Combining swimming, biking or running into a single brick session is key for triathlon training and racing success. Here’s why.
Triathlon might be made up of different disciplines, but on race day, everything comes together. From your first stroke in the water until you power through the finish line, swim, bike and run become one sport. Reflecting this in your training by combining two or more sports into a brick session is key to racing success. Here’s a rundown of why brick sessions should be part of every triathlete’s training, how to get the most from your brick sessions and when to include them in the run-up to your race.
What is a triathlon training brick session?
Simply put, a brick workout is a combination of multiple triathlon disciplines – most commonly bike and run – within a single training session with a quick transition between each. Transitioning between disciplines is something that’s unique to multi-sports events, so your first experience of combining swimming, cycling and running should happen well before race day.
Why include brick sessions?
Training for swim, bike and run will increase your fitness in each triathlon discipline not necessarily your ability to efficiently string the sports together during your race. Adding regular brick sessions into your training schedule gives you the practise you’ll need to prepare yourself mentally as well as physically for the rigours of triathlon racing. Over time, you’ll get to know your body’s responses better, improve pacing awareness and normalise the swim-to-bike and bike-to-run sensations so that transitioning becomes second nature.
Brick sessions can also take on the form of race simulations, giving you the chance to perfect your feel for the swim intensity you can sustain without tiring for the bike or the cycling intensity you can maintain without going too deep and harming your run speed. In these race simulations, you also get transition practise and the opportunity to field test kit, nutrition and race strategies, so these are some of the most important sessions you’ll do.
Swim to bike brick sessions
Going immediately from swimming to cycling can be a nauseating experience as your blood quickly has to redistribute itself around the body when going from a horizontal to a vertical position – check out our guide to banishing post-swim dizziness for tips to combat this. Swim to bike brick sessions give you the chance to see how much you’re likely to be affected by dizziness and what techniques work for you to avoid it on race day.
Swimming intensity can be hard to gauge in a triathlon event, especially at the start when the gun goes off kick-starting an adrenaline-fuelled sprint. Brick sessions give you the chance to work out what intensity you can sustain to both ensure you reach the bike fresh and to give you confidence on race day to race your own race regardless of what others are doing around you.
Sometimes it’s simply the cold and wet that can make you suffer when transitioning from bike to run. While brick sessions can’t magically make the weather warmer, they do give you a great opportunity to hone your kit choices. With regular brick sessions, you’ll quickly find out what extra layers suit you, whether an extra jersey, jacket, gloves, arm warmers or a headband.
Bike to run transitions
After being in an aero position with a static upper body and predominantly using your leg muscles on the bike, it’s no surprise that suddenly asking your body to run is often accompanied by a feeling of heavy-legged unresponsiveness. It’s a sensation that’s best combatted by plenty of experience. Brick sessions give you exactly this – the opportunity to get your body used to the transition.
A great way to speed up this learning process is to do a multi-brick session, where you go from bike to run for short stints a few times. These are great for hardening up the muscles as well as gaining that all-important transition experience.
Once the feeling of running off the bike no longer seems quite so alien, subsequent brick sessions will allow you to better hone your bike-to-run intensity, riding at just the right level so that you get off the saddle with plenty of energy left in the legs and are better able to gauge if you’re having a good or a great run day.
Yet another benefit of the bike to run brick session is that it also gets you used to the illusion of speed that cycling creates. With the brain and eyes used to a faster pace, it’s so easy to go out way too hard on the run, only realising you’re running way to fast – even a minute or more per km – when it’s too late. Practising this bike to run transition and keeping an eye on your running watch can help avoid implosion during the run in your event.
When to include brick sessions in your training
The closer you get to your event, the more race-specific your training should be, so brick sessions are best added to your build period, or from around 12-weeks before your event.
Swim-to-run bricks are ideally added to your open-water swimming sessions. If it’s purely the wobbly-legged swimming to standing feeling you want to conquer, a session with a few swims and short transition-simulation runs will give you lots of experience in a short space of time.
When it comes to bike-to-run sessions, you don’t have to be running 10k off the bike every time you ride. 15-20 minutes should be enough to get you used to the physical feeling and stabilise your pace. These sessions should be done at least once a week, but there’s no harm in having a short run off all your bike sessions in this period, especially if your legs feel particularly hollow when running after cycling.
ensure you’re properly recovering after each brick to avoid overtraining
However, running more than 20 minutes off the bike starts to increase the chance of injury so sessions with longer runs should be attempted less frequently – both to avoid injury and to ensure that you’re not fatiguing yourself too much that you miss out on the benefit of your single-discipline run training.
For 70.3 and Ironman training, a couple of well-planned longer brick sessions are essential. Such sessions can improve race fitness, help focus pacing and give a mental boost ahead of race day. An example brick could be riding for two-thirds your expected race time followed by a run at half of your expected run time with a fast transition in between all at race pace.
Whether you’re doing long bricks or multiple shorter bikes and runs, these sessions do increase the training stress on your body, so ensure you’re properly recovering after each brick and planning them apart in your schedule to help avoid overtraining or injury. Such sessions shouldn’t be done within 48 hours of another hard session and you should ensure you recover properly before you next take on high-intensity training.
