220's Winter Training Advent Calendar (Part 21)

Day 21 of our Winter Training Advent Calendar contains four one-hour sessions that you might like to consider for your Boxing Day workout which you'll definitely be doing, won't you?

Published: December 21, 2011 at 8:00 am

135 Gym-Based Brick Session

The aim is to train your legs for the bike/run changeovers. Swap between the spinning bike and treadmill. 10mins on the bike, 5mins on the treadmill repeated four times to complete the hour. Start at recovery or base endurance pace for the first block and increase the intensity of the session throughout so that the last 15min stint is the hardest of the lot at lactate threshold/race pace. Just allow a couple of minutes in the last set to cool down.

136 Duathlon Brick

This session mimics the run/bike/run format of a duathlon with a warm-up and cool-down into a continuous set. Run 15mins building pace from base endurance to lactate threshold pace. 30min bike at tempo/lactate threshold pace followed by 10min run at tempo/lactate threshold pace and 5min easy jog to finish.

137 Swim to Bike Simulation in the Gym

This will get you used to swapping from the upper-body work of swimming to the lower-body work of cycling. Warm up with some light spinning on the bike for 10mins. Main set: 3 x [5mins of upper-body circuit (10 chin-ups, 30 press-ups, 10 chin-ups, 30 dips continuous for 5mins)] straight into 10mins on a spinning bike or turbo at tempo/lactate threshold pace. 5min spin on the bike as a cool-down to finish.

138 Swim to Bike Simulation at the Pool

This accurately simulates the demands of going from being horizontal when swimming to sitting on the bike and working at race pace. If you local pool will let you, get your turbo trainer poolside for a real swim/bike simulation session. After a short race warm-up, go for reps of 200-400m at raace pace followd by jumping onto the bike for 5-10min several times over. For example, 4 x 400m swim at race tempo followed by 8mins race tempo on the turbo with a short warm-up and cool-down before and after.