Consistency Rules!

A point I recently made to an athlete, worth repeating here I think. If you have any aspirations for improvement then I guarantee that improving your consistency will get you bigger gains than almost anything else you can think of. Those athletes that are already consistent, already have their schedules dialed, will now be reading this screaming “Don’t tell everyone” at their screens. It is that big a deal.

Your magic bullet

If you want a magic bullet for performance, this is it. No power meters. No secret workout. No swim toys. Just the ability to dial in your coaching program and do some consistent work. Simply put – Getting it Done.

Why don’t some people get it done? They may aim high, fail and then once a few sessions have gone by they give up and think “I’ll start properly next week”. Others simply don’t really plan at all, the occasional workout buoying their esteem for a day or two until the end of the week when they realize that they hadn’t done as much as they’d thought. This isn’t a criticism, it’s so common that I think it’s just a human trait. People are generally not very good at planning their workouts and being consistent. Those that are, even those who you would not see as ‘natural athletes’ do very well indeed. I have had athletes who, by their own admission, are ‘plodders’ have outstanding results simply by being utterly dialed into their programs and being extremely consistent.

People often think endurance sports are about genetics and ?natural ability?. But endurance, especially long distance triathlon, requires a decent amount of workload in order for someone to get good at it. And by ‘decent’ I mean reasonably high in comparison to other sports. Everyone understands that it seems.

Repeated workload

What they don’t understand is consistency and how to get to consistency. Start from the top and work your way back.

1 – You do not build consistency unless you REPEAT decent volumes of work.
2 – You can not REPEAT volumes of work unless you actually do the workouts
3 – You can not do the workouts unless you schedule your time to REPEATEDLY do the workouts.

Repeating the work, week in, week out, is consistency. Ok, the sessions may change, your volume may ebb and flow, but what we are talking about here is consistently getting your training plan done.

Commit

It doesn’t matter what your viable level of training is, whether it is some hours, quite a few hours or lots of hours. Commit to that amount. Do that amount. Every week.

Commit. To. That. Amount. Be consistent.

People who are good at scheduling and committing to the schedule and being consistent are good at endurance sports, usually performing way better on race day than people that should naturally be their equal.