Dr. Evans | Why Good Coaches Don't Marry Training Philosophies... And Mine

Hello and welcome to Endurance Lab Podcasts. My name is Dr. Bill Evans, Professor of Exercise Science. And this podcast covers the physiology of some of the most elite athletes on the planet, as well as talking with their coaches and sports scientists. And on today's podcast, I'm actually going to be doing a solo pod, which I haven't done in a while, and honestly, I'm pretty excited to do. Because today's podcast, I'm going to talk about my training philosophy. And I'll share a little bit about why I'm doing this and what the hope with this is. But basically, I've had a lot of people reach out that are asking this question in one form or another. And shout out to a particular athlete I have, Lucas. He sent me a ton of questions about this. And honestly, I really appreciated them. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about my philosophy broadly from a physiological standpoint. But also, I'm going to answer some just very direct questions from different people that have DMed me along the way. I'm also going to wrap this episode up with a little bit of a discussion on long runs and why you should be doing them and hopefully follow this podcast up with a second one where I talk about all the research, not all of it. But some more recent research on long runs and why you should or should not do them. The other thing I want to do is talk a little bit about my newsletter. Last week, I didn't post one. And frankly, it was very relieving. I've been a little overwhelmed with the start of the semester. I've got two young kids and a family of my own. And frankly, sometimes it's hard to get all of it done, especially when I'm not paid to do it, right? The newsletter is a language of love. I hope is that eventually I can take all of the pieces of the newsletter and put them together into a book. And that would be really cool. But at this time, there's not a whole lot of pull to do that. And there's some other levers that I want to pull. So I'm still going to do the newsletter. My intent is still to get it out every week. There may be a time here or there when life comes up where that's just not going to happen. Again, I have two full-time jobs. So I'm doing the best that I can. So I appreciate your patience and grace with me while I figure all of this out. So last thing before we start, we've had a ton of breakout performances with the Endurance Lab the past few weeks. It's been super awesome. And it's one of those things where you're building the system, you're building the system, you're building the system of these runners over the summer. But it's so hot. There's not a lot of races and not a lot of opportunities to perform. But we finally had people racing and man, I posted a ton of testimonies on my story last night. A ton of people ran well, going to try and remember everybody, but if I don't, apologies. So first and foremost, one of our clients flow finished Chicago Marathon, shout out flow. She had some crazy stuff going on leading up to this race, but she did it and she crushed it and we're super proud of her and her performance, especially with the heat that was Chicago. I also want to shout out Luis, he ran 1621 and a 5K massive PR for him. I think prior to working with us, he had never broken 17 and now he's knocking on the door, breaking 16. Another shout out to Tyler Livingston, he got a 42nd PR in his 5K ran 2348. That was awesome for him. Krista Bronzi, she had a four mile race, broke 26 in that race, shout out to her. She is going to pop off, mark my words. We had another person, Victoria Scalise, she's hilarious, funny to work with. She ran her first 50K and this is someone who had never really raced before, had never done a marathon even and yet she jumped straight into Ultras and completed a 50K this past weekend. We also had our dear friend Peter Conselmo, whose real name is Richard, who raced a 10K and this one's awesome because his previous marathon goal was to break 320. I don't know if he had ever broken 330 in a marathon and I told him, you know, we're on our call as like, dude, you're going to run, you can run 240. He just had the archetype. He was new to running, he had never worn super shoes. He had the build for it and he is just super consistent in his training and he hadn't done a ton of volume and that's how I knew, well, look, this is a diamond, he's come to me with a golden egg. It's kind of the perfect archetype of somebody that you know you can turn into something. He ran his 10K in some 40 minutes, he ran 3926, which is awesome. If you put that into a paste converter, it basically means he's on pace to run three hours and one minutes for his marathon. Just for context, he started working with us last, what it would have been in May. And now he's literally right on the cusp of breaking three hours in the marathon. So shout out to Peter. And then finally, we have our boy, Cav from New Canaan High School who just raced an awesome 4K actually at Van Courtland Park. This is a really tough course. It's actually a 4K. And he ran 1301, which for context is teammate last year and 1257 there, Quintil Kenny, and Quint ended up running like 15, 20 or 1530 that outdoor and cross country. So Charles is out there tearing it up despite having what he describes as chronic quad pain, still trying to get to the bottom of that. But just to shout out to a few of our athletes, and finally Olivia Cusio, she finished the mammoth 200, which is