Training Around Christmas

As we come towards the end of the year there are always a lot of questions being asked about how to manage training over this period.

Over Christmas time a lot of people have less commitments. Ether; your on school holidays, your work has closed, your summer sport is on break or your pre-season for your winter sport has a break. So the first question we ask is “How is your body & mind feeling?”. If your feeling good and want to get after it over this period then it’s an amazing time to get some extra training done. However, your body may actually need a break. Maybe it’s been a long year and you need to switch off for a period of time and just do the bare minimum, and there is nothing wrong with that one.

So after you’ve checked in with your body & mind, the next question is “What are you doing over this period?”. Do you going away? Are you seeing family or friends? It is important to enjoy yourself over this period, it is important to relax, switch off and enjoy sometime away from normal scheduling (Although Head Coach Bailey isn’t very good at this himself!!). Maybe your feeling great and want to get some extra training in but your heading away camping for 5 days, well I’m sorry but it will be hard to actually get a bunch of training in.

The last question that we always ask is “When are you going to relax and recover?”. Let’s take a winter sport as an example, you’ve just completed a 4-6 week training block prior to the Christmas break. You get 3 weeks off before you head back early-mid January, so yes you don’t want to do nothing over this period of time but you want to come back to training in January feeling good, not exhausted. This is exactly the same when it comes to summer sports, your most likely close to the middle of the season so you want to make sure you come back ready for a strong finish the year. This is why we need to take into consideration when you will actually be able to relax and recover.

These are the main questions that need to be answered when we are looking at training schedules over the Christmas period but these aren’t the only things we need to taker into consideration.

Things to also think about; training location (Maybe you could do for a run along the beach, rather than at home) or training modalities (Instead of going for run you could for a bike ride, still getting an aerobic stimulus but trying something different to change up your training). These are just a few areas that you may want consider when looking at your training.

For a lot of us the 2 weeks around Christmas and New Years can be a very strange period, we may not even know what day it is. But if we answer these questions heading into this period then we can build out a solid training schedule that can help us get exactly what we need.

Personally, we are looking forward to having a small break over the Christmas period. Not only will it be a good reset but it’ll be an amazing time to get some extra and longer sessions in.