Training on feel from ventilatory thresholds is a great way to go as they’re so close to real LT1 and LT2. Easy runs at comfortable pace with nasal breathing and tempo/progression/sub-threshold runs at comfortable pace with oral breathing.
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Tracking pace for workouts is almost useless. I can see looking at your paces in the beginning to help find your rhythm and to prevent yourself from going too fast. Other than that, effort should be the independent variable that you're targeting while letting the paces be what they are (you really don't have much control over pace anyways).
Tracking pace for workouts is almost useless. I can see looking at your paces in the beginning to help find your rhythm and to prevent yourself from going too fast. Other than that, effort should be the independent variable that you're targeting while letting the paces be what they are (you really don't have much control over pace anyways).
Agreed, which is why I feel like the lactate meter is such a useful tool for training. When used correctly, it will keep you in a "sweet spot" of effort and prevent you from going over the line.
Even if you could benefit physically from more easy miles and adding workouts won't help much there physically at your milage, they do help mentally so that when you get to race day you have done that pace before and have some idea how it feels.
training too focused is a waste of time if you're a middle distance runner. 2-3x speed sessions a week does not have any benefit over 1 speed session + 1 strength/threshold session. The difficulty of sessions should be rising, not the frequency.
source: bro science + me going from 4:49 - 4:19 mile in one season
Short recovery time between reps is way overrated. If it takes more than 60 seconds for your heart rate to come down, just take the extra time before starting your next one.
Some people are made for high mileage and others aren’t. Too heavy and the aerobic stimulus is offset by “slowing” down the muscles and damaging them. it’s not one size fit all.
Training should always be smooth enough that you’re hungry for the races.
- HR zone training is worthless for like 99% of the population and is a boon on beginner runners who don't know better than to spend money on gadgets and plans
- Consistent small to medium doses of "quality" running far outweigh 2 big, tough sessions per week for distances 5k and down.
- Speed reserve is very real and too many people think they can ignore it. The faster your max speed, the easier it is to maintain sub-maximum speeds. Obviously doesn't scale infinitely, e.g. Usain Bolt would be a poor marathoner, duh. But if you take two guys, one runs a 50 flat 400 and the other runs a 60 flat 400, the 50 flat 400 guy has LOADS more potential than the 60 flat guy over most distances.
- Not even bro science but lifting weights is significantly safer than distance running. The amount of distance runners that think touching a barbell will result in them injured are already incredibly fragile and unathletic and probably need the stimulus of lifting more than anyone.
- Overall athleticism is extremely important, especially early on in your running career. Someone who can jump and throw and hop and bounce and lift and of course run has way more potential than someone who only knows how to do running training.
Yea agree strongly with these. HR training is so silly and new runners cling to it like Velcro it's wild.
I'm mostly running marathons but even then your second point holds true. You can get far in the marathon on strides and a weekly progression long run.
I used to downplay your 3rd point but am training for Boston and finally started incorporating strides and dabbling in k/mile repeats and have already noticed a difference in feel for my Threshold runs.
I have the opposite bro science stance. Doing all my easy runs faster gives me a boost in fitness, BUT, it's always proved unsustainable for me. I wear out or get hurt.
I'm sure it works for some, but my personal stance is "No such thing as too slow on easy runs."
I remember asking a sub 13:30 guy a while ago, "Wow you were fast, how fast were your easy runs? You probably cruised 6:00 miles like it was nothing!" and he laughed and said most easy days were 7:30.
A fast twitch runner needs to run easy run slow. A slow twitch runner needs to run easy run fast.
Different approaches work for different runners.
I bet when you do a muscle biopsy of all those fast twitch distance runners, they don’t have many😂 Seriously if we talk all the 12:50 guys in the world how much do you think the muscle comps differ? One guys has 5% more ft?
My 'bro science' take is that most of the science on training is garbage because there's not enough resources to do a proper study and most of the people who end up studying sports and exercise science are bro scientists who couldn't hack it in medical science.
Getting the best out of an athlete takes 10+ years of training. If you study a handful of undergrads for 12 weeks or however long your funding lasts, you're not going to learn anything useful for elites.
Most of the stuff about VO2 max, heart rate, blood lactate, etc. is spurious overthinking for people who like putting things into boxes. The body isn't neatly separated into zones and thresholds and energy systems and muscle fibre types. It's all a big complicated mix. Cycling and triathlon benefit from the science of PEDs and aerodynamics, everything else is window dressing. If you're not going to dope, runners don't have much to learn from sports science.