actually over 200 miles. She did this last weekend, super proud of her for doing that. This was kind of my first big success with an ultra marathoner, especially of this style of race. And shout out to some of the people that helped me along the way to figure out how to program for ultra marathons. I feel like after this one, I've got a good feel. And you know, like the collaborative coaching part of working with us is really great for me too, because it helps me learn about different runners, the individuality of the sport, and how to address the different deficits that people might have. Even if it's something simple, just like fueling. So shout out Jeff Garmire for all the help. I'm going on his podcast later this week. So if you guys are interested in that, be sure to check it out. I'm also going on another podcast with a swim coach, really excited about that too. Curious to see how that conversation goes, especially because swimming is so different. And on one of my exams for graduate school at UNC University at North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where I did my master's. The question they asked us was specifically why a four minute, so a swimmer who could complete a distance in four minutes, you know, why that person could not get on the track and run four minutes in the mile, right? They're seemingly the same physiological systems. And yet, you can't just take a four minute mileer and throw them in a pool and you can't take a four minute swimmer and throw them on the track and have them perform. And so the question was at a physiological level, why is it that you cannot do this? I'll never forget that question. So I'm excited to kind of rehash that, maybe even pull out some of my old notes to talk about some of that stuff. So looking forward to that. Okay, without further ado, let's talk about my training philosophy. So when I think about my training philosophy, and I was talking with Pete Jolene about this earlier this week, I wouldn't say that there's one specific thing that I would, a hill that I would die on, so to speak, right? There's things that I absolutely would not do with someone, for example, I would never have a marathon or just run 200 meter runs, right? And that's because it's not specific to the marathon, and that's using an extreme case and some of you might say, well, that's pretty obvious. But I think it illustrates well this idea of specificity that I hold at the center of my training philosophy. And there are a few of these training theories that really get applied more so when we think about traditional strength and conditioning like in the weight room, but, you know, I like to apply them as well in distance running because they still apply in the same manner. Sort of physiology is physiology, whether we're talking about very fast metabolic systems or slow long prolonged ones, like the club cycle. So some of these that I hold really close are progressive overload, which is the idea that things have to get harder as you train, specificity, which means that the training has to be specific to the goal in mind. So if you want to run 100 meter dash, you have to do things that look like running 100 meter dash, or if you want to run a marathon, you have to do things that look like running a marathon. There's also individuality, which is the idea that everybody's different in that you need to program in a way that addresses that individual's physiology. So I really like that one, and honestly, that's one that a lot of strength coaches can use to kind of get around some of the maybe traditional takes on training where they diverge and they can just say, well, individuality. So this person is different so we can do it. So we've got individuality, specificity, progressive overload. There's the concept of adaptation, which means that you're going to adapt in response to whatever training and then reversibility. So if you stop doing something, it'll detrain. Some people throw in recovery in there as well, which is the idea that you need time to actually recover from whatever training load that you're using. And we'll talk a little bit about that and how we incorporate that with the fitness fatigue model. So I want to talk about a few theories here that also undergirdle some of our training before we get into the physiology and how we kind of break someone down to think about their training. So the first thing is something called vertical integration, which is actually from Charlie Francis, who is an elite sprint coach. And the idea behind this is that at least to my understanding is that you are going to have each part of your training involved all year round. So for example, we don't diverge from threshold work at all. You're going to do it all year. We don't diverge from sprint work, you're going to do it all year, we don't diverge from strength work, you're going to do it all year. And that's because we can change the relative distribution of these things to meet the demands of your race and to get more specific and to progressively overload you. And if you go back and listen to the Justin Ranaldi podcast, this is actually something that he does, he may not call it vertical integration, but this is something that he absolutely does, where he has his guys doing threshold work all year round. He has his guys doing hill sprints all year round. He has his guys doing sprint work all year round. And he just changes the relative volume and distribution of those training sessions as he approaches a race. And