Jason Penner, BESS; NSCA-CSCS
Aspire Fitness
Head Trainer/Owner
May 28, 2012
D E S I G N I N G A T R A I N I N G P RO G R A M F O R A DV E N T U R E
RACES
Adventure races are a new phenomena in the fitness world, the variety in movements
throughout the race appeals to many people of different disciplines. Gone are the days of training
for one specific movement or task, enter the world of training for the unknown.
Adventure races can be broken down into four main disciplines, anaerobic recovery, muscle
strength (peak output), muscle endurance (sustained output) and proprioception. You can excel at
one or all of them but to be truly successful in an adventure race you need to have a balance of all
four. I will warn you that I like to talk, so if you’re not really into hearing what I have to say you can
just skip forward to the training program part of this paper. If you’re interested in knowing the
method to the madness it might be worthwhile reading the whole thing.
ANAEROBIC RECOVERY; the ability to quickly recover from maximal exertion. This plays a
major roll in adventure races when you will be asked to do something that will require 100%
exertion (ie: climbing a 16 foot wall) you’re not doing yourself any favours if you have rest on the
other side of the wall while you wait to catch your proverbial breath. A well trained adventure
Designing a training Program for Adventure Races
racer will be able to climb the wall, and be back at near maximal output within thirty to ninety
seconds.
During a typical race your body will never really have a chance to reach steady state, the point
in which energy output is equal to energy demands. When somebody runs a distance race like a
marathon the first ten to fifteen minutes are tough (output is less than demand) after that moment
your body reaches steady state and can “cruise” along for the rest of the race. I would liken this to
merging onto the highway, the merge lane requires a lot of energy (fuel) but once at a cruise speed
the fuel needed is much less. With an adventure race you never get to that point, you should be
close but most likely never get there and if you do it’s only for a few minutes. Think of it more like
pulling a trailer through a busy city where you’re trying to beat every light. You’re constantly burning
lots of fuel. That’s why training like a marathon runner for these events doesn't work, you will post
good times, but to post great times you need to be an anaerobic athlete.
How do we become anaerobic athletes? It’s simple never let your body get comfortable. We
strive to be unsteady so to speak. When you look at the workouts we do for Adventure Races, we
never have any runs greater than 6 minutes (this is sort of a magic number, there is no other
energy system that can take us past 6 minutes). So for example if you look at the weekly challenges
we’ve been posting online you will see that the runs are 90 seconds with something explosive. This
never allows your body to set it’s cruise control. You will always be burning lots of fuel.
How do I know if I’m in an anaerobic zone? There are a couple of tell tail signs, the first is you
will want to quit. Your body will feel like it’s on the brink of breaking, many people taste copper in
their mouth or have the feeling of cotton mouth. This is a tell tale sign of anaerobic training. That
copper taste is actually CO2 being expelled at great volumes from your lungs (we won’t go into
the physiology of that, just trust me on this one). This is where we want to be working during our
training sessions, at first it will hurt a lot and you will want to quit but as you get better at it you
will become one of those sick people who crave this!
MUSCLE STRENGTH; I often call this peak output its your ability to output 100% of your
energy. Think of that moment where you had to give it your all, lets say you had to do your first
ever pullup or your first box hop or your first power clean. These moments where you give it your
all and you can’t do anything else is muscle strength. Many of you in the power lifting communities
will know this as 1RM or 1-rep max. This is where most people will lack in their training, few people
train this properly. Not because they don’t have the drive it’s more that they don’t know what their
bodies will do. I can’t remember where I heard this but one of the smartest things I have ever
heard in terms of muscle strength is “If you put a 5HP load on a 1HP engine it simply won’t do it,
you put the same 5HP load on a 1HP person and given time they will move the 5HP load”.
We don’t use this all the time through out the race but when we use it we need it and we
need it to powerful. Think of sprinting up a slippery quarter pipe if you give anything less than 100%
you simply won’t make it to the top. You need to be tapping into your muscle strength reserve that
you trained for.
One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to intensity level of workouts, people will push
themselves hard when it comes to speed on treadmill, recovery time etc. But it takes a special type
of athlete to know how to properly select a weight (load) for an exercise. Lets say for example
Jason Penner, BESS; NSCA-CSCS | Aspire Fitness
Designing a training Program for Adventure Races
we’re doing a front squat, and we’re looking to do 5 reps but the weight you select is more
appropriate for 8 reps, your body simply won’t respond as quickly if you had chosen the right
weight. What does the right weight feel like? Well it feels like the last rep is the last rep possible.
