that way throughout the whole year. So periodization is about structuring your year to allow you to have some peaks, but also to allow you to have some troughs because they're really important too, mentally and physically, to back off and let the body recover, let the mind recover before you build back up again. So periodization is segmenting the year into blocks of training that allows you to arrive at your goal in the best possible shape. And those blocks of training really are looking at different physiological variables that you're trying to work on to improve your performance. So that could be that you're doing eight-week block of VO2 work into an eight-week block of threshold work, and then coming down into a small race-specific block into your care event or some sweet spot work. Yeah, there's different ways to structure it depending on what you're trying to achieve and in your different sports. It could be that how we're gonna have a block that we're focused on running, then a block focused on riding, and then we're gonna really nail in onto our swimming as we come into that last block as we start to increase the intensity in our bike and run. So the volume of the swimming might go up. So different ways to work around things.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

And I think you'll find as well, a lot of the age groupers doing well in their age group are people that do periodise the the year. They're working back from the race and are building in these blocks. And obviously, the key to going well at endurance events is having a massive aerobic base. And then we can sort of build, if you think of like a pyramid with or or a house with a strong foundation, you you want to build a strong aerobic base, you want to build the mitochondria, you want to build like everything that goes in towards allowing you to light that gunpowder on race day and light that gunpowder on those key sessions during the week. And to answer your query, um, Em, about your friend who's three weeks out from Western Sydney, it's really difficult to make a call on that when you don't know their background. What have they done over the last six months? Because it's kind of just wishful thinking. But if you work back from that event, if let's say we've got an event in six months' time, it gives us plenty of um runway to sort of plan, you know, a 16-week block and put that in in place. And I think what happens is you have a great event and you you leave the event feeling happy and positive. And I guess our MO with cartel coaching is longevity in the sport as well. And I think if you have a good experience, you'll keep coming back for more.

SPEAKER_02 7:50

Yeah, completely. And I and I think that's an interesting one too, as well. How you how people leave races often impacts how maybe the next four or six weeks can look. They leave super motivated, often people can get out there and keep on charging on and dig themselves a hole. But don't leave with a successful result that might go into a hole and not train for quite a while, and then it's a hard place to come back of. And what I found is for age group athletes too was generally the older we get, the less we bounce back. So we do have to give ourselves a good bit of time to breathe. But also importantly, if we stop moving, it's normally negative as well. Like we need to keep moving and keep it's like we've got to keep oiled and keep the gyms, the the joints moving and and the heart, heart ticking. So it can be really important to come off, just find a really happy place with a light load where you're just ticking over before you start to build up again towards your next event.

SPEAKER_01 8:47

Em, I think you said when you first got into triathlon that you sort of, you know, if you don't have some kind of structure and periodization, I guess the biggest thing you risk is uh probably two things injury and also burnout. Um and with the increase in social media um channels these days with Strava and people documenting their training on YouTube, we can't just copy and paste what Lionel Sanders is doing or Lucy Charles Barkley. So we really need to individualize a lot of this periodization as well. And I think uh that's something that's kind of the core of all this, too, right? Like it's we're we're wanting everyone to improve and have a really good race. The fun stuff with Triton as well is the training. And if you can break it down as well to bite-sized pieces, where hey, the next four weeks, we're just gonna work on building this aerobic base, and then four weeks after that, we sort of might move into a different phase, which could be strength, and then after that, we've got a few weeks of speed. Like it starts to break down what could be a mammoth build, and you're not aimlessly just going out and training each day. You know, there's a purpose behind each phase, and there's a purpose behind each um session as well, and it starts to make it uh fun and enjoyable.

SPEAKER_02 10:02

Yeah, completely. And it's really hard to do some of the other phases and some of the stuff that people might say is enjoyable without having done some of the base work first. You know, so if you're more of an experienced athlete, you easily come back in and be able to get into some VO2 max work earlier on and do that short, fast, hard stuff and ramp up your ceiling and use that as part of that as a base block. But if you haven't done that, your base block's gonna look completely different to an athlete who's very new to the sport or an athlete who's real low on training age, as we call it. So training age is not, you know, I'm 21 and I've been training for you know, 21 years. That's not my training age, it's uh I've been triathon for two years, so I've had two years of training age. Um, and so that's a really important part of it, is where you are on that spectrum can impact how you might set up your periodization throughout the year. And again, what race you're doing too. So depending on the race you're trying to achieve at, you know, it might depend on what order you do some of that work in. And because your race specific phase is going to look very different to what your base phase might look like. Um and your race specific phase for one event to the next is quite quite different. So you've got to sort of take homage to that and make sure that you're you're planning your year effectively depending on what you're trying to achieve.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Tim, we work off 16-week uh builds. Do you want to run through kind of the gist behind why it's 16 weeks and in simple terms what what compromises uh comprises of those uh 16 weeks?