I would say that we use a very similar framework. Another thing that we do is we do traditional block periodization. And block periodization just says that you're going to you're going to take whatever your goal is in mind and you're going to emphasize different things at different parts of the year. So if you've got an entire training cycle, right? And this does fit into vertical integration, though they are slightly different. You're going to work through each thing piece by piece. Now some people would say, okay, with block periodization, you actually can only do one thing at a time. So for example, you might say, hey, we're only going to do tempo work in this block or we're only going to do sprint work or we're only going to do power work. That would be somebody who's like a very emphasized periodization or block periodization model. I would say that we use block periodization, but we do it within a vertical integration approach. Like we're still using each of the blocks. We just keep a little bit of everything present, but just have a larger emphasis on certain qualities at different times. So hopefully that makes some sense. And then we use kind of this inverse funnel, right? And Danny Mackie talked about this inverse funnel. This is the idea that you're going to start really wide and less specific and then get more and more specific as you work down. So these are all, you know, pieces of our training philosophy, things that undergirdle how we do our training. The next piece of this is that we're going to use what we know about training rates and decay rates. So how fast or how quickly can you train VO2 max? How quickly can you train speed work? At what point do you tend to see those things plateau based on the literature? And then at what point do you see those things decay if you don't touch them? So what's the D training rate of sprint work of VO2 work of threshold work? And what is the minimum effective dose that you can include in your training to maintain those things? And so I'll talk about a few different studies during this podcast that that kind of highlights those features as well or at least I'll try to remember to talk about it. There's a lot of things to cover when you think about someone's training philosophy. And truthfully, I had an energy drink and I'm doing this off the dome. So no promises that this will be any good. Okay, so the last thing that I think is important to talk about is the fitness fatigue model. And so the fitness fatigue model says that you are going to perform as a function of your fitness and your fatigue. And so if you do a really hard training session and you wait enough time, you will gain fitness. But in the short term, maybe 24 hours after that session, you're going to be very fatigued. And so acutely, which means in the short term, you are actually going to have a drop in performance because performance is simply the overlay or the combination of fatigue and fitness. And so what we want to think about is that when we're training, we're introducing fatigue in a very controlled manner. And in the acute, we will see a drop in performance that doesn't necessarily mean that we're seeing drops in fitness. And this is why when you think about some of these studies, for example, that looked at overtraining by Philip Larson, what they saw is that performance can sometimes mislead you. And so too can fitness. So what they showed in some of these studies where they have them do like 150 minutes of high intensity interval training is that when they look at the cellular cellular level at mitochondrial capacity and some of these mitochondrial complexes, it's a very complicated experiment. But they show that that the mitochondrial function which mitochondria powerhouse of the cell is actually impaired. But when you look at performance, they look totally fine. They look like they're doing great. So this is kind of the inverse of what I'm talking about where performance actually looks fine. And fitness is very high, but they're still operating under a considerable level of fatigue. And this is where you're starting to get into something called overreaching, right? And there's kind of functional overreaching and there's different ways to describe this. But this is how we think about your training stimulus and how you respond to training to actually produce fitness. And again, a lot of this is actually from like the traditional strengthening, conditioning coaches in the sprint and jump and lifting world. But the principles still very much apply when we talk about distance running. For some reason, we just don't think about these as much. Jack Daniels is kind of the forefather of a lot of the scientific approaches to distance training. And he talks about these in his book a little bit. But I think that maybe there's more discussion that could be had. And I think a lot of this too gets muddied up when you think about literate training philosophy and how he was such a high volume guy where he had his middle distance runners doing like crazy, crazy distance running. And yet they still perform very well. And so someone would say, oh well, like you've got this incredible amount of fatigue shouldn't that have dropped performance? And ideally, yes it would have. And if you had Peter Snow race in the middle of the heavy, heavy training block, he wouldn't run well. I mean, there's no question about that. So what we really want is we want something called super compensation, which is the idea that you're going to