While there are many fun challenges, such as the Tactical Strength Challenge, Beast Tamer/Iron Maiden, or even achieving full front levers or planches, I don’t believe these short challenges force you to dig deep enough to create lasting change. And to me, that is the reason for a big challenge – to grow both physically and mentally

While there are truly massive challenges out there, the following list covers the most popular of the most accessible forms of “big” challenges.

Swim

The world’s biggest open water swim is the Sun Moon Lake International Swimming Carnival. This mass-participation swim boasts up to 22,000 participants who cover a distance of 3.3km. If you’re not a super confident swimmer, don’t start with something like this, which will be much like jumping into a washing machine that has hands and feet. The odds of completing this swim without being mugged are zero.

“If you’re not a super confident swimmer, don’t start with something like this, which will be much like jumping into a washing machine that has hands and feet.“

If mass participation isn’t your thing, then why not try the old standard of the English Channel? The Channel is one of the enduring tests of stamina on the planet. To date there have been 1,912 completions of the Channel. More people have successfully climbed Everest than have completed the Channel. So, in terms of gaining pub notoriety, you may want to put this at the top of your list.

Join the ranks of Captain Matthew Webb, the first recorded person to swim the English Channel in 1875.

Run

The Badwater 135 is probably top of the list of tough running races, but there is also the Leadville Trail 100 Run, which is a milestone achievement for any ultra runner.

Beyond Leadville there is the 4 Deserts. The race is as the name implies – you race across the Sahara, Gobi, Atacama, and Antarctic deserts. Each race is 250km over seven days. To achieve the challenge, all four races must be completed within a single calendar year.

“The Badwater 135 is probably top of the list of tough running races, but there is also the Leadville Trail 100 Run, which is a milestone achievement for any ultra runner.“

If the idea of just running seems boring for you, then why not try a Spartan Beast or Ultra Beast? The Beast is a half-marathon distance (21.1km), while the Ultra is the full marathon distance of 42.2km. Both are littered with obstacles designed to test body and mind to the limit.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to go long, but would prefer something short and painful why not try the Red Bull 400? Billed as the hardest 400m in the world, these races are typically held on ski jump slopes featuring a 45% angle. The record so far is 4:57 (roughly five times slower than a flat 400m would be for a good runner).

Ride

The Race Across America is perhaps the best known of the cycle challenges. At 3,000 miles, with 170,000 feet of climbing and crossing from one coast to the other, RAAM is a monumental challenge. That amount of climbing is equivalent to ascending Everest nearly six times, by the way.

If you’d rather test yourself on dirt there’s always the eight-day Cape Epic mountain bike race. Known as the Tour de France of off-road riding, this gruelling race features a distance of 739km, 16,000 feet of climbing, and 1,200 competitors.

Triathlon

While the Ironman World Championship in Kona is certainly the jewel in the triathlon crown, for many it is impossible to get there as qualifying becomes tougher each year. So, if you want to do a race combining multiple disciplines that is actually tougher than an Ironman (a paltry 3.8km swim, 180km ride, and 42.2km run), then Ultraman may be for you. Ultraman is a 10km swim followed by a 261.4km ride (split into 180km the first day and 81.4km the second day). The race finishes with a lazy double marathon on the third and final day.

If that still doesn’t sound hard enough, then perhaps the Enduroman Arch to Arc is more your speed. This race runs from London’s Marble Arch to Dover – an easy 87km. This is then followed by swimming the Channel (you get to wear a wetsuit, which means it doesn’t count as an “official” crossing). The final leg is a 181km ride from Calais to Paris, where you finish under the Arc de Triomphe.

Adventure Race

The Likeys 6633 Ultra may just be the craziest race on the planet. Starting in the Yukon, it covers 560km (350 miles) and boasts that only eleven people have ever completed it. Starting from Eagle Plains on the Klondike Highway and finishing at the Arctic Ocean, racers must drag all their supplies behind them in a sled.

If you’d rather something a bit less extreme, but still full of freezing-good fun, then how about the Patrouille des Glaciers? This 53km race across the mountains of Switzerland is a classic endurance race on a route first used to test the readiness of alpine soldiers during WWII. The race is held every two years, so plan ahead for this one.

Trekking

If speed isn’t your thing, but you still want a good challenge, perhaps you could tackle some hard trekking? Forget Everest basecamp, there are far harder treks that may not have the reputation but offer far more challenging trekking.

“The route from Spiti to Ladakh takes 24 days and is bleak enough that Kipling wrote of it, ‘Surely the gods live here; this is no place for men.’“

On par with Everest for street cred, but far harder, is the Indian Himalayas. The route from Spiti to Ladakh takes 24 days and is bleak enough that Kipling wrote of it, “Surely the gods live here; this is no place for men.”

