The off-season is a good time to work on and develop your fitness, in particular your strength. This session combines both intensity and strength with exposure to Threshold intensity for both running and cycling. Although this session was developed for Olympic distance triathletes, it is a great session for any triathlete, including Ironman and Ironman 70.3 athletes (if it is in the early stages of your build up).
Each week I will post Monday’s Brick session that you can do to enhance your triathlon performance. For a full understanding of my Level’s intensity system, please read my previous articles about intensity for cycling and running.
Recently Cam from Training Tilt released an update within his Training Tilt coaching platform. This new feature was upgrading the AI tool called Tyler to help plan and prepare workouts. If you are a coach, check out Training Tilt and the capability of Tyler. I had to play with it to generate different brick workouts (this previously wasn’t an option). I kept the parameters the same and adjusted one of the input variables. I changed the Tone from Chilled to Professional, to Motivational, to Serious, to Hardcore or Obsessed to create a series of workouts. This workout was generated with the Motivational setting. Once Tyler had generated the workout I checked it over and made some adjustments (as with any AI, it should be checked by a human before being used or incorporated) to ensure the workout fitted the duration and zones that I wanted and this is the result. I generated about twenty different workouts, but only kept three of them for actual use.
Strength Focused Brick Session
- Bike
- 15min WU Level II Cad 80-100;
- 45min Level III-IV (85-95%) Cad 70-85;
- 5min Level II Cad 80-100;
- Run
- 4x 6min Level IV, 3min Level II RI;
- 15min CD Level II;
- 10min Stretching
Start this brick with a one-hour and five-minute ride. The first fifteen-minutes is your Warm Up (WU) at Level II. Maintain a cadence of between 80 and 100 rpm.
Then increase your effort to Level III-IV for forty five minutes, between 85% and 95% of your Functional Threshold Power (FTP). Keep your cadence between 70 and 85 rpm.
Ride for five-minutes at Level II afterwards for your Rest Interval (RI) with a cadence of between 80 and 100 rpm..
Then transition into the run.
Start the run at Level IV for six-minutes. Next run at Level II for three-minutes for your Rest Interval (RI). Repeat for a total of four reps.
Then move into a Cool Down (CD) for fifteen-minutes at Level II.
Finish with 10 minutes of stretching to assist with the recovery.
Read more about the benefits of brick sessions here:
I am the Head Coach and Director of Qwik Kiwi – Endurance Sports Consultant.
I specialise in assisting first-timers and recreational athletes in achieving their sporting goals. I can be contacted at coachray@coachray.nz and 021 348 729.
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Download the Garmin (.FIT) & Zwift (.ZWO) files for this workout for FREE
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