15 March 2021
 Categories: Recreation & Sports, Blog

If you're looking for a way to safely improve your physical fitness during quarantine, indoor winter training can help you chase down your goals.

From building up your volume and intensity density to peaking, here are some of the ways to get more out of your indoor winter training.

Building Volume and Intensity

Volume is the amount of time you spend indoor winter training. However, not all volume is created equally.

• Creating Zones: To avoid injury and burnout, it's important to avoid increasing your volume too drastically. In addition, to keep track of your total weekly volume, you'll need to create intensity zones. For cardio-based indoor winter training, these intensity zones might correlate to heart zones. If your indoor winter training is more resistance-based, you can focus on watts or the amount of resistance related to your maximum effort for a single rep. Regardless of what type of indoor winter training you plan on using, keeping the majority of your volume between 60 and 70% of your maximum heart rate or maximal effort is a good rule of thumb. As you progress through your winter indoor training, you add more total volume and increasing proportions of volume at higher intensities.
• Reducing Rest or Reps: You can safely improve volume and intensity density by focusing on reducing rest or increasing repetitions. For instance, you might begin your training with sets of 3-minute intervals completed at 80% of your maximum heart rate, followed by 3 minutes of rest (easier training at 50% of your maximum heart rate). As your training progresses, you can reduce the rest intervals, or you can increase your total number of hard and easy repetitions.

Peaking to Recalibrate and Celebrate

Without goals and maximum performance efforts, it can be difficult to celebrate your progress and recalibrate your appropriate training paces.

• Pre, Mid, and Post: Before beginning an indoor winter training cycle, it's important to establish a fitness baseline. If you're new to indoor winter training, this effort can be as simple as running for as long as possible without stopping. Regardless of your current fitness, it's important to figure out where you're starting. Once you establish your baseline, you set your appropriate training paces and set a goal of improving your fitness in a few weeks. If you want to set a big long-term goal, you'll need to recalibrate your fitness every week. Building in time trials and maximum efforts can help you monitor your progress toward your long-term fitness goals.