So you've downloaded the latest and greatest training plan or better yet got one personally designed for you and are all set to break your PB. Getting the most out of your body requires more than just blindly following the plan. Your have to think on your feet.

Training, simply, is adding specific stress to the body. Your body then adapts to the stress load, and gets stronger, faster, or more powerful. There are times when completing your work out is detrimental to your training and perhaps your health. Knowing when these times are will reduce your risk of injury, and ultimately make your training more efficient and productive.

There is a miss conception out there that training increases the effort we can sustain during competition. I believe this miss-conception is magnified during race strategy for the bike portion of a triathlon. You believe because you have trained harder and are fitter for your upcoming race that you can swim, ride, and run at a harder level of effort. This thinking is a mistake.

Coach Brendon writes: If you have a look through race results you can often see that the difference between final placings is the transitions. Even at the elite level there can be as much as 10 seconds between a good transition and a poor one. Let's take a closer look at the two transitions in triathlon. BASIC PRINCIPLES

The fall and winter is a common time for athletes' to wrap up their race season. It is also a good to take some time off and let your body recuperate from the rigors of high intensity training and racing. Some athletes take as much as four weeks off, but this does result in loss of fitness and requires making up lost ground later.

The final touches to any training program come during the taper. This is the period of your season leading up to a key race when you cut back your overall training volume and allow your body to absorb all of the hard work you did during your base building and speed phases. Doing the right kind of taper is an art unto itself.

Getting the most out of your training is a fine line between training enough and resting enough to improve but not over doing it and becoming overtrained. Coach Julian Piotto looks at overtraining and some suggestions to help avoid it.

I have seen many athletes or aspiring athletes start out in a training program that is new to them with the expectations of certain time goals and/or race results. Some of them attain these goals, but most athletes in a new sport have expectations of themselves that are unrealistic.

The thought of getting ready for a short triathlon can be a daunting prospect for the average athlete. Brendon Downey explains some of the key points to ensure that individuals can get ready to do their first triathlon.

A magazine recently asked me for 5 key pieces of triathlon training advice to be used in an article. Here was my response. As my book 10K & 5K Running, Training & Racing: The Running Pyramid contains five training phases, I'd be a bit silly (as we'd understate in England) to change course now.