SPEAKER_02 11:42

Yeah, we as you mentioned earlier, Carol, it's really important to work back from your race. So, you know, if we looked at it, it was we probably want six or eight we weeks of race specific training. Okay, so that sort of sets up what those those last six or eight weeks are gonna look like. And then before that, we want to have some a base block where we're trying to achieve something else, depending on your level of ability, as we discussed just before. You know, we might have a block in there that we're building some real just key fundamental strength work, aerobic work, transitioning into some little bit of higher intensity work before we go into that specific phase. It might be for real advanced people. We were coming in after a couple weeks of getting set up and routine established that we can hit some really good building blocks of VO2 work, four to six weeks, and we sort of need at least six weeks in there to get significant change. So, and that was sort of where we looked at it, was like, well, we do need eight weeks, six to eight weeks of really good race prep. We do need six to eight weeks here to make significant change, and that created sort of our 18, well, sorry, our 16-week platform. And so we're looking at creating a base, then building through to race-specific phase, and executing in that last phase into the race.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Yeah. And so the athletes that have sort of no direction or are not periodizing through the year, they're just training at one sort of pace, just going year round, stuck in a loop. Um they're never going too hard, but they're never going too easy. So they're not really going too hard to create an adaption, and they're not going too easy to sort of build a big aerobic base. What what what are some of the downfalls of just doing this year-round? Well, you just pl you plateau.

SPEAKER_02 13:32

So if you say you were just doing eight hours, those eight hours were pretty similar every week. You're just going out riding bungees every week. Generally, you're just going to plateau because you don't have a variation of your stimulation to your system. So your system just adapts to the stimulation you're throwing at it, and then it won't really go any further from that because you're not throwing real concentrated effort of being high intensity with lots of rest or VO2 work where you're one to one and you work to rest ratios. Or as you talked about, Calgoing, real easy, now allowing your aerobic system to adapt and have high volume, or a lot of aerobic work where mitochondrial development's happening. You're teaching yourself metabolizing fats and transferring them to ATP as energy, which is a really important part for long distance racing. So you start to miss different elements that you can throw in and you're just flat line, general, and you'll get really stale over the time.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

Yeah, so I might just share my experience actually. So when I first started doing Iron Man racing, I think back to my first 70.3 actually, I felt like I needed, I don't know, like over six months to train for that. And I didn't understand what periodization was, and I didn't understand actually what I needed to do to build into that race. I did have a a fairly a moderately okay um baseline of fitness coming off running a marathon, but I really just I didn't I didn't understand it. So the day that my training kind of started, because I did just buy a you know, generic off-the-plan, you know, thing on the internet to follow, I was like, I'm in training right now, so I just have to hit this hard. So I just went out and and just sort of went for it from the start. And um, and yeah, and it ended up with me doing too much, just not really getting it, um, and becoming very injured. And, you know, if I look at it to where I am today, uh, you know, working off my plan, I'm I'm pretty far out from my race. Like I'm doing Port Mac in October, so we've got ages, but I understand what we're doing here, you know. Like I it's not about building all of the, you know, race specific stuff. It's about actually making me strong and and building a bit of a base. And so um, I think it's a lot easier for me these days to, you know, understand what I'm doing and the why. Um, now that I do know the why and I've been educated about the why and and what we're doing. Um, but I I think it also rings true what you're talking about, Tim, about getting stale, because I'm someone who really just enjoys doing a regular routine of training. So I've been doing that ever since I started my weight loss journey. I just started doing that. And um, I could really it's the first, you know, I guess the last couple of months is where I really started to notice it that I that nothing was moving for me, particularly like in in all of them, in all the swim background. I was I was I I I have been a bit stale, I I think. Um and I've I've kind of reached that point now where I actually need to start doing things in a more I don't know, um, methodical way that's gonna actually get some sort of adaptation because cause I won't I won't do it otherwise.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

Yeah, and it's really hard to do that adaptation. You know, if we take you, for example, we're we're really trying to provide a lot of strength, and then we're also trying to provide a lot of speed. And then, you know, strength and speed is power, and we'll so we'll start to bring those together. But it's really hard to do that sort of work if you're then lowering on top of it a whole lot of other work, which is going to fatigue the system. Um and that's where a really big aerobic base plays in as well, because you've got a good aerobic base, you can tolerate more work and still do some of that work. But if you don't have as big aerobic base, that's really hard to achieve. That's where sort of understanding yourself and your individuality around training is important. And that's for everybody out there. Really think about you can only achieve probably a couple of things within your training program. So look at your program, think what are those key things that I want to get out of it in this next four to eight weeks, and just knuckle down on them, just commit to them, and you'll see some shift in those areas, you know, and then go into a bit of a maintenance phase with those, then commit to something else and and step it along. And it means if you do have a race that's six or eight or nine months away, you can segment it up more and create a lot more target of target of achievement and also see some progress along the way.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

