Email List
Title Sponsor
Photographer
Classifieds
There are currently
23
classified ads listed on our MultiSport Classifieds Site.
Go get a bargain!
Running Races
Bricks - by Richard Pady of Healthy Results Training
"Brick" is a word we often hear in the multisport world. To those who have been a part of the scene for a while, this training method has probably been firmly incorporated into their regimens. For others who may be new to duathlon or triathlon, I will try to de-mystify the term and show you how to advance your training with a sport-specific technique.
Multi-sport by its very definition is more than one activity brought together and performed in sequence. Most often these individual sports are practiced separately and raced jointly. A brick stacks one upon the other in training, the most common is bike-run session.
There is benefit derived from this type of training aside from the obvious
time saving factor of combining workouts. The specificity of training
theorem states that in order to perform an activity well, you need to
practice that activity. Sounds overly-simplistic doesn't it?
In triathlons you make two distinct transitions from one muscle group
to another as you change activities. The body requires an adaptation
period allowing blood flow to shift from the upper body to the legs,
as in the swim to bike transition, or from a circular motion on the bike
to the stride and impact of the run in T2. When you do bricks, you are
acclimatizing your system to those specific stresses. Another reason
to add these workouts to your weekly program is also to practice your
route on how to change from a swimmer to biker or biker to runner. Take
time to think about the order you want to put on or take off each item.
Remember the first thing in T1 and the last thing in T2 should be your
helmet. Keep it simple!
Bricks can be easy or race pace. They can be long-slow-distance or intervals. Regardless of the type of effort or length you want to practice your transition-area skills during these workouts. It's not advisable to stack every session. There is still much to be gained with segregated workouts. One of my favorite workouts for short course athletes is to have them do a 45:00 bike followed by a 30:00 run. I have them do the last 15:00 of the bike at race effort and the first 10:00 on the run is at you race effort. The rest of the workout is just nice and easy endurance. This workout trains you to deal with the difficulty of heavy legs coming off the bike. You can also do shorter intervals that you repeat.
In summary, bricks not only allow us to practice individual sport skills but rehearse the change from one to another as well. If bricks aren't currently a weekly part of your conditioning program, you may be missing a key part of your multisport foundation.
If you have any questions please feel free to email any time
Richard Pady
Head Coach of Healthy Results Training