Big goals but little time? Here are a few tips on how to make the most of your valuable training hours.
When his friends talk about Ulrich Nieper, the first thing they do is shake their heads. "I don't know how he does it," they usually say. Because what Nieper has been doing for almost a decade is more than astonishing. The 40-year-old doctor from Munich is an orthopaedic surgeon at a clinic and works up to 60 hours a week in shifts. And last year, he competed in the Hawaii Ironman for the ninth time in a row - finishing in 100th place, i.e. at medium professional level.
Nieper achieves without complaint and seemingly effortlessly what many athletes fail to do: he reconciles a successful and demanding professional life with consistent endurance training at a high level. He is certainly helped in this by his talent and the foundation he built up in his youth. However, Nieper can only reap the rewards of this training because he has mastered a special art: managing his time efficiently. The question arises for anyone who does not earn their living as a professional athlete: How do I best utilise the limited time I have available for training? The obvious answer: I need a plan, a strategy. "The less time you have, the more important it is to train systematically," says former world-class triathlete Katja Mayer, who now works as a training consultant in Augsburg. If you have a lot of time, you can waste it on training that doesn't lead directly to your goal. If you don't have time, on the other hand, you should use every minute as sensibly as possible.
The ideal solution is to get help with this. Why spend precious hours tinkering with a training plan? Others can do it better: "My main job is to help people with extremely little time to get the most out of their training," says Katja Mayer. This work often involves constantly reorganising the plan if unforeseen appointments spoil the athlete's tour. If the athlete didn't have this help, rearranging the schedule on their own would take up even more valuable training time.
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