And six, eight, nine months may seem like a long time until you start to break it down and realize, hey, we've only got you know four, six, four or six weeks to create this base, and then we move into the next phase, and then in the next phase, and all of a sudden all these bite-sized pieces um accumulate to make a nice big cake that hopefully you ice off for the event. And I guess essentially we're just creating these ingredients and bringing them all together, and you will have a much better event if you have you know worked on these different systems in your body as well. And I think, and I see it all the time, I still feel like there's a lot of age groupers that are just stuck in that sort of zone three area where they're not going hard enough to create adaption and they're not going easy enough to really recover. And I feel like the hard stuff, the VO2 stuff and anaerobic training, there's super top-end stuff that you can do on your trainer or you can do in the pool, or you can do to running, like these are the things that they can be super challenging, but you won't be able to get up for those sessions if you've been smashing yourself all week as well. And we see it a lot, don't we, Tim, where a lot of athletes they just burn out because they're just they're sort of stuck in that grey area all year round as well and not really advancing too much.

SPEAKER_02 19:43

Yeah, completely. It's it's really, really common. And what people will see with some of the training plans we've been developing is that Monday is actually a really key, easy day. People are like, oh no, Monday we're staying the week, but often it's because we've smashed ourselves at the weekends. Those as age represents, those are our weekends of opportunity where we'll put some bigger volume down or some more intensity down, or we're doing some racing and they call you to crit race in the weekend as well. So Monday actually becomes a good day to recover up from that, and then set yourself up for another few good days before you might have another recovery day before going into the weekend or set you up for another couple of days before a couple of aerobic into the weekend. So yeah, periodization can relate to the overall picture of the year, but then you can start to step it back down into different cycles, so macrocycles and microcycles to think about what they look like. So even the week, you know, we're trying to periodise a week so that we've gained the right hits of sessions throughout that week and we're recovering. We're trying to periodise three to four week block so that we get two to three weeks of really good training, and then we get a week off, we're allowing ourselves to adapt to that stimulus and that load and really go easy. And then we look about that and we layer that up. I'm like, right, now we're looking at what do those two to three months look like, and then how that then plays into the year. So yeah, it comes from uh little pieces of ingredients as you talk, Callum, which is the macro, microcycles, just building themselves together to make the big piece of cake at the end of the year. Um, which for M's Port Macquarie, and I guess Cal, you've got Ken's coming up, eh?

SPEAKER_00 21:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

Sure do. So we've talked about best case scenario, we've mapped out this beautiful periodization training plan. Let's throw a few curveballs in there. So we get family gets busy, um, we get injured. Do we stick to the plan or how do we make adaptions to that if it comes in certain phases? Because a big thing in triathlon, not only on race day but in training, is overcoming um setbacks. And we all need the tools to be able to deal with these. So, Tim, what's the hot take on that? How do we make these changes or adaptations? So lovely thing about triathlon.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

generally get injured somewhere. Um you can go training somewhere else. You know, so if you can't run you can still swim and ride. Some reason you can't ride, you can probably still swim and run. You can still do some gym work. Like we can shift around and people can appreciate that aerobic stimulus developed in one area is going to have a crossover effect. It's not going to be you know the full crossover. But you know how often have we seen people, even an elite level turn up at Kona, having run off very minimal load. I think it was Trevor Foley actually who did second in in Kona and he was basically on a lever in a water running in the water and on Alta G all the and all the lead up. But really good cycle miles, really good swim miles. And that huge aerobic base helped him turn up. And funnily enough he probably in some ways he may have turned up fresher than had he'd been doing all the run training he'd scheduled in and that may have been a really cool lesson to him is that actually I did a little bit less and I performed better and that was really important. So if we are injured or if we do get ill the family is busy first step is to step back and look at what can I what can I strip out and just keep aerobic because the intensity is an extra stimulus that makes us tired and it's hard to get up for. But if you can do easy aerobic training as your baseline and always return to that then that's great. And remember 30 minutes is better than zero minutes. 20 minute run is better than zero minutes. So even just getting yourself out the door for saying small is still going to keep you moving forward or at least maintain where you are at. So that's really a key part of it is aerobic and try keep moving and then try use your other disciplines to balance the aerobic stimulus if you are injured in one or the other. If you're ill generally just knock it on the head as quick as you can.