Do lots of running. Run consistently. Do lots of fast running. Don't run so hard that you can't run fast again in a couple of days. Keep it consistent year after year. Learn to race by racing. If you need to take 'down' weeks or to split your year into blocks that coincidentally resemble the maximum period of funding some second rate academic could scrounge together 10 years ago, you're running too hard on the 'up' weeks.
My 'bro science' take is that most of the science on training is garbage because there's not enough resources to do a proper study and most of the people who end up studying sports and exercise science are bro scientists who couldn't hack it in medical science.
Getting the best out of an athlete takes 10+ years of training. If you study a handful of undergrads for 12 weeks or however long your funding lasts, you're not going to learn anything useful for elites.
Most of the stuff about VO2 max, heart rate, blood lactate, etc. is spurious overthinking for people who like putting things into boxes. The body isn't neatly separated into zones and thresholds and energy systems and muscle fibre types. It's all a big complicated mix. Cycling and triathlon benefit from the science of PEDs and aerodynamics, everything else is window dressing. If you're not going to dope, runners don't have much to learn from sports science.
Do lots of running. Run consistently. Do lots of fast running. Don't run so hard that you can't run fast again in a couple of days. Keep it consistent year after year. Learn to race by racing. If you need to take 'down' weeks or to split your year into blocks that coincidentally resemble the maximum period of funding some second rate academic could scrounge together 10 years ago, you're running too hard on the 'up' weeks.
Great post.
I was on an international regatta winning collegiate rowing team where our head coach's entire philosophy was 'grip it and rip it'. I literally hadn't heard of the concept of 'steady state' training until until 5 years after graduation, when I was looking for a 2k erg programme on reddit. Was it remotely scientific? No. Did a lot of athletes burnout (either physically or mentally)? Yes.
But this squad produced some of the best results in the world, and the head coach is now an Olympic team's performance director.
I always think of this when I see hobbyists online agonising over training regimens and 'optimisation' (for any sport / event).
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mine is that crosstraining can positively influence muscle development when used in concert with traditional means. You obviously can't cut back on actual running, but it can be a useful tool, especially if your adequate at whatever form of crosstraining you do. I came from a swimming background and I've honestly found that I have better closing speed and leg turnover at the end of races when I've been swimming a ton than when I've been solely running.
I agree--exercise science hasn't really "gotten it" yet with regards to running. Not saying anything bad about exercise scientists, who appear to be smart, thoughtful people. It's just hard to really figure out something as complicated as the human body without a sky-high budget.
I've long had an idea that sounds a bit strange, but I think it would be a good way to approach the study of running. The way exercise science is often done is by isolating small factors, one per study, and combining them to make a whole. This makes sense practically because if you change too many factors at once, your study won't have the statistical power to understand what causes an effect.
Coaches build up their knowledge very differently: runner-by-runner, rather than factor-by-factor. Train a bunch of runners, see who performs well, then modify your approach towards the training those runners did. If anything, our consensus is that this works BETTER than the "scientific" approach, but it doesn't count as publishable research to say "we read Lydiard, and here's what he thinks". The reason science is great is because it can have real, falsifiable hypotheses (and conclusions) that aren't just the opinions of the top coaches.
My idea is to create a specialized AI "coach", which we can then study and test:
Step 1: Feed in data based on thousands of different runners, and study the predictions of the AI. In the way a coach does, the AI would "learn" that e.g. Runner A got a lot faster after increasing mileage, and that Runner B got injured after starting double-threshold. Maybe Runner A's experience turns out to be generalizable, while Runner B's does not, or vice versa.
Step 2: Have the AI predict how different runners will perform under different training plans. This should be publishable research! ("e.g. We studied 12,000 runners using an AI, and concluded that each additional mile/week leads to a performance improvement of 0.3 seconds/mile. This effect is largest for younger runners, and has the following caveats...").
Step 3: Have runners follow the AI-suggested training plans, and iterate. This is a real-world test of the conclusions in Step 2. The big improvement over the current paradigm is that the plans the AI spits out are actually real training plans, rather than plans constructed to isolate a specific factor in a 12-week study. These studies could be published as a "classic" experiment with AI plan vs. no AI plan as the treatment vs. control groups; and ALSO used as training data to improve the AI itself. This leads to a further paper discussing what conclusions the AI drew from the experiment (e.g. "maybe weekly mileage is more/less important that the AI previously thought).
Most amateur and many high school and college runners run way too much mileage. For most local elites up through half marathon, 1 quality session that's V02-ish and 1 long run of 90 min a week and everything else 45 min or less is plenty. If you want to do more add 6-8 strides a few days a week and some easy weight-training. Loads of mileage often seems to be more about disordered eating/exercise addiction than actual racing benefit
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