How long should your end of season break be?
Of course, there is no right or wrong answer to this question. It depends on many things. Like, how long until your next important competition?
Athletes in the Southern Hemisphere might have their national championships in February for example, and the Olympics just 6 months later in August. You can’t just take a month off, when you have the Olympic Games in 6 months.
Keeping in mind that there is no right or wrong answer, let’s take a look at the annual resting period of some of the top male athletes in the world of Athletics…
David Rudisha takes 6-12 weeks completely off training every year. When we trained along side David Rudisha earlier this year, Colm O’Connell told us that the usual rest period is around 2 months at the end of the year, but after the Olympics in 2012, he took 3 months (also mentioned in this IAAF article).
Mo Farah and Galen Rupp take 4 weeks (2 * 2 weeks) completely off training every year. In an interview at the the Nike Cross Nationals at the end of 2012 Alberto Salazar (Coach) broke down his periodisation. “We work on two twenty-week cycles, so that’s forty weeks. You ask where are the other twelve weeks? After each 20-week cycle, we have a two week period which is basically off, usually two weeks of no running whatsoever and then we have two weeks of jogging. So that’s four weeks of recovery after each cycle and then we have another two weeks of moderate build-up training, and then we are back into the heavy training.”
Bernard Lagat takes 5 weeks completely off training every year. In an interview with runnersworld, Lagat said “I take five. I do nothing, just eating and playing with my children.”
So why don’t more of his peers take such an extended break? “It’s the fear of how they’re going to feel on that first day back,” Lagat explains, and he knows from experience what it does feel like. As Cacciola describes it, “a 30-minute jog on his first day back can leave him doubled over, short of breath. By week three, he can go for a 10-mile jog in 55 minutes.” But Lagat has the patience of a man who has been world-class since the 1990s, who knows his process and his progress and has learned to be patient with it.
“I never push myself feeling like I should be in shape right away,” he asserts. “I know I have time.”
Steve Ovett used to take 1 month (or 4.5 weeks) completely off training every year. I personally used to train alongside Freddy Ovett (Steve Ovett’s son) and would chat with Steve regularly. Steve mentioned that in his one month off, he would do next to no running, only if he really felt like it, but would drinks lots of wine.
Usain Bolt would take between 4-8 weeks off, depending on the year. Coach Glen Mills mentioned at a conference in Jamaica in 2010 that Bolt tended to need at least a month off after each season to recover (mostly mentally) and if the following year didn’t include a World Championships of Olympics, he’d take closer to 2 months off.
Renato Canova – coach of many of the world’s best Marathoners (including many sub 2:10 runners) said on a Letsrun’s forum: “There are not rules valid for all the athletes, and valid, for the same athletes, always in the same way. After a season, we can have a short RESTING period, before starting the TRANSITION period, which is already a period of training. In Kenya (and Africa generally), the resting period is something including FULL REST. We give, to every athlete, about 2 weeks of total rest, and in this period they don’t do any physical activity.”
The Sweat Elite team took a sample of 10 male and 10 female elite athletes in the events ranging between 400m and the Marathon and asked them how long their end of season break is. Athletes sampled were at the Olympic Games level or very close. Of these athletes, the shortest break mentioned was 1.5 weeks and the longest was 5 weeks. The average resting period of these athletes in days was 19 days (or just under 3 weeks).
When asked if they did any training at all during these periods, the answers varied a lot. Some did absolutely nothing and gained some weight. Others were more cautious and “jogged a few times a week.”
by Matt Fox (Co-Founder @ Sweat Elite)
