Triathlon Training Basics

Leslie Williams: Hi, I am Leslie Williams a triathlete and I am teaching you how to train for a Triathlon. Now we are going to start talking about exactly how to start training. The most important thing to do is to pick a race that's a distance you are comfortable with. If this is your first race, you may want to start with a Sprint or an Olympic Distance and leave the Half and The Full Iron Man for a little bit later on. You could hire a coach or you could train yourself but the most important thing to do is to have a training program to follow. For instance if you are doing an Olympic Distance Triathlon you probably want to give yourself about 3 to 4 months to train for the event.

You can go to the web and you can find training programs on the Internet, you could buy books there are so many of them, you want to make sure that you keep a training log. You just need to make sure that you are critical of the information that you receive. There is a lot out there and you want to make sure that you pick the right ways and the right training plan for you, if you are a beginner, you want something that's beginner focused. Once you have picked a training log and you have a training program, there are lot of other resources out there besides the Internet. There are lot of books, this one in particular is very good, it's Joel Friel 'The Triathletes Training Bible', it covers everything that you could possibly want to know and it is a good high level, he is a very good writer.

You can also subscribe the 'Triathelete Magazine', there is another one called the Inside Triathlon, they are both excellent resources and resources that you should seriously consider checking out. You can also get nutrition books, Hammer Nutrition does an excellent job of educating athletes on what to put in your bodies and there are also other books, there are diets you can follow, 'The Paleodiet for Athletes' something that is very popular at the moment. And then we can go into a little bit about nutrition. There are lot of products out there that you can take during your training and during your racing.

The point of taking a product rather than eating regular food is these things are easily digestible and they give you a lot of energy. You can start off your day with an energy drink, this one is very good it is called FRF as you get into longer training and harder training, you want to have quick energy, gels and the shot blocks are very good for quick energy and if you are going longer, you can try some of the bars. Clif Bar and Power Bar are some of the most popular. You can also do a lot of powders that you put into a drink bottle on a bicycle. Sustained Energy is an excellent source of complex carbohydrates, Gatorade is an excellent source of simple sugars or simple carbohydrates and there is also Accelerate which contains proteins and you should really experiment and try and figure out what works the best with your body, with your race.

As a reminder you never want to do anything new on race day. Another great resource to find information for races and how to train and how to find a coach, there are local Triathlon clubs and if you look on the Internet I am sure you could find several. There are also local running stores and bike stores which have a lot of information, there is a publication called Competitor and they list out local races in different areas. You can also go online like I said that you want to be critical about the information you get there. The next segment that we are going to look out is how to swim?