Reserve Training

The concept of “reserve training” can be applied across various domains of athletic performance to enhance overall efficiency and endurance. Let’s break down how this idea works in relation to heart rate, strength, and speed training.

1. Heart Rate Reserve

Concept: The difference between your low aerobic heart rate and your maximum heart rate is your heart rate reserve. This reserve represents the capacity of your heart to respond to exercise intensity. By improving your efficiency at lower intensities, you can better utilise this reserve by maintaining a steady pace for longer periods.

Training Implications: Engaging in low-intensity training (such as Zone 2 training) increases your aerobic efficiency, allowing your heart to perform the same work with less effort. This enabled you to hold lower intensities for longer periods. Over time, this type of training shifts your heart rate range downward, meaning less exercise stress for the same output, ultimately increasing your endurance.

Paddling Implications: Use heart rate and RPE (Rate of Perceived Effort) to ensure you are exercising in the correct aerobic zone. This aligns with the 80/20 principle of training, where a large percentage of paddling should be done at a low intensity. This approach not only benefits endurance development but also enhances skill acquisition, such as technique, balance, surfing, downwinding, and wash riding.

2. Strength Reserve

Concept: Unlike heart rate, which has a physiological ceiling, strength does not have an inherent limit. Strength reserve refers to the difference between your maximal strength (e.g., 1RM) and the strength required for a given task. By increasing your maximal strength, you make submaximal efforts easier.

Training Implications: To improve endurance or performance in activities requiring repeated efforts, increasing your maximum strength makes any given submaximal load relatively lighter. For example, if you’re lifting 60% of your 1RM for repetitions, by increasing your 1RM, that same 60kg load will now represent a lower percentage of your max, allowing you to perform more repetitions or maintain effort for longer periods.

Paddling Implications: Getting stronger improves your strength endurance, enabling stronger and more powerful strokes for longer durations. Strength training also serves as the foundational work for becoming a faster paddler.

3. Speed Reserve

Concept: Speed reserve is the difference between your maximum sprint speed and the speed at which you need to perform for a given distance or time. By increasing your maximum speed, higher submaximal speeds become more attainable.

Training Implications: In sprinting or any sport requiring bursts of speed, improving your maximum speed directly enables your submaximal speed to also be higher.

Paddling Implications: Train at speeds equal to or faster than what you expect to race at on race day. This will enable your specific race training and race speed to reach higher levels.

Summary

• Heart Rate Reserve: Lower-intensity training improves heart rate efficiency, enhancing your ability to train more frequently and recover quickly.
• Strength Reserve: Increasing maximal strength decreases the relative load of submaximal efforts, improving endurance and performance in repetitive tasks.
• Speed Reserve: Enhancing maximum speed allows you to sustain faster paces over longer periods, improving overall performance.

In a well-structured training program, “reserve training” is about increasing your capacity across these domains to make submaximal efforts more efficient, ultimately leading to improved performance. This approach involves periodizing your training to focus on different aspects at different times, ensuring that each area is developed to support overall athletic development.

To consider how best to apply these principles to your own training plan, explore the content on this site. You can also contact me for advice on how this can work for you ben@strongpaddler.com