Developing a Plan

The sections below describe some steps you can take toward developing a cross-training plan for yourself.

Establishing Your Annual Training Calendar

  1. Think about your sports year. Make a list of the sports in which you compete or participate and define the "Active" or competitive season(s) for each one. You may have one or more sports, and one or more competitive seasons for each one.
  2. Now define your "Training" season. You can do this by backing up 3 months from the active season to determine when your major training should be taking place. If you know from experience that you need a longer or shorter Training season, adjust accordingly. Do this for each sport.
  3. Next define what we'll call "Groundwork." This is the general conditioning and prep work that gives you a solid base on which to build your focused training. Back up another 5 months or so for this.
  4. The rest of the year for each sport will be called "Recovery."

Make yourself a training calendar like that shown below. Transfer the "Active," "Training," "Groundwork" and "Recovery" seasons for all your sports to this calendar. Don't worry about overlaps.

Training in Each Phase

Groundwork

Emphasize longer, steadier work, adjusting muscles to the exercise. The goal is to develop a good base of general cardiovascular conditioning, as well as to adjust your muscles to the specific motions of your sport. Cross-training can help a lot with the former, but not as much with the latter. Include plenty of stretching and flexibility work as well as strengthening exercises.

Training

Here, your workouts should be tailored to best prepare you for the distance and intensity of your upcoming events. In general, you will need to train some at your race pace to develop a sense of pace for your competition. You will also want to include shorter harder work to push your intensity level up, as well as longer, easier work to maintain and improve your endurance. All of this will depend on your specific sport and events. Cross-training can be used for some of this training, but certainly not all of it.

Active/Racing

During your active season, you will want to keep sharp and rested. Between events, it is important to give your body a chance to recover. Your work load can be greater if your events are fewer and further apart; less if they are close together. Cross-training can be a very welcome way to get a workout while still allowing your racing muscles to recover.

Recovery

Variety, fun, whatever pace feels right. Lots of stretching. Keep in contact with the sport by doing a few steady state workouts at a comfortable pace. Do as much cross-training as you like—this is a great time for variety and trying new activities.

Single-Sport, Multiple-Season Training Calendar

Perhaps you have just one sport, but several distinct competitive periods spread throughout the year. For example, you might run the Boston marathon in April, then another major race in the fall. Your annual training calendar would look like this:

MONTH PHASE ACTIVITY
January Training Running
February
March
April Active
May Recovery
June Training
July
August
September Active
October Recovery
November Groundwork
December

Single-Sport, Single-Season Training Calendar

Here's an example of an annual training calendar for a single competitive sport with a single racing season which extends from April through June.

MONTH PHASE ACTIVITY
January Training Running
February
March
April Active
May
June
July Recovery
August Groundwork
September
October
November
December

Multiple-Sport, Multiple-Season Training Calendar

Here's an example of a multi-sport annual training calendar. This one includes an on-water rowing season in the fall; x-c ski races through the winter, and a marathon and various shorter runs from May to July. The active seasons are fairly well spread out, but there's a lot of overlap between the training, groundwork and recovery phases for the different sports. In effect, they all become cross-training for each other, with rowing being the thread that continues throughout the year and ties them all together.

MONTH ROWING PHASE RUNNING PHASE XC SKIING PHASE
January Recovery Groundwork Active
February Groundwork Training
March
April Recovery
May Active Groundwork
June
July Training
August Recovery
September Groundwork
October Active Training
November Recovery
December