Building fitness is a good thing, whereas losing fitness is a bad thing, right?
Not always. There are times when losing some fitness now helps you gain fitness later so that you come out ahead in the long run. One of those times is the early off-season period (in other words, right about now) when you’ve just completed your last big race of the year, your fitness level is at or near an all-time high, and you may be sorely tempted to “keep the momentum going”. Instead of giving in to this temptation, however, I advise you to do just the opposite — not by just accepting the need to give away some of that hard-earned fitness, but also embracing the process and even enjoying it.
Losing Fitness for Next Year’s Gains
对于经验不足的运动员，此建议是违反直觉的。大多数人参加耐力运动，具有一般健身背景，“变得健康，保持健康”的心态占上风。在典型的情况下，有人认为他们需要减掉几磅，签署健身房会员资格并开始锻炼。起初，他们无法进行很多锻炼，因此他们做得不多。But as they get fitter, they do more and more, until they reach a point where they’re either seeing the results they want or they’ve run out of motivation to do more, so they lock into a routine and try to sustain it.
This approach works well for goals like losing weight and improving overall health. But endurance athletes need to train in a more progressive manner, building toward performance peaks that create the need for a period of rest. At these times — counterintuitive though it may be — the best move an athlete can make to ensure they’re even fitter for their next big race is to reduce their training load sharply and regenerate physically and mentally at the price of lost fitness.
Learning When It’s Time to Rest
这种做法是精英耐力运动员的常态。早在80年代和90年代，六届Ironman世界冠军马克·艾伦（Mark Allen）将在10月中旬在科纳（Kona）参加比赛后，将他的游泳，骑自行车和停顿下来，直到元旦才开始。在此期间，他几乎每天都在冲浪时保持活跃，但仍然失去了很多健身。然而，艾伦（Allen）并没有避开他的铁人三项野心，但艾伦（Allen）感到新鲜，积极进取，并准备在下一个赛季将自己的表现提升到新的高度。
I’m not suggesting that every athlete should take two and a half months off from structured training and surf in the off-season, but you should dial back your training by a sufficient amount and for a long enough period of time that you come to feel deeply rested and hungry to start getting after it again. At a minimum, spend two weeks after your last “A” race of the season doing light exercise and enjoying activities like hiking, skiing, and yoga that you don’t have a lot of time for during the competitive season.
为了获得更好的结果，请欣喜地遵循此指南，而不是勉强地遵循。换句话说，真正拥抱失去健身的过程，随着您的享受越多，您就越能摆脱困境。在这方面有两件事有助于：了解在淡季初失去健身的好处，并与内心的懒惰人重新建立联系。
Believe in Your Off-Season
培训总是更有效ve when athletes understand why they’re doing it and buy into it instead of merely doing it. As the great basketball coach Billy Donovan once said, “Believe in your system, and then sell it to your players.” Believing in intentional off-season fitness loss means understanding its long-term aim, which is ensuring that athletes are fitter for their next “A” race than they were for their last one. Athletes who try to hold onto 100% of their fitness through the off-season are very likely to burn out before their next “A” race. In contrast, an athlete who is just slightly fitter at thebeginning在他们的下一个比赛中，他们的下一个赛场比最后一场比赛的最佳机会也是略高的水平达到顶峰的最佳机会。到达这一点的最佳方法是在淡季拨打您的训练 - 放弃您的一些健身，但不要太多 - 以换取全部的身体和心理补给。
This can be done without anxiety if you reconnect with your inner lazy person, especially in the first couple of weeks of the off-season when you are least active. Endurance athletes like to work hard, but there’s a part of every athlete that doesn’t. If you’re like most athletes, there have been times in your life when exercise wasn’t a high priority and you were resistant to sweating and breathing hard. The early off-season period can be a lot of fun if you choose to indulge this part of yourself. Take pleasure in eating dessert more often, binge-watching your favorite television programs, and perhaps even gaining a couple of pounds. You’re not letting yourself go — you’re looking out for your long-term athletic interests by appearing to do the opposite for a short period of time.
