In practice this means that we encourage the athletes we coach and those who listen to our podcast and read our articles to embrace different sports and movements depending on their interests, their context, their seasons and their current abilities.

Get the 8 Week Cross-Training Base Training Plan from Consummate Athlete on Training Peaks

How to build out a Consummate Training Plan

1. Tactics – Know what matters in your sport. Many athletes come to us thinking that mountain bike training is like road training. Treat your sport like a game (or rather, remember it is JUST A GAME). This is perhaps simple but not easy to make time for in some cases. Read books about the sport (especially older ones), watch races (including older ones), take a course, or study video are common ways to become a ‘student of your sport’.
2. Be Prepared, Be organized – Being consummate at anything means you are ‘put together’ (think about James Bond or being a ‘consummate professional’). You do the work, you show up on time, you are prepared, you have clean/functioning equipment. This is all controllable and independent of genetics or even skill/ability. We have had clients go to courses about personal finance or organization and even get their home organized by interior designers! Our Book ‘Becoming a Consummate Athlete‘ includes several chapters on organizing gear and choosing gear that can be used for multiple sports.
3. General Skills – General movement skills can be learnt at home by practicing strength training and by doing activities like yoga, pilates or martial arts. Taking time for these skills often spirals into new hobbies, if not a change in your main sport but importantly provide new experiences and communities.  Including Strength, Power, Coordination and Mobility in these ‘general’ training sessions is time well spent and can make new skills, abilities and performances possible in your main sport(s).
4. Sport Specific Skills – Planning skill training for your sport is foreign to many endurance athletes but it is time well spent. This can be a solo pursuit, a fun session with a friend (watch kids at a skate board park or bike jump park for ideas), or a guided or coached session. Learn more about our getting Consummate Athlete Bike Skills Coaching
5. Engine Building – This is the training many endurance athletes do. Building your endurance is important and beneficial. Our belief is that cross-training gives you options to stay consistent over time. You can adapt to weather, terrain, training partners and work around injuries and fatigue. Build the engine but remember variety.

Want to learn more? Check out our book for all of our key pillars to training like a Consummate Athlete!

Keep It Short — or at least have a short option

The last time I did this challenge (adding a bonus yoga session on top of my AM routine), I had grand plans of hour-long classes each day, but that wasn’t realistic. I did a few long sessions throughout the month, but mostly, I focused on 20-30 minutes and actually took the time to enjoy that time rather than stressing about cramming an hour in. (If you can commit to a couple of real-life, or at least, longer, sessions each week, that’s awesome. I know a lot of people really struggle to practice at home with all the distractions.)

Find the Right App/Video

There are TONS of great options out there for yoga videos and classes—and tons of them are free. I’ve used YogaGlo in the past, and the app has been amazing. It’s not cheap ($19/month) but they have a free trial and I suggest taking advantage of it. There are over 4,000 classes on there, they’re all really good quality, and bonus, you can sort by all types of things, from length to style, and even search for things like ‘travel’ or ‘PMS.’ If you aren’t ready to spend $$$, I’d highly recommend taking Day 1 to bookmark a few interesting free videos (I love Tara Stiles’ YouTube Channel, and you can also grab a few yoga videos done by moi on our channel) so you always have one on hand and don’t waste time starting and stopping videos every day.

When You Don’t Want To… You Need To

The day you want to skip your class is likely the day that you’ll benefit the most. Just trust me on this one. Even if you have to google / search on youtube for ‘easy restorative class’ and spend most of the 20 minutes in child’s pose, you’ll feel better and clearer. It’s always worth taking the time, even if you have just 5 minutes to do a few stretches without a video.

Make It Nice

My favorite session came at the end of the month when I rolled out my a new yoga mat and block. I decided to get fancy and plugged in an essential oil diffuser that my amazing friend had gotten me for my birthday (and of course, I hadn’t used before), and used the eucalyptus oil. It was honestly the nicest I felt the entire month, because it felt really special. Going forward, I want to do that a lot more frequently! (I couldn’t find the exact diffuser I have, but this one has great reviews and comes with a starter set of oils!)

^Now, the caveat here is that you can’t be so precious about it that it never happens, so be careful with getting too fancy! Ambiance should be a bonus, not a necessity.

Don’t Quit If You Miss a Day

The biggest mistake people make with challenges like this is throwing in the towel after skipping a single class. Don’t fall into that trap. Just get back to it tomorrow.

Hating it? Try this…

Once you’ve done your routine for a few days, if you’re still hating every minute of it, do what I do in my everyday morning yoga routine: Stop watching yoga videos and start watching a show or movie you love instead. If you need to, print out a routine step by step and follow that. Or skip the yoga routine and just do the stretches and mobility exercises that you do know. Find a method that doesn’t make you hate every moment. It may take a while to figure out the routine you want to do, but once you do, it’ll become an enjoyable part of your day—I promise!

To maximize your ability to stick with your habit and to continue to grow as an athlete, especially if you want to gain versus maintain strength, you’ll want to record and track your progress, which leads to the question of ‘but how much weight should I be lifting?”