introduce a training session, which will acutely drop performance through inducing fatigue. And then you allow that person to recover, which is why recovery is so important. And they get this super compensation, right? They're compensating for the demand that was put on their system. And then they can actually progress. And this is why I think it is so important to recycle sessions because it ensures and it gives you an exact data point of where that person is to determine whether or not they're super compensating in a positive way, whether they're super compensating in a negative way, which means that they're not giving them enough time. Or you can actually do something called, you can super compensate in a positive accumulated manner. So basically, I can give you three sessions back to back to back to back. You're going to progressively perform worse and worse and worse in each of those sessions. But then if I give you 72 to 100 hours of either total rest or very, very low workload, you're actually going to, you're going to super, super compensate, right? And so there's, there's ways to do this in all sorts of different manners. And I just think it's important to understand that these are all things that you can do as a coach, that you can, you can, you can blend and, and mix these things up in all sorts of ways. So these are some of the theories that that undergird all my training philosophy and things that I am thinking about actively when I'm writing my programming or thinking about coaching someone. The next piece of this is that I use what I would consider is a, it's almost like parts therapy, which is this idea that you've got different parts to who you are. And in the same way, you've got different parts to what makes up your running and your physiology. And the things that I typically think of and talk about and, and this is maybe a simplification, but that's fine. You know, sometimes the simplest answer is the best answer is that you, you've got your metabolic system, which is going to drive fatigue. You've got your neural system, which is going to drive fatigue and thus performance. And then you've got your structural integrity. That's what you're made of, right? What are your tendons made of? Are they thick? Are they thin? Are they rigid? Are they compliant? And these three pieces and, and they have sub parts to them, each of them, I think of training them each individually. And sometimes you can train them all at the same time. You can train them in conjunction with one another. For example, if I have you do very hard 400s, you're going to improve your metabolic system. You're going to improve your structural integrity. You're going to get a neural demand. They are not isolated. And this is one of the things that I think so many people maybe don't think about necessarily, like we live in a monkey sea, monkey do sport, where you know that something works, you know that people have been doing it for a long time. And a lot of people are very afraid to experiment with things. And honestly, I am too, like if I had an elite athlete, I would be very, very nervous to take a study that took 27 10k runners with a 39 minute 10k and had them do this strength program and they performed very, very well. Shout out Michelle Zimini. He did that exact study. And honestly, it's very good study. But I could see why someone would be hesitant because they haven't seen somebody else do it in the past. And they don't necessarily sure they have the data, but they don't have the data in their population that goes back to the individuality component of things. Which, you know, that kind of informs how we do our training. So let's talk about the metabolic piece first. Now this one's complicated. And if you want to learn about metabolism, I'm happy to develop a class for this or you can go back and listen to the VLMAX podcast. I go through most of the metabolic systems in painstaking detail. So I'll try and keep this simple. So this is the one that most people think about. This is the one that most people want to focus on. And I think sometimes it's a little overemphasized. So we know that there's three metabolic systems. You've got fast, intermediate, and slow. And depending on what your race is, you need to prioritize each of these features accordingly or emphasize them differently. If you want to be the 800, go to the 800, you need to prioritize and emphasize the intermediate one. If you want to be good at the 5K, you need to emphasize the aerobic one or the long term one. If you want to be good at the 100, you need to emphasize the short term one. Now, the thing about this is that, again, much like some of the other things in this training philosophy, they don't exist in isolation. Classic example of this. If I put somebody on a metabolic cart, and I do a graded exercise test, and I progressively increase the workload, so you get on the treadmill, you're running 10 miles an hour, 10.3 miles an hour, 10.6, 10.9, 11.2, 0.3 miles per hour up every three minutes, and I measure their oxygen consumption. What I'm going to see is that their oxygen consumption is going to increase linearly in a stepwise fashion with workload until close to the end of the test. All of a sudden, I'm going to increase workload, and their VO2 is going to plateau. In other words, it's not going to rise as much as it did at any other point in the test. Now, it will still go up, it will still rise just not as much as it did before. And this is because even though you're getting an