Now one thing to know about muscle strength is that we can’t train 1RM all the time, your body
will simply just breakdown. So what we do is we work within rep ranges and using a simple formula
and some algebra (looks like my math teacher was right that I would use it in life) we can easily
determine the proper load. So what we need to do first is determine a 1RM, we will do this with a
predictive formula. Lets choose an exercise, say squats, we’re going to put a weight on it that we
think we can do about 5-8 times. We’re going to do this as many times as we can until we can’t do
anymore. We take the successful number of reps and we plug that into the following formula.
Brzycki Formula
So using this 1RM we just found we can actually determine the right weight for any rep range.
When we’re training muscular strength we’re going to try to keep our reps below 8. So lets do an
example here for you, lets assume that we did a squat of 135 lbs for 6 reps and now we want to
know how much weight for 8 reps.
= ~157lbs
So using our grade 10 algebra skills we can determine that for 8 reps we should be using
Jason Penner, BESS; NSCA-CSCS | Aspire Fitness
Designing a training Program for Adventure Races
= ~126lbs
I know this is a lot of math just to lift weights but it is an important concept to wrap your head
around, often called the rep/weight continuum it states that if reps increase weight needs to
decrease and vice-versa. Remember this when choosing your weights at the gym.
MUSCULAR ENDURANCE; think of this like muscle strength over a period of time. So output
will be less but it will be sustainable. Take something like flipping tractor tires, the first couple are
fun, but then it starts to kick in that wait this is hard work. The ability to do this hard work over and
over and over again is muscle endurance. Think of running through waist deep mud, that burning
feeling you get in your legs, that’s your body telling you that hey look at this sweet muscle
endurance we got going on here. OK well that’s not the case, but it’s lactic acid (this will be very
simplified physiology lesson). It’s a term we’ve all heard but few of us truly understand. When we
workout at high levels your body creates these acidic toxins now we need to have a way of dealing
with these so we can keep our output high. So through some chemical processes your body
buffers the acidic toxins and the result is lactic acid. Now what we want to do is become very
good at dealing with lactic acid, let’s call this lactic threshold.
I always think of lactic threshold as the redline on a car. If we can somehow increase the redline
on a car we should be able to get more work (Horsepower) out of it. When we’re training lactic
threshold we’re trying to get more out of your body. This can be very tricky to follow, so if you
have a headache trying to follow along don’t worry you’re not the only one. The take home point
of this is that we want to have a high lactic threshold. During an adventure race you will be
accumulating lactic acid throughout the race if we don’t have an efficient means of getting rid of it
Jason Penner, BESS; NSCA-CSCS | Aspire Fitness
Designing a training Program for Adventure Races
you will have to stop at some point to allow it to clear, which can take about 2 and a half minutes
or a lifetime if you’re trying to post a great time.
We train our lactic threshold by training over it. We can typically express lactic threshold by a
percentage of max heart rate. Be warned this is going to get wordy. If we’re running at 80% of our
max heart rate and at 85% of it we can’t sustain it, we know that the lactic threshold is somewhere
in between 80-85% of MaxHR. Now for us to improve that we need to train above 85%, so we
might see something like this. 60 seconds at 95% MaxHR with 2 minutes @ 80% MaxHR as we get
better at it you will see that your “easy” interval can get shorter and shorter. And as our lactic
threshold gets higher and higher we have to accommodate for that by retesting it.
PROPRIOCEPTION; a very smart sounding word that for our purposes just means knowing
where your body is in space. This is so important in a sport like adventure racing, where your next
step might be on a slippery rock or in a puddle and if you can’t control your body in space you’re
going to take a tumble. This doesn’t just apply to foot placement, if we’re doing an up and under
with say something like barbed-wire you’re going to want to know where your body is as you duck
under.
