Fitter & Faster Podcast: How to Crush the Off-Season

Published November 19, 2021 10:54AM

Welcome to Triathlete’s training podcast, Fitter & Faster, where we cover one training topic in-depth each month—from the basics to your questions, plus all the gear you need.

Fitter & Faster and all our Triathlete podcasts are now on one feed, so you can get all your triathlon news in one place. Be sure to subscribe to our Triathlete podcast feed so you don’t miss anything: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Soundcloud | Spotify | iHeartRadio

You can also listen to past Fitter & Faster episodes with Dr. Stacy Sims, Jay Dicharry, Dean Karnazes, Matt Dixon, cycling guru Matt Bottrill, sports psychologist Jeff Troesch, and plenty more.

In this episode of Fitter & Faster, coach Mike Olzinski joins host Emma-Kate Lidbury to talk through all aspects of winter training. Whether you call it the off-season, the post-season—or something else entirely—this period of time between one race season ending and the next one beginning can be more important and significant than most realize. It can also be hard to get it right: How much time should you take off? How much of that should be total rest and how much should be activity of some kind? What level of intensity should your workouts be? And would it benefit you to focus on one sport over the other two? Would you make gains from spending more time in the gym? (Spoiler alert here: the universal answer is almost always going to be Yes!). Lidbury and Olzinski, who is a senior coach and head of strength training at Purple Patch Fitness, chat through all of these things and more in the show.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be Fitter & Faster without our Gear Up section with resident gear guru and Triathlete executive editor Chris Foster. Like the true gear guru that he is, Foster runs us through gear he thinks will help get you out of the door this winter (perhaps when your mojo is low or the weather is truly grim) as well as gear that could come in handy if you’re really focusing on just one sport and shoring up a weakness to make it a strength. We get in the weeds of front-mounted snorkels, swim paddles, FORM goggles, gravel bikes, trail run shoes, running with power, and more.