increase in energy demand, you can't produce more energy from oxygen at the same rate. Let me say that again. Even though you have a linear increase in demand around your VO2 max, you can't keep driving up oxygen consumption any higher. So the question is, well, if the increase in demand was strictly met, let's say, even though it's not, let's say it was met 100% by aerobic metabolism from 10 to 10.3 and 10.3 to 10.6, and they're both going up in a linear fashion, and then all of a sudden you get to 11 and 11.3. And VO2 goes from, instead of going up by five milliliters per kilogram per minute every stage, you went from 55 to 60 to 65 to 70, and then you go up another stage and you should go to 75. All of a sudden, it only goes to 72. But the workload still increased by the same amount. So how can this be? And this is because you're getting a greater contribution from glycolytic or non aerobic metabolism. You're getting a greater contribution from type two fibers. You're getting greater contribution from non-oxygen consuming fibers that are producing force. So they're helping you to run faster, but you're not consuming more oxygen. So this is very important to understand because it is something that is at the heart of my training philosophy, which is that running at your actual VO2 max is borderline impossible and may not necessarily drive up VO2 max because you will rapidly fatigue. And you need to use your work-to-rest ratios in an appropriate manner to ensure that you can actually run at your VO2 max, which ties nicely into running economy. So another thing about the metabolic part of this. When we think about, when I think about training, again, it needs to get more specific and progressively harder. So if I am training somebody for the 5K, the first thing I'm thinking is what is the metabolic demand of this event? The marathon. What is the metabolic demand of this event? What is the percent of somebody's 5K pace that elites can run at? Right? So for example, Vinny Mari runs at 92% of his 5K pace roughly for his marathon. Yomif Kajelcha runs at 89.8% of his 5K. Now that either suggests that Yomif Kajelcha can run a faster 5K or that Vinny Mari can run, or sorry, let me rephrase that, that Yomif Kajelcha can run an even faster marathon and/or that Vinny Mari could run an even faster 5K. It's one of the two, or it's something in between where it says, well, there's individuality here and their numbers aren't going to be the same. But they're generally very close, right? Like when we look at a lot of runners, their lactate thresholds are generally 85% of their VO2 max. We call this fractionally utilization or fractional extraction of oxygen. So they are operating at 85% of their VO2 max when they are running at threshold pace. And marathon pace tends to be a little bit lower than that. So I use these known values to create a metabolic profile, or basically where are you strong and where are you weak? And typically these things are highly trainable. I think so often we put people into a box and we say, well, you're not that type of runner. Well, you're not that type of runner because you haven't trained that way, right? Most kids before they get into college are playing ball sports or sorry, even high school. They're playing soccer, they're playing basketball, they're playing I don't know. Whatever typically probably soccer basketball football, these are kind of the or baseball traditional ball sports softball, even maybe volleyball now or lacrosse. And so they are very good at repeated sprints because that's all they've ever done. And so they have a very good glycolytic tolerance because that's what it is. They're very good at middle distance relative to everything else because that's all they've done. And so if you think about a high schooler, they're demand that they've put on their body has mainly been glycolytic. So their response, their super compensation has been to get very good at things like the 800 or the 400 relative to their other events. If you were to look at the normal relationships between those events, we can use the 2.2 rule, which says that somebody's performance should improve by or sorry, somebody's times should increase when you double the distance by 2.2, a factor of 2.2. Another example would be the 6 second rule, which says that, you know, if you run an 800 and 152, then I can add 6 seconds per lap and that'll be about your mile time if I double the distance. So if you've run 152, then you can run 56s. We add 6 seconds to that. You're capable of running 62 seconds for a 1600 meter run or about whatever that is, 408, 409. So that is like those relationships are fairly well established. And if you look at critical power curves, they somewhat explain this. But you know, I'm kind of getting a little bit too detailed here. The point that I'm trying to make is that you have to think about the metabolic demands of the event and then you need to meet those demands with your training understanding that it still needs to get progressively more intense and progressively more specific. So if I'm thinking about the 5K and I start my training block by doing 10 by 1K or actually let's rephrase this, 6 by 1K with 3 minutes rest at goal 5K pace. And I've still got 16 weeks to go. That is not a good idea. Even though that is highly specific and it's breaking down the event and having them practice it and whatever else, it's not a good workout at that point in time. Because that workout is very metabolically demanding. It's very