SPEAKER_01 23:59

You'll see a lot of people you've probably seen it a lot Cal in your day and you probably start to see it now as well is that people just train through because they have so committed to what they want to do and what they want to achieve and then often you see that just falling off a cliff right totally I I I feel like from my experience running injuries seem to be the most common and I'll just share a few tips of what we used to do to try and overcome it. We would get in the water and in deep water aqua running so we would do you know you could Google sessions for this or you could join cartel coaching and we could share some ideas of you know how that would look you can uh let's see you can go on the um uh use one of those lever things where it basically it uh accommodates your weight makes you feel a lot lighter than you are there's also um uh what's the thing that ski thingy uh uh the elliptical yeah the elliptic the elliptical and that so there's great examples like Tim was saying with Tim Trevor Foley that uh there's athletes who are doing very low mileage but they're still getting a benefit from swimming and riding and they can still turn up to an event and run very well. And I know Emma Moffat had that one year with the World Champs um done almost all of her running on the elliptical and it's just a way to sort of cater for that. You can also boost up your your swim sessions as well. So you can still get that aerobic benefit but there's ways around a lot of it and a lot of the time you can supplement your training without sort of derailing things too much while your body mends itself as well. But the important thing is once you get back to running again you almost need a bit of a return to run program because you can't just pick up where you left off and just listen to the body a little bit more. Maybe it requires altering you know some of the training the the mileage and that but with this day and age with the super shoes and the amount of padding on a lot of the shoes I mean I find as well the the treadmill it just feels like running on clouds when you've got like nice soft you know Joel Nimbus shoes and the hookers now and the on shoes it it really lends itself to you know injury prevention in my opinion and um yeah that's that's great. It's great.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

I think um yeah what I'm hearing here is that there just needs to be a lot of planning but what I feel like gets in the way for most people and I I'm kind of speaking for myself here it's the FOMO factor right so there's so many things that you can do throughout the year and I feel like Iron Man is constantly knocking on the door with different events. There's all these running vents there's lots of stuff that's always going on and so it becomes really challenging I think as as you know someone who loves this stuff right to then say okay yes I am going to commit like if I use myself as the example Iron Man Australia is my race that I want to do this year. Like I'm really I really want to have a good race there. But I've already signed up to Sydney Marathon in August which is just a couple of months before Iron Man Australia and you know like I feel strong fit and healthy right now but I'm already starting to consider whether that is the right move for me because I I actually don't want to do anything that's gonna impact Iron Man Australia. And I never would have thought like that before but I think you know if I look at my peer group and the people that I chat to most regularly we're all in everything right like it's just a constant the race schedule is is fierce. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:42

Yeah there's a lot of opportunity out there and it's and I think some of the bracing as well can be used really wisely within training but as we are all a type endurance athletes we go seeking for the big dogs and try the big dogs in lots and lots which are the ones that are create the most risk of injury and then also the harder they are to recover from you know to be able to back up. And you can see some sort of systemic failure not just from you know running races but from like you do big long rides um and in the next few days you can be really low and flat and you can actually really struggle for a little bit after that. You know it's a different fatigue that you're feeling after something like that than it is if you've done a marathon or a hundred K ultra run, something like that. You know they're very different. Whereas if you look at some other athletes they might go and engage in sprint races or Olympic distance races and use them as a regular training stimulus which helps set them up really well for the half IMAD or the full because you can recover from them better. And I think if we can try redirect our FOMO towards some of those and and have that outlet and race in some of those events we'll probably be creating a better structure for ourselves across the year.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

I also think having a period periodization plan uh creates a lot of discipline too to sort of uh frame your training and give you a purpose for what you're trying to achieve and it gives you a lot of direction. So uh it can make what seems like a long build up seem quite short but it's very targeted and you've got a purpose for a lot of things as well. And I think what we subscribe to is you need a purpose and you need to know why you're getting out of bed and doing this session if are you taking it easy or is it a key session where you know we're going to use the afterburners and really get after it and create some adaption. So I think otherwise the rest of the year if you don't sort of have some structure you just like Tim said you become stale I feel like you have a higher risk of sort of dropping out of the sport and at worst case scenario taking up high rocks. So we we want you know to really dial into triathlon and have some longevity creating some kind of periodization is key and it's something that we're really big on here. It's something we discuss as well within our school platform and um we've got you know resources here to sort of guide you guys through it. And um obviously with you know a 16 week training plan you're not always picking it up from day one. So we can sort of guide you on that as well that hey we're I've got an event in 10 weeks it's still plenty of time we can help guide you on hey what's the best phase to pick that up from from here.

SPEAKER_02 30:33

Yeah especially based on your history and that's a really important part of it and swear where have you been and where are you going?

SPEAKER_00 30:40

The two key questions to ask anybody when you're starting out on a journey well that's a wrap but if you want to keep the conversation going come find us on Instagram at cartel dot coaching and for coaching camps and community you can check out our webpage. I've linked it in the show notes. See you next time