You just swam the fastest 1.5 km and are dead tired as you exit the water. Your legs are having a hard time understanding why you are trying to run to the transition zone. You stagger into the area and haphazardly find your bike while feeling a little dizzy. Your legs start to come to life as you mount your bike and fasten your feet into the clips. After a couple minutes on the bike your legs are alive!
You make your way back to the transition zone after a hard bike ride and a sore behind since your seat is made of practically no fabric. You dismount and your legs feel like your favourite snack as a kid – Jell-o. Your lower back is stiff and your legs seem almost as if they are not a part of your body. After a few minutes of easy running, your legs seem to be acting normal.
If this sounds like you when you are attempting to complete a triathlon, you are missing on essential component in your program. Your missing link is ‘brick’ workouts. Brick workouts are where you complete two or more disciplines immediately one after the other. The two most common brick workouts are swim-bike and bike-run since they are the specific transitions encountered in the sport.
Why are these workouts important and how will they help me during transitions? Simple. A pianist didn’t just pick up sheet music and play Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 the first time perfectly. It took time and progression to have his brain almost ‘go through the motions.’ After years of practice, the pianist is capable of playing the piece without the assistance of sheet music; his fingers making the keystrokes instinctively. By doing brick workouts, you are teaching your brain how to adapt to the new requirement.
As you make the transition from swim to bike, your body needs to direct the blood to the lower extremities. During the swim, most of your blood is allocated to your upper body since it is doing most the work while your legs are fluttering. As you exit the water, you are telling your legs to run to the transition, but the nutrients you require to do such a task are all situated in your upper body. This delayed time to shunt blood to the working tissue is when you feel the most discomfort.
The second transition, bike to run, is most excruciating. Even though roughly the same muscle groups are active in each discipline, posture and gravity play a significant role in why your legs feel like rubber. In a study conducted by Haworth et al. (2010), they noticed that the range of motion about the knee joint during running was less in individuals who didn’t do brick workouts. Furthermore, you arch your back while on the bike, therefore once you straighten out for the run, it seems stiff. Your breathing rate and depth of breath increases as you go from cycling to running because you are working against another factor – gravity. Running is the most demanding component of the triathlon and requires increased oxygen uptake (nutrients) to accomplish the goal. Many athletes who do not perform brick workouts hyperventilate during transition since their bodies do not adapt efficiently.
By incorporating brick workouts into your training program, you can make your body more efficient and effective during transitions. Your training needs to be sport-specific to obtain your greatest personal performances. By doing brick workouts, you facilitate your bodies adaptation process since it learns through experience. You will be able to shunt blood faster to necessary tissue, you will increase range of motion about your joints, you will decrease your chance of hyperventilation, and your body will not feel the same amount of discomfort when it completes transitions.
The biggest thing for effective brick workouts is the keep the transition between disciplines short. Do not take a long rest period between the two sports because that will cause your body to return a physiological state similar to after a warm up. My suggestion is to have everything setup for your next sport (IE bike, helmet and cleats prepared, or shoes and hat) and do not spend time changing clothes. Try to keep the transition between sports under 10 minutes in duration, with 5 minutes being optimal. In a race setting it will be much quicker depending on your goals or fitness, but the objective with brick training is to teach the body to adapt. This takes time, so your first few brick workouts will result in discomfort, but as you progress it will be less.
Remember, practice makes perfect. Adding another brick to the wall may even allow you to accomplish personal bests.
References
Haworth, J., Walsh, M., Strang, A., Hohl, J., Spraets, S., Wilson, M., & Brown C. (2010). Training for the bike to run transition in triathlon. International Symposium on Biomechanics in Sports: Conference Preceedings Archive (January 2010).
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