Jerome used to ask me this when I first got into triathlon. Back then, I didn't really appreciate the difference. I was swimming, and biking, and running. A lot! But really I was exercising, and the difference is critical!
If you jump in the pool at the gym and spend 20 minutes stroking away, nice and easy, up and down the lane, did you exercise? Yep! Did you train? No.
If you jump on your bike and go for a
ride with your kids or some friends, your heart rate never getting much over 100BPM, did you exercise? Of course! Did you train? Nope.
People who are just trying to avoid the health risks of being sedentary exercise. Athletes train. Hard. Which have you been doing?
To be clear, you certainly CAN exercise your way into a triathlon finish. It's not that there's zero benefit of moving your body with consistency. But are you ever
going to get fast? Are you going to reach your maximum potential as an athlete? No way.
A lot of endurance athletes focus on MILES or HOURS of training. They're concerned with building VOLUME. The issue is that you absolutely can rack up a ton of miles, hours, "volume", without ever actually training.
Think about going for a super relaxed 30 minute run at a very easy pace. Now imagine doing a run
workout consisting of a half mile warm up, 10 x hill sprints with easy recovery on the downhills, and a half mile cool down totaling 30 minutes. Your "volume" was the same. Miles, the same. Time, the same. Are they the same?
Ever found yourself, or someone you know, saying "I work out SO MUCH but I never seem to get any faster!" Maybe it's time to look a little harder at your training plan. Maybe there's a lot of "exercise" and not enough "training".
Training is specific focused effort aimed at developing your capacity to go faster and/or further. When done well, it's a carefully curated plan that incorporates low, medium, and high intensity work to develop your strength, speed, stamina, and technique. Each workout Is carefully crafted with a specific purpose aimed to achieve improvement in one or more specific areas. Constant low intensity, high volume ("exercise") training only works on endurance.
So, are you training? Or are you exercising? Come TRAIN with B2G! www.teamB2G.com/plans-pricing
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