In reading magazines and training sites I feel a little bit like Jan Brady, replacing Marsha with Brick… “Brick brick brick!” I hear her saying to me. But to the complete novice, you can do a little bit of googling and get some definitions, but no one really says what it is or what you need to do.
So here it is. It’s actually pretty simple.
A brick session is when you train using two of your activities in the same session. For example you could go from bike to run or swim to bike, though it’s often thought of as being easier to practice the bike / run than the swim / bike because of the lack of the wet stuff – but we know we have to do it some more 😉
In reality you should also include your transition at race pace too, so that you don’t take half an hour between sessions for example. You need to be keeping your transition to about 5 minutes to replicate race day attempts. And so you get used to how your muscles will act and what they’ll feel like or what exercises you need to train harder at!
My training at the moment is quite often a swim at dawn and then if working from home I’m quite fortunate to hit the gym at lunch for a bike / run. It’s been really interesting to see how, I think I can be honest, bloody painful it was on the first dozen or so attempts and how it’s evolved over the last few months.
With a combination of being out of shape, having poor technique and just being absolutely knackered after a tough interval session on the bike, the transition to run has become easier. It’s no less painful, but my muscles (and breathing!) are starting to adjust to two high cardio activities one after the other. I’ve just got to build up the stamina on each now and evidently work on my technique to not tire out some leg muscles completely on the bike.
Rach and myself tend to do two sessions a week together to see how we are progressing (and to have a bit of a laugh egging each other on- crucial when you start to hurt!) and we mix it up a bit too. Whilst it’s dark and cold in the week, we hit the gym and do our bricks in reverse – run/bike/swim (crazy I know huh!) We do it that way partly because Rachel prefers to run before her cycle but I think it’s also good to not just go in and do the same exercise over and over again. You need to change it up to not get bored and to stretch your muscles in different ways.
As we are both completely different builds, targets within those sessions are slightly different for each of us too. So for example, in January we have been doing a 2.5km run followed by 20-25 km bike. I tend to do my run at intervals eg start at 7km/h pace and every minute boost it 1km/h until I hit 13km/h and then drop down to 7km/h and start again. Normally three cycles takes me to about 2.5km of running. Rachel tends to do a higher / longer / steadier pace throughout, but we tend to get to the end result about the same time.
On to the bikes, we tend to do a 25 minute interval session trying to keep a steady pace / rpm for the duration, but as we have progressed we are adding more km under our belt with each 25 minute session (I was getting to 1.45/1.50 mins per km last week – stoked!). FYI, I started riding on average around 90rpm and am pushing to about 100rpm to help with the variations when riding on the road! Our aim is to build up the time we train each week.
We’ve only done one outdoor session like this (it was fecking cold!) but we are aiming for another this weekend… We’ll let you know how we get on!
So what brick sessions do you do? How do you split it up? Answers in the comments.
If you’re not sure what an interval session is… More on that in the next blog 😉