Training Volume - Regulated, gradual, smart

 Training Volume is extremely important. There are certain factors that are crucial to to observe, respect and play around with:

• Regularity of volume
• Sport Proportion in Volume
• Volume in time
• Volume of stress like kilometers and elevation gain and loss
• Weekly / Monthly / Yearly Volume

Changing the regularity in volume is often a key to injury. It can be general volume or the volume of one sport or the mixture of both. Example:  A runner injures his leg, he has time on hand. Now he starts cycling double the time of his total actual training. That is a great way, to in addition to the running injury, develop like knee and lower back pain. Of course, we can double or even triple or quadruple our training hours, but must be done gradually and very smartly. 

Dropping under certain amount of hours is also very bad for regular runners. You know if you ran 60km in 6hours with 2hours of strength and conditioning regularly, that is 8hours, that is barely enough stimulation for a generally sedentary human to stay in shape. If you dropped down to 2 hours or nothing, well your training is gone. In case of a high volume, well performing athlete, it is slightly different. It might promote sudden recovery, sped up healing and brutal fitness gains. But ! But the thing is when a 25hour week athlete drops to 5hour for a week or two, he should not do that on a couch potato style. That is also a very bad habit. Of course, the last 3 days before a marathon you don't want to be wood chopping for 7 hours daily. However, you don't want to glue down your muscles and have sticky non elastic, semi calcified tendons either. Balance !

Your volume in time is important. As I said, training time to time is as bad as training too much. I can see runners doing 2 runs a week. What a crappy habit. I can see runners doing that preparing for a marathon. A 10km run Tuesday and a 20km long run on the weekend. It is better not to run. Your body has no time to build resistance. It has no stress to strengthen bones, tendons, cardio vascular system, to build endurance and to train the regulation of sugar burning and fat burning. To understand endurance and speed. Your body is confused. If you don't like to run, than do another sport. Do not do something because somebody told you to, for a challenge or fashion, jealousy or lack of knowledge. Do something that gets you out of bad. Everybody needs movement. Everybody needs sport. Every body needs daily exercise. Find one ! The one where you invest time to learn technique, to learn biomechanics, anatomy, physiology. To read books about it, blogpost. Write a journey and  journal. Write a blog, make videos. That is the sport you want. See what motivates you. Body transformation ? Human capacity ? Competition or challenge ? Strength and power or speed and endurance ?

Also do not get sucked into anything that is about aesthetics and narcisitc, equipment obliged BS. Like body building, cross fit, hyrox, ninja warrior and stuff like that. First of all, unlike 20 or 30 years ago, when I used pay 5.99€ for a high quality monthly Gym membership, with sauna, steamroom and unlimited jacuzzi time included, now it is bloody expensive. Also, often these young fellas can do absolutely nothing without a barbell, rowing machine or elliptical trainer. You are also just locked into a mindset, that you need a gym or actually need something to train regularly. No you don't need anything to start out. You can do callisthenics, power pilates, body weight stuff, walking, running, jogging, uphill walking. You can always find ways to use your actual environment for free. Do like the gym ? I absolutely highly rate it and love it. I have a Bsc in strenght and co and I highly rate everything I learnt in the last 30 years and still do learn. Do I go to a gym ? No ! Would I go if I lived just besides ? Probably !

I got carried away a little sorry. So You must also respect your running and other sports volume. If you ran 5 hours and cycled 10, that is 15 hours of training. You cannot just turn it around overnight. And you cannot just suddenly run more and augment your totals to 20hours. Needs time, thinking and preparation. 

Then there is your periodic volume. We talked about weekly, but there is monthly and yearly volume too. People often and very fast forget what happened. For instance, if somebody injured himself 2 times in a year, with 2 to 4 weeks time, it can be very much related to volume. Year one 300hours of training, Year two 750 hours of training, Year 3 injured. Simple ! Of course, the injury can come already in the beginning of year 2. 

Tendons, muscles, heart and lungs get trained brutally fast. Bones, joints, cartilage, meniscus and brain needs years and decades. The joint structures and major tendons too. The actual backbone, pelvis, tibia and more. They need graduality.

So while your yearly volume might be always 600hours, this should be 50 hours a month and not like 150, 5, 50, 80, 10 and so....Keep in simple and regulated.