Crash Workout Weeks, Pushing Intensity and Endurance

Very seldom do you find an endurance athlete who hasn’t had to, at one time or another, fight off the desire to push themselves into and anaerobic phase in every workout. We are competitive people, and want to work hard; harder than our competition, harder than we did the time before, and often end up working harder than we should. Overtraining occurs on two main fronts, intensity and volume. In other words pushing to hard (high heart rates and burning legs) or pushing for to long. Either one of these is usually a bad thing.

A Crash week is where you allow yourself to give into these desires. The key to a successful week of crashing is planning. You must plan three major facets. First, you need to plan you recovery week. Second, you need to choose whether you want to focus on speed, strength, form, endurance, or mental toughness (you should not choose ‘all of the above’ but rather one or two of these objectives. Finally, you need to plan you workouts during the CRASH week.

The benefits of a well-planned crash week are huge, especially for amateur athletes like myself. Pro athletes might find less value in crashing for a week, especially because their volume is already relatively high. However, the overall timing of a crash week is also very important. DO NOT crash close to a race. Many athletes fall into the trap of trying to get one final boost a few weeks before a race. In fact Googling crash workout weeks will bring up blogs for many of these people. But let me repeat that, DO NOT crash within a few weeks of a race.

Everyone is different and everyone’s workout plan for the week will be different. Average recovery time from a crash week is a week, but the gains might not be realized for another three or four weeks after that. I am in the midst of a crash week right now. I had a bit of a recovery week last week and below is the plan for the crash week and my recovery week.