Camino Fitness Week Six
Last week’s primary training goal was to extend aerobic endurance by lengthening the long walk. If you have been doing one long walk per week, then your endurance is already increasing significantly and some people are doing a midweek long walk as well.
You’ll notice that instead of adding distance to everyday walks, in the Camino Fitness Plan, the ‘midweek walks stay relatively short - while the longer walks get longer. This is by design for several reasons:
We want to ensure ample time for good recovery from the easy-paced long walk. This can take 48 hours, or longer if the walk was particularly demanding.
We want to make room for higher intensity sessions midweek (interval training and Tempo training).
We want to make time for strength training.
In essence, if you were to describe this training program in 30 seconds to a friend. We could say that, “It’s a three part program. We train easy long walks so we can go the distance. We train short faster walks so we can handle short steep sections, or speed up if we need to. And we train strength so we can deal with the pack, reduce road/trail-shock and prevent injury.”
In week six, we are coming towards the end of the foundation building phase. For the ‘long walk, we reduce distance this week to between 2 and 3 hours. If you feel like doing more, that is great, but at half-way through the plan, this is perfect. Remember, the overall benefits as a result of this plan, will be exponential- and the big gains come in the last four weeks. We are still building moderately and consistently.
The primary focus for week six’s training or this week’s ‘recipe’ - is to focus on strength endurance.
Here is a quick primer on strength endurance.
Roughly speaking there are three types of strength. Explosive. Maximal. Endurance.
Sprinters, basketball players, gymnasts all need explosive strength, but Camino Walkers don’t need much (unless you’re about to step on a snake and need to leap a metre in the air suddenly).
Maximal strength is our ability to pick up a heavy object one time. We need some of this, for putting the pack on and off, but not as much as an olympic weightlifter or someone doing tug-of-war.
Primarily, the strength we need for Camino walking, cycling, running etc is Strength Endurance - the ability to keep repeating the same motion over and over again for a long time. This is the strength, which combined with our increased aerobic endurance, will get us to Santiago de Compostela.
We do build some strength endurance on each walk. So it is true, that if all we were to do is walk, we would eventually build the endurance we want…. However, we can build strength endurance much more quickly and effectively by adding shorter sessions. In Camino Fitness, we call these; strength circuits (SC), interval training (IT) and tempo training (TT).
In this week’s training you’ll see two Strength Circuits, an Interval Training session and a Tempo session.
Strength Circuits
There are many ways to do these sessions, but the simplest way is to set aside 45 minutes, do a simple warm up and then do the Daily Dozen start-to-end - three times through. This will involve then, in total, 36 X 40 seconds effort with 20 seconds rest. For variety, you can add different exercises and we encourage this, but if you want to keep it simple - 3XDD is a very effective strength circuit.
Interval Training
An interval training session involves walking quickly, preferably uphill (stairs are good) for a short period, followed by a rest, then walk back down and repeat.
It’s helpful to have a watch and while there is a range of what works well, we suggest a hill or stairs which takes between 30 and 60 seconds to reach the top. Then rest for one minute.
We don’t need to do many of these. After a good warm up (10 minutes walking plus Daily Dozen), four efforts is a good number to aim for. Afterwards, take a 10 minute easy walk to cool down, then stretch.
Tempo training.
Tempo means going at a pace which is not as hard as interval training, but hard enough that it would be difficult to have a conversation during the effort. For this week, we suggest a similar warm up to Interval Training, then 20 minutes tempo pace, and a 10 minute cool down walk.
So, some new ‘recipe ingredients’, new techniques and terminology for people new to this program, but the good news is that by the end of this week, we have completed all the types of training; long walk, daily dozen, strength circuits, interval training and tempo training that are in this entire plan.
Next steps
From here on out, weeks 6 - 12, we focus not on doing more types of training, but mastering these types. What many people enjoy about this multi-facted approach, is that it has variety and is not boring. We see that many training programs which lack ‘staying power’ because they have too much of the same thing everyday and can get tedious. The advice, “Just put on a pack and walk hills every day”, are often well meaning words, and may ultimately will work… but what we are aiming for here is the best possible use of your time, a well balanced plan and (training sessions) recipes which taste good instead of being so bland you can’t take any more and hate them after a few weeks ;-)
SUMMARY
Congratulations on building endurance and learning good movement skills with five weeks of Daily Dozen. Week six is where we cut back a bit on volume, we add in some advanced training, and we really focus on quality. Bear in mind that shorter, more intense training can be more fatiguing than long long miles… so the focus on recovery becomes even more important. Also, the addition of strength circuits, intervals and tempo training will tax the muscles more as well as demand attention to good movement skill and form. It would be good to review the Daily Dozen instructions to be reminded of the movement cues/tips for each exercise.
Week six is a big step forward, and involves change. Thanks for following along, and be sure to employ ‘Challenge by Choice’ as well as whatever ‘extreme self-care’ habits you have been creating. Remember - the goal is not to go hard, the goal is to be the best we can be. And remember it’s better to undertrain than overtrain.
This is a week where we expect/hope for questions in the comments, and we will do our best to answer questions and keep the conversation going forwards.
