Competitive pause: why train in transition?

Most athletes and coaches after a long season of preparation and participation in competitions ask themselves: what to do during the so-called transition period? Opinions differ. Most of them significantly reduce the volume and intensity of loads during this period, and the duration of this period is from three weeks to one month.

However, in the practice of both big and amateur sports there are successful examples when the year-round training process takes place without an obvious allocation of the transition period and reduction of activity. Anatoly Naumov, coach and candidate master of sports in track and field athletics, will help to understand the issue.

What is the transition period for?

In my opinion, the leading factor in this question will be the level of the athlete’s training form reserve at the moment, not only in the physical, but also in the psycho-emotional area.
For example, if an athlete has had a rather intense competitive season with a lot of starts and heavy training loads, his body has spent a lot of both physical and moral strength. Therefore, it is advisable to significantly change the level of training loads.

If in the past season the athlete had problems of a traumatic nature, then during this period it is necessary to engage in various medical and recovery procedures to come to the new season fully armed.

As practice shows, the time interval of the transition period varies from three weeks to one month. This time is usually enough to accumulate adaptation reserve and prepare for full-fledged work in the next season.

However, it is worth considering this fact: some athletes have a physiological peculiarity – in the absence of a large training load, they quickly gain weight. This should be strictly monitored, otherwise it will take much longer to gain fitness in the new season.

Do amateur athletes need a training period?

Non-professional athletes, as a rule, have little training experience, have other parameters of physical preparation and some peculiarities.

This category of athletes is usually not sufficiently trained, and therefore endowed with a large adaptation reserve, which allows to continue the training process without reducing the load.

Often long-term performance is explained by psychological dependence on physical activity. For example, it is difficult to keep an athlete of any level from the readiness to perform high-intensity exercises when the body requires the realization of the accumulated potential.

It turns out that if amateur athletes have no limiting factors, artificial breaks in exercise have no physiological justification. However, even they may need to switch from one activity to another due to their psycho-emotional state.

In such cases, it is worthwhile to change the training routine for a while, while maintaining the overall focus. For example, if an athlete has been performing running workouts with a certain load, it would be extremely illogical to completely abandon them and switch to barbell exercises.

How to train during the transition period?

So, for runners, a good alternative for the transition period will be light cycling or swimming, long walks in nature and a wide range of exercises from general physical training. Various sports games will help to get an emotional release.

For general physical training of a runner can recommend a whole list of special running and jumping exercises. However, they should be selected taking into account physiological and morphofunctional features (peculiarities of joints, blood cells, neurons, etc.) of each athlete.