Here are a few of the commonly asked questions around strength training and setting your goals that we shared in our book, Becoming A Consummate Athlete, which includes a whole section about why strength training is important for everyone, plus a simple routine that’s ideal for endurance athletes.

How do I set a strength goal?

Yours may not be ‘squat 200 pounds,’ you might be more focused on doing 10 pushups without strain, or executing a single pull-up or chin-up. Start thinking about a couple of goals that would make you ‘feel’ strong: Don’t stress yet on how each relates to your actual sport, just think to yourself, ‘I would feel really badass if I could…” This can help motivate and dictate the way that your training progresses. If doing a pull-up would feel badass, you may want to start with planks and hanging from the pull-up bar to get started, and slowly progress from there.

How much should I be able to squat?

Goals for weights and reps are highly specific to the athlete and their goals. In our experience most athletes are best setting goals first in the routine and habit of strength training. Focusing on completing it consistently and letting the loads come over time. As you become consistent with strength work, you can start looking at goal loads to lift. For many adult athletes, goals around completing or regaining a certain movement (e.g. pullups or overhead work) and body weight motions like full-depth pistols, handstands and tumbling can augment a consistent strength routine with low risk of injury and minimal impact on your goal sport program.

Seriously though, how much should I lift?

If you are in a strength training-focused block, aiming to build to squatting or deadlifting your body weight, doing 20 pushups, and 3+ dead-hang pull-ups are good goals for any endurance athlete.

Should I do specific exercises for specific sports?

It is contentious and highly debatable if strength training needs to be (or should be, or can be) specific to the sport. There was a period in the early aughts where ‘functional movement’ was all the rage and cyclists would hold handlebars and only train to exactly 35 degrees of hip flexion (The theory being ‘Why train more if the cycling motion doesn’t require more hip flexion as you come through the top of the pedal stroke?) Well, Peter’s client’s story in the last chapter explaining his issues with squatting to the depth of the toilet should give you some indicator of what we think of that. If you’re a Pro Tour rider, then maybe there’s some specific strength training to be done. But if you’re a dad of four who loves to play with your kids and enjoys the ability to comfortably poop on the toilet (sorry!), then you’ll want to strength train more generally for health rather than for your exact discipline. And we promise that your discipline will benefit anyway.

We talk more about all these habits in our book, Becoming A Consummate Athlete.  For tons of easy habits to add to your life to make big changes, check it out or book a call with us to talk through some changes you could make that will make the biggest impact on your health and fitness!

A Training Plan Points You in the Right Direction

We operate under the general training principle of high-low-off these days: go hard one day, long the next, recover after that. Having some structure in the form of a training plan helps me to keep progressing in all three of those (yep, including recovery—weirdly, that’s where I really needed to improve!). I love having a general blueprint of where I’m heading, even if I don’t have a specific race on the horizon. It’s nice to be working towards just being the fittest version of myself as an endurance athlete, and I like knowing that if I do pick up a specific race goal, I’ll just need to tweak my training to adjust for it, rather than starting from scratch.

It Keeps You Honest

It is WAAAAAY easier to not skip a workout when it’s actually already in your calendar. I know when I don’t have a training plan in place, I will generally sneak in some type of workout or movement in the day, but it’s not a guarantee, and if other work comes up, I will rarely prioritize the workout unless it’s been noted in the schedule. So having a daily schedule makes me feel more ‘pro’ about being an athlete, and make the time for it. Those empty (or red, in Training Peaks case!) slots that show where I skipped a workout keep me highly motivated to actually get mine done.

You Don’t Need to Be Perfect

What I love about my husband/podcast co-host/amazing coach Peter is that he is constantly reminding me that 80 percent is a passing grade. You don’t need to freak out if your workout didn’t happen one day, or try to cram 7 days of scheduling into one day. You just need to aim for doing what you can, when you can. That might mean cutting a ride short, it may mean not nailing that last interval. But as long as you’re trying to stay consistent, you’ll see progress.

A Training Plan Holds You Back

Huh? I know, it’s a weird one. But seriously—having a training plan is great because it will almost always help keep you out of overtraining territory—and often, it helps avoid burnout. I know for me, I used to train in waves: hardcore for a few weeks, totally crushed and burned out for a month. Lather, rinse, repeat. Having a plan I actually can follow let me feel OK about lower hours, periodization and the importance of rest weeks.

OK, so you’re convinced. You want a training plan. There are a ton of great ones out there, and you can find simple ones in pretty much any issue of Runner’s World or Bicycling (hell, I probably wrote a few of them!). But I’m personally a big fan of using Training Peaks-based plans because then, I get daily emails about my workout for that day/the next day, and I have a place to upload the actual files, versus just checking days off a ripped out page from a magazine. (I also love Training Peaks because it syncs with most of the apps that I rely on for recording HRV, workouts and food—that’s HRV4Training, MapMyRun, Wahoo, Strava, and MyFitnessPal.)

More info on training plans here

If you already have a training plan, or want to start this one but still have some questions about endurance training, cross-training, nutrition or some lingering saddle sore issues, book a consults where we can chat about all of your questions, and we’ll follow up with a targeted plan of attack!

