In order to prepare for a race in the mountains, you need to train a lot, but how much training is necessary for a successful preparation? I think each of you asked this question to yourself or to the coach.
In order to accurately answer this question, you need to know more about the characteristics of your body, but given our experience and analysis of training systems, you can determine the optimal minimum and maximum.
Minimum
Cross-country racing is primarily a journey, and if your task is just to meet the target time, you just need to do at least 3 training sessions a week. The optimal amount of training is not in kilometers, but in hours. For 3 training sessions, it is enough to allocate 4-6 hours.
Optimal
The optimal amount of training depends primarily on the amount of free time, if you have to sacrifice sleep or do not have time to rest at all, then you are training unnecessarily much and such a number of training sessions will not bring you success. 5-6 training sessions will be the “golden mean” and if you want to finish successfully, you need to strive to adjust your work and rest regime so that there is time for training. When you train more than 4 times a week, the amount of training will be optimal 7-10 hours.
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Anything more than 6 workouts, this is quite advanced level and be prepared for good progress you will have to spend more time on recovery procedures, nutrition, sleep, if all this is ignored, all your efforts in vain, and the efficiency will be much lower, since the training process needs to be constantly undulating and the resulting stress must be applied quality of “rest”, only then the growth is possible. If your time and level of training allows you to train more than 10 hours, we recommend increasing the amount of training, not the volume. The optimal amount for a volume of 10-16 hours will be 7-9 training sessions.
Maximum
As they say, the appetite comes during meals and many very much flirt with the amount of training and just overtrained. There should be a maximum of 2 workouts per day, and a maximum of 13 per week cycle. Analyzing the training of the best endurance athletes, if you do not consider triathlon, where swimming can be the third training session per day, most train 2 times a day and 11-12 times a week, and the average training volume is 16-22 hours. In our opinion, the optimal average volume should be around 16-18 hours with blocks of 20 hours and peaks of a maximum of 25 hours.
It is important to understand that you should always strive for quality, not quantity.
We will talk about what kind of training it should be in the following articles.
