Triathlon Fitness Tips

Anyone who has ever competed in a triathlon knows well the dizzy feeling you get as you first stand up out of the water and attempt to run to the bike transition, and the heaviness in the legs as you leave the bike rack and enter the run. That effect is commonly referred to as ‘blood pulling.

The dizzy feeling after the swim is actually attributed to a delay in the blood’s ability to redistribute the blood supply to the brain when quickly going from the horizontal swimming position to the vertical running stance to get to the transition. However, blood pooling shouldn’t be a significant problem in this transition as gravity will assist the drainage of blood from the shoulders and arms back to the heart when in the upright position.

Blood pooling seems to be more of a problem when changing from the cycle to run leg, with heaviness in the legs persisting until blood is designated to the muscles more directly involved in running.

Improved fitness and specific transition training will greatly reduce the negative effects described above. By regularly introducing transition training into your regime, your body will improve its ability to redistribute the blood supply to the correct muscles and also be able to maintain a continuous flow of blood to the brain.

Specific training sessions will teach you to adapt to having blood pooling in your upper body after swimming, and then having to shunted quickly to your legs in preparation for cycling. Those of you who haven’t yet ‘run off the bike’ will be amazed by discomfort and lack of control that you’ll experience when doing this for the first times.

Better to experience these sensations in training for the first time during competition. The best thing you can do for this type of fitness is practice going from one discipline to another in training. Get on your bike straight after a swim session, and run straight after a bike ride. You can even set up your bike on wind trainer at the pool or lake and practice mini triathlons. It feels a little bit strange changing from one discipline to the next at first but as with anything, your body will adopt and get used to it with practice.

You can train you muscle to cope with blood pooling in the fitness gym by exercising one muscle group to fatigue, then moving quickly to a totally opposite muscle group. Your core (abdominal) strength plays a major role in this transition training. Time should be set aside on alternate days for a mini-abdominal circuit of ten minutes focusing on lower abs, upper abs. oblique’s and isometric holds in that order for you to keep your fitness up to good.


These exercises will ensure that you always stay in shape and never will you at any given time complain about having problems with any of your fitness exercises. You should ensure that you also enjoy doing these exercises because if you find that it is something you don’t like doing, don’t force the exercise.