You may need to modify it at first, especially the planks and push-ups, but do it consistently and you’ll see major strength and mobility gains!

This is because most of my races at this point are ultras, which means I’m not starting my run mid-morning, nor am I finishing before lunch when I race. Instead, I start early, often in the dark, and finish late, occasionally in the dark. You know what I’m not great at? Running in the dark. Because I rarely do it. I don’t run with people very often, partially due to scheduling, but also because I love my solo runs. You know what can be challenging in a race? Running with other people.

So, part of my Leadville 100 training needs to be shaking things up. We started small here in North Carolina, where we’ve been working and training for the last couple of weeks. It was a lucky break that forced me to start thinking towards this change: We serendipitously ran into an acquaintance while hiking the first weekend we were here, and he told us about a casual trail running group that gets together on Wednesdays for a chill five mile run followed by beers at a local brewery. Sold!

Wednesdays have always had ‘optional easy double’ on my plan, but I rarely made time for that. With an invite like that, though, how could I refuse? So, we’ve showed up a few times now, and honestly, it’s been a blast. We’re running with new people, chatting, getting in some miles after lunch and at dusk and on tired legs. There’s fantastic beer afterwards. It’s a win-win… and it’s inspired me to get more serious about the whole ‘break from routine to improve your racing’ thing. It’s not always a pleasant concept: Who wants to trade midmorning runs for before dawn shuffles in the dark when they don’t have to? But I know for racing, that’s going to be a huge advantage for me. For example:

Running in the Dark

If I can improve my running in the dark by even a few percentage points. I don’t do badly at it now, thanks to good eyesight (thanks, genetics!) but I definitely don’t excel. Looking at my splits in my last 100 miler, I know that when it was dark early and when it got dark later, I wasn’t nearly as fast. Granted, that race was more technical than Leadville, so darkness was more of an issue, but getting comfortable with night running is going to be key.

Running on a Full Stomach

I can run well when I ate breakfast three hours before my run. But what about after breakfast, a run, lunch, and a snack? How does my gut hold up? It’s great gut training to run later in the day.

Doing a Double with Cross-Training

Adding in later afternoon cross-training (like MTB on Sunday afternoons) has been a great addition. It’s not as high impact, it’s a fun break from my norm, and it gets me back out on tired legs—which will be the case at Leadville. I’ve also taken to spacing out my run and my strength on Tuesdays and Thursdays so that I get two training stimuli in the day rather than doing it all at once. It makes me more effective in my strength session since I’m not tired from running, and I think it’s good for my blood sugar stabilization to hit two workouts vs. one.

It’s Easier to Train with Friends

The ‘easy double’ is tailor-made for runs and rides with friends, since there’s no speed or distance goal. You just have to be very careful who you’re doing this with, though, since some friends will turn your chill easy short run into a sufferfest if you’re not careful!

And I think that’s how a lot of us get during this season, especially now that Zwift has made riding the trainer actually enjoyable for many people. It’s easy to eschew a hard snowshoe or cross-country ski or slushy run or ride in favor of a quick workout in the pain cave. But there’s so much more to riding/running than the pedal strokes or foot strikes themselves. The simple act of spending time outside in the actual fresh air, getting even a little bit of sunlight, can be just as impactful as the workout itself. 

And yes, I’ll be the first to admit that we’re super lucky to be able to spend a few weeks of the winter in warmer, sunnier locales and it’s much easier to be outside here. But even when we are home in NJ or Ontario, we are huge on this concept. Yes, the trainer is absolutely efficient and a great way to do a workout. Ditto the treadmill, and we utilize both.

It’s undeniable: Most days, you should be getting outside for some type of movement!

Having DW has made this easier for us, since even on days we do most of our training inside, we feel like he deserves to have his normal walk regardless of how inclement the weather (within reason). We put on his coat, wax his paws, and head out in almost any weather for our 1.5-mile walk at the end of the workday, with headlamps for us and a glowstick collar for him.

During these winter months, any day the roads are even somewhat reasonable and visibility makes it safe enough to do so, I run outside. Running is obviously much easier to do in bad weather compared to biking, and Peter does most of his workouts inside when we are home in the winter. But for endurance—and we’ve talked about this ad nauseum in podcasts in the past—he’ll run or cross-country ski as cross-training to get that nature dose.

What’s important here isn’t necessarily what you choose to do outside, it’s just the act of getting out the door. I’ve realized that often, we assume that fitness equals our time in nature, or at least that it can be equated with the need to spend time outside. But there’s so much more to being outside than just the getting out and hitting the 10,000 step count! We know that time in nature improves mood, increases cognition and stimulates creativity, and reduces anxiety. From the physical health standpoint, time in nature actually boosts your immune system, lowers all of your different stress mechanisms, and of course, hits us with that necessary vitamin D exposure from the sun.

So, do yourself a favor and check in: Is your TrainingPeaks all green from doing your workouts, but your time spent in nature this week was negligible? You might be better hitting yellow on your training but spending some time outside a couple times each week!

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Show Notes

• Strength Plan for Cyclists in Training Peaks
• Articles on Strength Consummate Athlete
• Stacy Sims Episode on strength Consummate Athlete

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Past guests:

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