If altitude isn’t your thing, then perhaps the Overland Track in Australia is more your speed. While short in comparison to the Indian Himalayas, this 65km, six-day trek is regarded as one of the most challenging of the easily accessible treks worldwide. For bonus points, there is actually a run that takes part on this track, adding to the challenge.

Get Uncomfortable

A good challenge will change you both inside and out. Step far, far outside your comfort zone in 2015 and attempt something everyone else thinks is crazy. I guarantee you’ll learn more about yourself from an event like these than you ever can inside the gym.

You’ll Also Enjoy:

• Free 4-Week Training Plan to Get You Spartan Race Ready
• 4 Pro Tips for Ironman Swimming Success
• New Research Reveals Recent Trends in Ultra-Endurance Events
• What’s New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photos 1 and 3 courtesy of Shutterstock.

Photo 2 provided by Royal Museums Greenwich via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Go Big: 15 Challenges for Serious Athletes appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

While these events can provide the opportunity for plenty of hard workouts. It is worth reviewing your goals before getting caught up in the excitement. Let’s look at your goals, your training schedule, and how you might arrange your training plan to have both fun and progress this summer.

Devising a Plan for Progress

As an amateur cyclist, my main goals are to have fun, stay fit, and steadily improve my race results. Most of the local events would satisfy my first two goals, so in this article I will be looking at the last goal – how to steadily improve my results. I would like to think that this year’s results will be better than last year, and that next year’s will be better still.

While it may be tempting to leave thinking about training until the end of the season, there is work you can do to make steady progress through the year. The key is to devise a program that fits in with your event and social calendar and still enables you to work on developing sustainable power output.

Recent research shows that combining endurance with interval sessions is an effective way of developing sustainable power. You should always include time for effective recovery and adaptation, too.

One way of doing this is to have a three-day cycle of two endurance days followed by an interval or race day. It is easy to tweak this to insert an extra recovery day before an important event or to increase the overload by scheduling an interval day with a race on the following day. I find it more motivating to do the race after the interval day, than vice versa. I would not expect to care about the results in this case. The event is just being used for training.

The 28-Day Training Cycle

The following pictures show how this might work over a 28-day cycle. Training effort is shown relative to your functional threshold power (FTP), or your average sustainable power.

• Endurance sessions should be well below eighty percent of your threshold as the emphasis is on developing the aerobic energy system.
• Interval sessions should be hard and lead to failure. This is usually more than 120% of your threshold. The interval session could also be supplemented by resistance training as mentioned in previous articles.
• Recovery and adaptation days should consist of very light activity.

Key to charts:

• Green = endurance session
• Orange = interval session above threshold
• Red = an event, this will typically average out to your threshold
• Blue = recovery and adaptation, very light and short duration activity

This picture shows a 28-day period with a race or event in the middle. Two additional recovery days have been inserted as this was an important event. The three-day cycle continues until the end of the 28 days. This includes additional recovery and regeneration days before another period starts.

This picture shows a race or event during the middle of the period. This event is of little importance and is being used as overload training by combining it with an interval session on the preceding day. The three-day cycles are scheduled on either side.

This picture shows a 28-day period with regular weekly events. Endurance and recovery days are manipulated in order to maintain the weekly cycle of events. A longer recovery and regeneration period is inserted before the next period starts.

The Benefits of the Three-Day Cycle

One of the things I like about the three-day cycle is that it is flexible and enables programs to be adapted to cater for all the challenges life throws our way – like last minute work or family commitments or even illness. If an extra days recovery is needed, it is easy to insert without upsetting the general precept of the routine combining endurance with intervals and slotting in events.

What events are you signing up for this summer? And how could this plan help you both enjoy the season and continue to make progress? Post your thoughts to the comments below.

References:

1. Westgarth-Taylor, C., et al., “Metabolic and performance adaptations to interval training in endurance-trained cyclists.” Eur J Appl Physiol (1997) 75: 298-304

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Cyclists: How to Combine Races and Training for a Successful Summer appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

We all know that the barrier to entry into the fitness industry is small. Unlike a tertiary degree, which may cost you tens of thousands and a few years, obtaining a personal training qualification may take just a couple thousand dollars and a few weeks. And that’s if you actually get a certification at all, as many trainers operate without one.

Because of the lack of control to get into the industry, there is also little control within it. Like with most things in life, the vast majority is perfectly fine with doing as little as possible, and the fitness industry welcomes them with open arms. Want a job where you can wear a T-shirt and runners? No problem. How about one where most customers, having failed several times beforehand, don’t actually seem to care about paying money and getting any actual results?

But at some point, in order to actually make a decent living, one of two things is going to happen. You will either quit and go find a “real” job or you will realize you need to pull your finger out and start actually acting like a professional in any field.

It’s at this point that I get to meet quite a lot of trainers as they look for a solid, professional group to be involved with and take their education and business to the next level – by attending RKC. But unlike many fitness groups, the RKC doesn’t accept mediocrity and does actually fail people if they don’t meet the standards. So, if you’re smart that means one thing to you – you need to prepare fully before your event. While the points below apply to RKC, they can just as easily apply to any event you sign up for that has even the slightest element of conditioning needed.

