3 Steps to INSTANTLY Avoid Jelly Legs Starting the TRIATHLON RUN

(wheel spinning) - Morning, Trainiacs. Awesome, awesome, little ride there. Now, as triathlon beginners are getting into the sport, one of the biggest things that they have to overcome is jelly legs, cement legs, cramping coming off the bike. Now, if that happens, it's going to ruin, basically your entire run. Now, with this three step process to incorporate into your triathlon training, you'll avoid that, set yourself up for a great run. I've gotta go do a run right now myself (groans) stiff. (energetic music) Trai-ni-acs! When a lot of new triathletes get into their first few races, one of the biggest shockers, myself included, actually, I'll show you a picture right now. That Taren right there is the most cramped Taren that has ever Taren'd a triathlon. When you get off the bike it is very, very normal for your legs to just turn into jelly or cement. Kinda different ends of the same spectrum. But getting off the bike and getting onto the run is one of the skills that we need to build as triathletes. And if you can accomplish building these three skills, going through these three steps, you are going to be able to get off the bike, not have your legs completely thrashed and have an enjoyable run. Because if you do go through that experience of having jelly legs or cramps or cement legs in the first little bit when you get off the bike, it's going to set you up for a fairly unenjoyable run, making your triathlon fairly painful. So the first step in what we need to do to avoid those jelly legs, is to make the distance of the bike ride a non-issue. And I talk about this a lot. This is accomplished by over-distance rides. Now this doesn't mean that you have to go and just constantly be smashing yourself for years on end with huge, enormous rides and the race distance isn't that challenging for you. This just means, in the final 12 weeks leading up to the race, you should be building up to such a point that you can actually bike longer than the distance of the bike in the race. So what you're doing is you're gradually building up the distance of your long workout, not all workouts, but just one workout a week, your long, less intense, endurance ride, by about 10% each week, until such time as you can bike. If you're a sprint athlete, 35km, about 21 miles. If you're an Olympic distance athlete, about 60km, 37 miles. If you're a Half Ironman athlete, about 115km, roughly 70 miles. And if you are an Ironman athlete, roughly about five and a half hours. And then in the final 12 weeks before your race, you want to have a long ride around that kind of distance, thereabouts, at least four times. And this ability to bike super long, longer than the distance of your race, is gonna make sure that when you come to race day, whether you've gotta bike 20km or 40km or 90km or 180km, you're totally able to do it. The second thing that you need to accomplish, is we need to make sure that our legs have the strength to be able to pedal at that race intensity for the entire duration of the ride. It's not enough just to go and be able to ride super long, because there's 80 year olds that ride across the country, but that doesn't mean that over the course of a 40 minute hard effort and a sprint that they'll do okay. So we need to combine that step one, long endurance ability, with this step two, that's making your legs strong enough to hold race intensity for the entire duration of the race. And how you do this, is by strength work on the bike. And this is the over-gear work that we talk about, the low cadence work. Starting in the winter, you start with about one minute, at around 80 cadence, at a low intensity. As you gradually get closer and closer to your race, what you're doing is you're gradually making that one minute longer, so up to three minutes, five minutes, seven minutes, 10 minutes, all the way up to 30 minutes, and you're making the intensity a little bit more intense, so from low intensity to kind of moderate intensity, to higher intensity and, to the point that you are able to bring the cadence down from 80 to 75 to 70 to 60. And in the end, come your race, what you should be able to do, is for a 30 minute interval, at around race effort, you can hold somewhere around 65 to 70 kind of cadence. This is really, really taxing on your muscles. It's very strength focused, so it creates that durability in your muscles, that callousing, that toughness, so that, instead of when you push on the pedals in the race, instead of your legs hurting, the pedals hurt. And then step three is to make sure that you have the fuel to do this. You can do all the training in the world and you can do it all completely right, but if you don't fuel your body in that race to be able to perform at a high level, you aren't going to perform at a high level. So what you need to is you need to calculate the amount of calories that you're going to need to replace during the race. You then take that amount of calories, and starting about 20 minutes before the race and then 10 minutes into the bike, all the way up to 10 minutes before the end of your expected finish time, you take equal inputs of calories, whether it's a gel or a bar or a chew, and every five minutes take a big sip of water. And you divide that up in such a way that you get equal intervals, that maybe it says, all right, every 25 minutes you need to take 90 calories, or every 30 minutes you need to take 100 calories. And this will work out, basically exactly, so that you replace one quarter of the calories that you burned over the course of your race, and this is going to be an amount that your gut is going to be able to handle and that your body needs. It's that really nice, sweet spot. So if you do all that, you are going to be able to bike long enough. You are going to be able to bike strong enough and you are going to have the fuel to make your body able to actually do this. You're gonna get to the bike and it's gonna be a complete non-issue, where a lot of people might even have a good bike, but it's setting themselves up for a poor run. In your case, you're going to be having a good bike and a good run. I mentioned that you need to calculate the amount of calories that you're going to burn and need to replace during the race, and I'm not expecting you to know how to do that right away but you can go to triathlonteran.com/triathlonnutritioncalculator for a free calculator that customizes this for your race distance, your expected race time and your weight, so it's customized exactly to you, with guidelines for how and when you take all that nutrition. And, if you are a new triathlete and you want more of these triathlon training tips, make sure you hit the Subscribe button below, because we come up with videos every single week. Later, Trainiacs. Later, later, that felt really good, but I might just be hopped up on fizzy water.

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