demanding on one's neural system. There's a lot of running economy involved in doing that workout. And they're actually not ready to do that yet. The second piece is that you can't progress them. You have nowhere to take them. They're already running their goal pace on day one. So what I like to say is that you're using the strongest antibiotic ever invented to cure a running nose. They are very possibly going to improve if you do something much simpler and less demanding with a much lower injury risk and much lower cognitive demand on them. You have to realize that that's a hard workout that's going to induce anxiety. It's going to induce fatigue, especially if that's your first workout of the block. This is where the art piece comes into this a little bit. And so sure it demands their aerobic system, but it doesn't address the problem, which is that in most cases, especially in a younger athlete, this is an aerobic event. They need aerobic strength. Aerobic work is less intense inherently than running at VO2 max because it operates at a lower percentage of ones VO2 max. So you wouldn't do that, right? There's nowhere to progress them. So you can't get progressive overload. It's actually too specific. And it doesn't use that reverse pure middle approach. Nor does it respect vertical integration, which says that you want to change your emphasis as you go, right? Sure. You want to keep it in the system. That's fine. If you want to build running economy, which is really what you're trying to do by having them run at pace, and that's the neural side of things which will come to in a moment, then have them do 600, have them do 200, have them do, I would say probably you need a 400, but they need to run at pace with good form. When you have them doing those reps, they're going to rapidly tap into type two fibers because they're running above and beyond their lactate threshold. And we know that when you run above and beyond your lactate threshold, you're going to progressively fatigue. And it's going to be from a greater contribution of type two and type two A fibers, which are these faster, more explosive fibers. And so it's not a good workout. Like that's not a good workout for that point in time. Unless you have another theory, which is well, we're going to we're going to invert that pyramid and we're actually going to go from short to long. And we're going to get very specific early and we're actually going to get more general as we work out. That is believe it or not an approach and it can work. There's more than one way to skin a cat. That's not generally what I would do unless somebody has plateaued. And you've got in you're trying to stack things together in a very specific way. So again, that's not what I would do at all. So progressing forward, that covers a little bit about the metabolic system and how we want to see think about these training sessions in terms of what the demand of the event is and then what the demand of the workout is. And then we play with the work to rest ratios to ensure that we're actually getting that metabolic demand, for example, threshold work, five to one work to rest ratio, to roughly three to one work to rest ratio. That is threshold intensity. If we want VO2 max, true VO2 max, it's one to one work to rest, okay? 3K pace is not VO2 max pace. They may approach VO2 max, but it is not VO2 max. VO2 max can only be held for 300 to 400 seconds. And actually, I think 400 seconds is on the furthest end of that spectrum. And if you've ever run a 3K and you're running it in under 300 seconds, congratulations, you have the world record. So VO2 max pace tends to be closer to someone's mile pace. However, if you get them at 96% of their VO2 max, remember, there's a nonlinear relationship between workload and VO2 max. So you're probably gonna get really, really close to their VO2 max, and that's probably sufficient to continue to draw their VO2 max up. This is one of the things I disagree with Jack Daniels. He says, there's no better way to increase someone's VO2 max than having them run at VO2 max. And that is true to an extent, except that you can't have somebody do five by mile at VO2 max with two minutes rest. That's kind of his textbook example. That's an impossible workout. It's literally impossible. It could not be done. So, anyways, we can use what we know about metabolism to prescribe workouts in a way that hit those metabolic systems. Like, I know that something very special happens at a minute and 30 seconds of maximal effort. And that is that you're going to fatigue your glycolytic system. I know that conversely, if you're operating at a less than your 800 effort and you get to 130 seconds, that's when you're gonna have accumulated enough fatigue around that time from glycolysis because you're running above and beyond your lactate threshold to where that metabolic system is going to be very, very strained. So, I know this is nitty gritty, but people ask me these questions and I'm like, "All right, here's my philosophy." And then I get it's complicated and I probably need to write a book on it and maybe I'll do that one day. So, that's the metabolic system. At the end of the day, you're trying to produce hydrogens, you're trying to increase oxygen consumption, you're trying to increase your tolerance to those hydrogen ions, and you're trying to increase all the other features both as structural and the neurological systems as well, but maybe that's not the focus of the workout. So, let's go to the neurological