Adding Specificity to your workouts
As the triathlon season wraps up many athletes are setting goals for next season. Once you set a goal, and you have months to work towards that goal, laying out the steps in between can be daunting. One way of ensuring that you will make progress towards future goals is by adding specificity into your planned workouts.
Specificity; the quality or condition of being specific. Specificity involves adding a focus to the details of your planned workout rather than simply completing the numbers prescribed. The specificity should relate to your weaknesses, should take into account where you are in the race season and how experienced you are of an athlete. The specificity should allow you to gain skills that help you alleviate your weaknesses, starting with your largest weaknesses first, and then should narrow down as experience is gained.
For example, a beginning athlete may do 12x400’s on the track with the specificity of completing the workout consistently and evenly, a goal that would be appropriate for a newer athlete with a pacing weakness. A more experienced athlete may complete the same workout but will focus on dropping their left shoulder, or increasing leg lift, working towards a finer tuned goal of gaining run efficiency so they have a stronger kick at the end of a race.
Adding a specific goal into your workout also keeps your workout fresh, and focused. For example a typical workout may be 15X100 in the pool. Adding specificity into that workout for an experienced athlete may incorporate off the pool deck starts for each of those 100’s. This would keep the workout fresh for the athlete, while allowing them to fine tune their race starts, a skill that will allow them to start races calm and with less stress.
Adding specificity requires you to:
- quantify your end goal
- break that goal into specific weaknesses
- prioritize your weaknesses
- identify how to correct each area of weakness
- implement skills, drills, etc within your workouts
It can be a challenge for athletes to identify their own weaknesses and break them down into manageable steps, but not impossible. This is where using a coach to gain valuable third person perspective can be extremely useful. A coach can determine which weaknesses need immediate attention, which one can wait, and can help to administer specificity into your workouts.
Steve Pye