The good news about proprioception is that it just sort of comes naturally. But we can do a
few things to speed it along. By stepping on a Bosu ball, or swiss ball or any other dynamic stability
implement we now have created a situation where our little muscles that sense where we are have
to work overtime. So for those who have ever done a Bosu squat and notice that during the first
Jason Penner, BESS; NSCA-CSCS | Aspire Fitness
Designing a training Program for Adventure Races
set (assuming it’s your first set ever) you will be shaky, like uncontrollably shaky. This is
proprioception at work, or more or less showing that it isn’t working hard enough. As you progress
through your workout and try the Bosu squat again you will notice you get better at it. To a point
where you might actually not shake at all by the end. That’s one easy example to show how
proprioception just improves. Now proprioception isn’t just about standing on a Bosu and not
shaking it’s also the position in space idea. When you see somebody try a new movement for the
first time it sort of looks reminiscent of Bambi on ice, but as they do the motion more and more
they become better at “feeling” where their body is. Starting to see why this might be important in
an adventure race? OK one last example lets say you’re walking across a 2x10 and only have the
short side to balance on as you walk across ice cold water. Well if you know how to control your
body based on where you are in space you have a much better chance of getting across in
comparison to our poor Bambi.
The Aspire Fitness Program
We have broken the program into a 4
workout per week program. We like to allow
a fair bit of recovery between workouts so
we’d suggest the breakdown as follows;
• Monday; Metabolic Conditioning
• Wednesday; Strength beyond Strength
• Friday; Weekly Challenge
• Sunday; Active recovery
METABOLIC CONDITIONING; this is
where we’re going to be training that lactic
threshold. So we’re aiming to be
uncomfortable, we’re going to accomplish this
by using multiple intervals and then pepper in
some muscle endurance work by using large
compound movements. Our goal here is an
hour long workout where our average heart
rate is at or above our lactic threshold.
Proprioception also fits in here nicely, we’re
going to get the heart rate up and keep it
there while we do high volume strength
training as well as dynamic stability exercises. I
know that this might seem all Greek to you but if you have any questions you should come check
out the Dirty Drop-ins and you will get a better idea of what we’re looking at doing here.
STRENGTH BEYOND STRENGTH; this is the day where we get to be explosive, we’re going
to train our power centre, and for most sports especially adventure racing that comes from our
hips. So we’re looking at a lot of jump squats, clapping pushups, burpies, pullups. If it makes you
Jason Penner, BESS; NSCA-CSCS | Aspire Fitness
Designing a training Program for Adventure Races
grunt and sweat we’re going to be doing it. This day differs greatly from Monday’s workout because
we’re really only focusing on one discipline of adventure racing, and that’s the muscle strength part.
The reason being if you’re training it properly there should be nothing left in the tank for anything
else. It is also very important to know that we NEVER train proprioception on this day, the reason
being is if we’re lifting at an appropriate weight for the reps we’re doing we can’t have another
variable in there taking away from it or we just won’t be stimulating our muscles enough. For
example if I’m squating 225lbs for 5 reps on a flat floor and try to do it on a Bosu ball I simply
won’t be able to it. The reason being is my primary movers (in this case quads, glutes and hams)
aren’t the weakest link anymore, it’s my stabilizer muscles (peronial group, calves, external hip
rotators). Now I’m not saying these aren’t important I’m just saying we need to train them at
different times.
WEEKLY CHALLENGE; this is a weekly challenge that is designed to mimic the energy
demands of an adventure race. This introduces an interesting concept, train a body system not a
body part. I see this a lot, people will have grown up reading Muscle and Fitness, Men’s Health. All
these magazines demonstrate a great principle of training, that is body group splits (ie: Chest and
Back - Monday, Legs - Tuesday, etc) but when we’re training for an adventure race we’re never
going to have one obstacle that is just Chest and Back, it’s going to take our whole body to get it
done. That’s why you will see the obstacles using every part of your body, but more importantly
every system. For example we might get a box hop (muscle strength) followed by a wall sit (muscle
endurance) then a sprint (anaerobic output) with a one legged squat (proprioception and
anaerobic recovery). That is a very important concept to think about. Systems not parts!
ACTIVE RECOVERY; ok this doesn’t mean actively sitting on the coach and doing nothing all
day. What we’re looking for here is get moving, keep the joints limber. This is a great time to go for a
bike ride, take the kids to the park to throw a football around. Anything just get moving. We are
also offering Dirty Yoga (starting June 10th) which will be Yoga geared towards the recovery needs
of an Adventure Racer. If Yoga is not your thing, no problem just get our and do something.
Recovery should always be active... the worst thing you can do is nothing.
Jason Penner, BESS; NSCA-CSCS | Aspire Fitness