one, this one's quick. This basically just says that when you run, it's like throwing a ball. You have to learn how to throw a ball before you can throw a ball. You have to learn how to kick a soccer ball before you can kick a soccer ball. And the more you throw a ball, the more you kick a soccer ball, the better you get at it. Running is the same way, but perfect practice makes perfect. We don't just say practice makes perfect. Classic example, when I was playing basketball in eighth grade, we'd have new kids come out, and I remember my coach, Mike Wyclan, shout out, love that guy, rest in peace. He would say, it's easier for me to coach you if you've never played basketball before at this point, because if you have, you probably have bad habits that you learned when you were smaller and weaker, like shooting the ball with two hands. And in the same way, if someone is running very, very fast, great, but if they're doing it with bad form, they're cutting off their ceiling, because they're able to perform, they're able to do the task, but they're doing it at the cost of very low economy. And sure, that's fine and a hundred meter dash, but we're trying to run the mile. We're trying to run the 800. And so that is going to come back to bite you in that race. If you go out and you try and run the first 200, with your ugly sprint form, like it's too demanding. You're not actually generalizing well to what it is that you're trying to do. And so the neurological system just says that your brain has to work with your spinal cord and your nervous system to trigger those muscles to fire at the right times in synchrony with the right intensity to elicit a proper motor pattern. So an easy way to think about this again is like, if I'm trying to sync things up, like if I'm trying to play music, I want to play the notes at the right time. And I want to play them for the right duration. Running is the same way. You need to fire those muscles at the right time for the right duration with the right intensity. If you do it right, you can play a beautiful song, but you need to practice doing it perfectly. There's no point in practicing playing the piano if you're practicing it wrong in the same way. You need to practice good running form and running at the right paces at the right time so that you can build running economy. And this comes back to the vertical integration approach. You should be doing that all year round. If you want to run sub 15 and 5K, you should be running 72 second pace all year round. I don't care if it's 200s where you're running 36s. I don't care if it's 100s where you're running 18s, but you need to be doing it all year round. The longer you can make those reps the better because then you're going to, you're going to demand, put more demand on the nervous system. Now, conversely, if all of a sudden you're doing them too long, well, you're gonna start to see issues because you're gonna fatigue too much. Well, that's gonna fatigue your type one, type two X fibers and actually it'll fatigue all the fibers and then your running form is going to change. And now again, we're not getting perfect practice. So this is a balance. You wanna strike the balance of giving an appropriate stimulus that is going to drive up motor learning but in a way that is not going to overdo the system or cause undue fatigue that's gonna inhibit or prevent that person from performing that action the way that it was intended. So this is why again, a good coach is going to know this and they're not gonna have you, you know, ripping 200s it, I don't know, 28 when you're trying to run 14, 45, right? Like that's a different system. Now you're working into the metabolic system cause you're running 800 pace. You're not running 5K pace. So I think you wanna try and hit these systems individually. And so monitoring that intensity and that rest when you're working on running economy is super important. There may come a time where you wanna do both and you might say something like, look, we're doing 8 by K at three flat, come hell or high water. And our goal is to take four minutes rest but if I have to take five minutes rest or break this into set and so be it because my goal today, the purpose of this workout is to build running economy. And in each rep, we're gonna get metabolic fatigue and in each rep, we're gonna develop metabolic resilience and hydrogen tolerance and we're gonna work on your lactate threshold and improve your Vio2 max. But the main purpose of this workout above all that other stuff is to increase your running economy and that is the purpose of today's workout and that's what I want you to focus on. And like when we're building training, we're understanding the purpose of these workouts. And when it is an individual purpose or when it's a combined purpose of hey, we're gonna work your metabolic system and we're gonna work your neurological system. So we're gonna do two by one K at three flat and we're gonna give you two minutes rest and then we're gonna give you full recovery. And that way you're stacking it together. You're getting metabolic fatigue from the first rep in the second rep. You're building neurological proficiency by giving them enough rest between the sets, right? And you're not gonna totally tax their system and have them swimming each rep. If that's happening, then you're not serving the purpose, right? You need to know the purpose of what it is that you're doing. Okay, the last one is a structural integrity. This is where strength