It’s Better to Be Over-Prepared than Under-Prepared

The RKC is a long weekend. So is SFG. So is Gym Jones. So is Spartan Group X. So are any number of events from Spartan races to Ironman to Gran Fondos. There is no worse time to realize you are under prepared than in the middle of the event and be left trying to survive for the rest of it.

At my RKC, I found out exactly how important grip strength was at the end of the second day. Leading into the event I had only trained with competition grade bells. For people unfamiliar with kettlebells, that means the handles were thinner, which requires less grip. By the end of the second day, my grip was shot. My hands were fine, but my grip was done. I couldn’t even turn the handle on the door of my hotel room. Instead, I had to push it down with my elbow while bumping the door open with my hip. The next morning it was worse. I couldn’t even manage to hold a fork reliably in my hands and kept dropping breakfast all over myself, as well as the fork.

But while my grip was shot, my body was fine. I was never left so exhausted from a drill or workout that I was unable to concentrate on taking in the next part of the lesson. Because the technique testing is at the end of the three days you will be tired and sore when you get to it. That’s life. Often you will be tested most when you least want to be. But as a trainer you need to be able to demonstrate perfect form at the end of a day regardless of how tired you are. Being in great shape will help you not just get through the weekend, but also make sure you still have enough in the tank for perfection when you get to testing at the end. You simply cannot be too conditioned.

See an RKC Prior to Your Cert

Unlike most of the fitness industry, the RKC has actual standards. We don’t call lifts “floor to overhead.” We would call that snatching and we have a bullet point list of what safe form for that lift entails. Failure to maintain that standard during the test will see you fail the technique testing. For many people, that means they need to severely tighten up their form and their understanding of what their body is doing at any given moment – from the time they touch the handle of the bell in preparation of the lift, during the lift, and until they release it at the finish of the set.

The number of people I have seen pass an RKC without having previously spent time working with an RKC is incredibly low. In the same vein, before I did Ironman, I spoke with a number of experienced Ironman athletes and got a feel for what the day was like. I spent time on forums. I read. Doing so helped me understand exactly what I was going to do and helped me prepare. Don’t risk winging it, and then be upset when you fail to meet the standards.

Little Things Count

If you’re into minimum effective dose style training and think a thirty-minute session with some swings and a few snatches will be enough, then I have bad news for you. There’s no way that is going to be enough to get you through the death by swings that day one is.

The funny thing about doing a lot of swings is that you find yourself rubbing your hands in places you’d never had problems before. So, the only way to toughen your hands up enough for the event is to train hard and put in some longer sessions. When I run RKC preparation workshops, we usually warm up with 400 swings (10 x 10 two hand swings at snatch weight, 10 x 10/10 one hand swings at snatch weight, and 10 x 10 two hand swings with something heavy like a 40+kg bell for guys) Then we train for another two hours.

Over a few sessions, the students’ hands become nice and tough, and when it comes to the critical weekend, they find that they handle the massive volume just fine. This approach should stop you needing to buy the world’s biggest roll of tape, wearing socks on your hands, or super gluing your skin back together to get by.

But these little lessons are in everything. In long distance racing, it’s not uncommon to develop bad reactions to certain foods even if you’ve been fine with them in training. Through hours on the bike and then onto the run, all with your heart racing and stomach struggling to get enough blood flow to do its job properly, you need to get food down. I made sure to alternate gels on the bike using different flavors, and then have different flavors again for the run.

I also wore my race gear once or twice in training to make sure there were no stitches that would rub and that it was comfortable for hours at a time like I needed it to be. Don’t wear brand new shorts, shirt, or shoes for an event. You will likely pay for it when the shorts rip as you squat, the shoes give you blisters, and the shirt proves uncomfortable.

Start Your Preparation Early

For my RKC, I ended up having a single week of training to spare as I was struggling to get my snatch test number until right before the event. These days I leave nothing to chance and most of my clients would be able to pass the snatch test as far away as six weeks from an RKC. 

It is far better to cruise into the event than try to desperately cram as much fitness into your body as you can in a short time frame. In my experience this leads to injuries. If you’ve read my Ironman journal, you can see the trend of pushing hard to gain fitness over a relatively short period and see the list of injuries – constant calf and Achilles problems – over the eight months leading into the event. As it turns out I would have done better at Ironman if I had given myself two years to prepare and not just one.

Like I said above – you can never be too conditioned, too strong, or too fit. Take your preparation seriously and you will not only enjoy the weekend more, but you will get a lot more out of it, as you will be able to take instruction better rather than gasping for air like a fish out of water between sets.

Photos 1&4 courtesy of Dragon Door Australia.

The post How to Physically Prepare for the RKC appeared first on Breaking Muscle.