Your Best Possible Training Week

Fundamental Principle

Designing a training week is like fine-tuning a machine: it works best when you understand how quickly each part recovers and how they work together. Over time, you can gradually improve each training factor to match better your health goals, competitive spirit, or the lifestyle you’re pursuing.

Fit your training into your life, not the other way around. Why? Because it keeps you consistent, and consistency is what actually gets sustainable results—is not the heroic efforts. This way you keep progressing without losing your sanity, hurting your self-esteem, or ignoring the rest of your life.

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Training Capacity = Glycogen Storage × Recovery Rate

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1. Training Capacity: Your training capacity is like a factory's total power, including the time needed for maintenance. It’s your body’s ability to handle the workload, both now and in the long run. Imagine that your body is a machine with clear limits:

   • How much work can you handle?

   • How fast can you recover?

   • How well can you adapt to harder challenges? (Progressive overload)

   This table breaks down the core differences between recreational and elite athletes. Elite athletes train like it’s their job, handling high-volume, high-intensity sessions with structured recovery. Recreational athletes, on the other hand, juggle training with work and family, often maxing out on intensity and volume without enough recovery. This lack of recovery is a common pitfall—I see amateurs repeatedly trying to push workouts to the limit without the necessary downtime, which only holds back their progress.

   Use this example as a guide to see where you fit and what’s realistic for your level—remember, more isn’t always better; better is better. Start where you are and build gradually. Like any general guide, it’s a bit simplified but should give you a good sense of the main differences. This example is for ultra-runners.

   

   To keep your machine running well, it needs:

   • Fuel = glycogen (and fats; I will not get into fats this time). Think of glycogen as your daily spending cash and fats as your savings account - the better trained you are, the better you can access both.

   • Recovery time: sleep and rest. Rest includes complete rest (no training), active recovery (easy movement), mental rest (stress management), and tissue rest (muscle repair).

   • Maintenance: Focus on good nutrition and stress management. Eat the right amount at the right time—quality food helps recovery, carbs refuel, and protein repairs muscles. Both training and life stress use up your recovery energy, so high stress means lower training tolerance. Remember, your body can’t tell the difference between stress from family, work, or training. Be mindful not to overload it, or it may struggle to adapt.

2. Glycogen Storage: While glycogen (the stored energy in your muscles and liver) is crucial for endurance and training, it's only part of the picture. Many recreational athletes over-complicate things by either over-fueling or using the wrong foods at the wrong times, while elite athletes often under-fuel consistently. Energy is essential—like fuel for a car—but it’s not everything. Just as a car needs tires, a transmission, and an engine—not just fuel—your body requires a simple, effective approach to fueling, along with proper recovery (more on that below).

3. Recovery Rate: Recovery rate affects how soon you can train again, but it’s influenced by more than just glycogen. Muscle repair, nervous system recovery, sleep quality, and nutrition play a role. Outside stressors, especially those unrelated to training, are particularly important for amateur athletes. Regardless of experience or competitive level, amateurs typically face more stress sources than elites.

   This table shows how different types of training affect your recovery needs.

   Easy aerobic sessions and high-intensity workouts each stress your body differently, requiring specific recovery times. Understanding these patterns helps you structure your training week effectively and avoid the trap of training too hard, too often.

   Different body systems recover at different rates, and outside stressors can also significantly influence this. I like to track Heart Rate Variability (HRV) over long periods to get a clearer view of recovery trends—not necessarily for daily decisions unless recovery is off-track.

   

Practical Week Structure (General Preparation Phase)

Here’s a practical approach to structuring your training week as an intermediate ultra runner in the base phase. Each session builds on the last, with recovery as the cornerstone. Remember, your body doesn’t recognize hours, days, or weeks—time is just a human construct. What matters is the cumulative effect of training and recovery.

This structure follows basic physiological principles: hard days need good recovery, volume builds gradually, and different systems (running, strength, mobility) need strategic placement in your week.

• When to Use: Early season (well before your main race), after a recovery block, most likley after a few weeks of the off-season, around 3-6 months before specific race preparation (depends on where are you coming from in baseline fitness and progressive overload), during “building” periods

• Purpose of This Phase: Develop your aerobic foundation, build tissue durability, establish strong movement patterns, increase overall training capacity

• Not Suitable For: Race-specific preparation, peak training phase, tapering period, right after a race, or not during the off-season period.

Let me show you how a basic week flows, keeping energy systems and recovery in mind.

Key Success Factors

1. Consistency over intensity

2. Patient progression

3. Recovery quality

Common Mistakes to Avoid

1. Too much intensity too soon

2. Skipping mobility work

3. Insufficient recovery

4. Rushing progression

5. Nutritional over or under fueling

If you want to go deeper, feel free to use the resources I have used to research what I have shared with you. Also, remember that practice beats science when it comes to execution. There is always a lag between the actual doing and later understanding the whys.

• Bishop, D. J., Botella, J., Genders, A. J., et al. (2019). Training for Endurance and Strength: Lessons from Molecular Biology. Physiological Reviews, 99(1), 481-534.

• Bompa, T. O., & Haff, G. G. (2009). Periodization: Theory and Methodology of Training. Human Kinetics.

• Bourdon, P. C., Cardinale, M., Murray, A., et al. (2017). Monitoring Athlete Training Loads: Consensus Statement. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 12(s2), S2-161-S2-170.

• Coffey, V. G., & Hawley, J. A. (2017). Concurrent exercise training: Do opposites distract? The Journal of Physiology, 595(9), 2883-2896.

• Halson, S. L. (2014). Monitoring training load to understand fatigue in athletes. Sports Medicine, 44(2), 139-147.

• Hawley, J. A., & Burke, L. M. (2010). Carbohydrate availability and training adaptation: Effects on cell metabolism. Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews, 38(4), 152-160.

• Holloszy, J. O., & Coyle, E. F. (1984). Adaptations of skeletal muscle to endurance exercise and their metabolic consequences. Journal of Applied Physiology, 56(4), 831-838.

• Ivy, J. L. (1991). Muscle glycogen synthesis before and after exercise. Sports Medicine, 11(1), 6-19.

• Meeusen, R., Duclos, M., Foster, C., et al. (2013). Prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the overtraining syndrome. European Journal of Sport Science, 13(1), 1-14.

• Mujika, I., & Padilla, S. (2003). Scientific bases for precompetition tapering strategies. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 35(7), 1182-1187.

• Nosaka, K., & Clarkson, P. M. (1995). Muscle damage following repeated bouts of high force eccentric exercise. Journal of Sports Sciences, 13(5), 367-377.

• Pascoe, D. D., & Gladden, L. B. (1996). Muscle glycogen resynthesis after short term, high intensity exercise and resistance training. Sports Medicine, 21(2), 98-118.