training plyometrics and sprint work come in. And honestly, like bigger volumes, that's what this is going to do. It's gonna build the structural integrity. It's gonna increase the amount of collagen and the last in in your tendons and ligaments. It's gonna increase calcium deposition into the bone. It's gonna make you quite literally a more resilient runner from a structural perspective. What you are made of the makeup of your tissue will change. And some of this is also just about like the muscles resilience, right? When you think about the marathon and you think about being resilient, this is a muscular stress. It is a tissue stress. Acting in my center being actively degraded and broken down, connective tissue, actively created and broken down. And Wolf's Law says that you will adapt to the stressors that you put on it. And so we are going to actually stress those tissues. This is actually Wolf's Law is a relation to bone, but it applies, right? We're gonna stress the tissue in a way that's going to cause structural adaptations that will then allow you to tolerate six by K, 5K pace without rupturing your Achilles. We're gonna build your tendons stiffness by doing plyometrics, by doing sprinting all year round. So that when you're running at 5K pace, you're actually not at that high of an intensity relative to your tissue's structural integrity. So you can think about this as like, and I talk about sprint speed reserve all the time, but you're trying to move mountains so that you can move as many mole hills as you want. Because you can move as many mole hills as you want in life or in this analogy, but if you can move a million mole hills that doesn't necessarily mean you can move a mountain. But if you can move a mountain, I can promise you that you can move mole hills, at least on mole hill, and I can train you to move more mole hills. And this analogy breaks down at some point, but the point here is that structural, the structural makeup of the tissue is super important. And when I'm writing training, I'm thinking about that as well. And this is again where the fitness fatigue model comes in, because if I introduce too much fatigue too quickly, I disrupt the integrity of that structure, and it's gonna break down and you're gonna get hurt. So the structural component is largely about recovery. It's about intensity and recovery, and appropriate intensities and appropriate recoveries at appropriate times of the year, to ensure that you're actually adapting in a good manner, right? And so we know that tendons according to Keith Bar's research. We're gonna adapt every 48-ish hours, 72 to 48 hours. And so we don't wanna elicit, or we don't wanna put in too much of an intense stimulus on those tendons back-to-back, because they're not gonna recover. And I like to explain them like a rubber cup, right? Or a cup made of silly putty. If you had a cup made of silly putty and you fill it up with water, right? The hydrostatic pressure is gonna push that cup out and it's actually gonna get bigger, right? And so you're gonna be able to put more water into it. Okay, great. And you keep doing this and the cup gets bigger and bigger and you're putting more water in it. That's like increasing the workload and the capacity of your system. Now, the flip side is if I put too much water into this, right, and let's say some of the water spills out. You know, or as I'm pouring the water in, the water gets all agitated and it starts making waves and then the waves spill out of the side of the cup. Well now there's less hydrostatic pressure on the cup and the cup will return to the shape of the stressors placed upon it. This is like overdoing it on the tissue. You're, this is the way I think about it and I'm sure some tendon research was out there like, that's not true. Actually, I'm not sure about that. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. But you wanna stress it in a way where it's not going to overdo it. And so that way you're increasing the tissues capacity and tolerance, you're stressing it out, but you're doing it in a way that's controlled in a very intentional manner so that you're not overdoing it, right? I wouldn't give someone single like plyometrics and then say, hey, the next day, you're gonna do, I don't know, you're gonna do this crazy hard six by one K at five K pace, like that's not a good idea because they're already gonna have very high impulses from the day before and now you're gonna introduce pretty high impulses. I mean, maybe they're working at 90% of their top speed, sprint speed, which is pretty high and now you're gonna do an incredibly high volume of it, probably not a good idea, right? So these three pieces, when I think about a race, I break the race down into what are its components from a metabolic perspective, a neurological component and then a structural component and I say, what is the demand of the race, right? And I build a program around that, okay? The other thing I wanna talk about briefly is a deficits based approach, right? And typically what we say is we wanna get all the low hanging fruit first. And so we previously talked about kind of these middle schoolers who come from these ball sports and they're very, very explosive there. They're more explosive than they are good at aerobic work 'cause that's what they've done, repeated sprints. And so we would say, well, from a deficits based approach, we should probably work on the thing you're worst at, which is your aerobic strength that you're endurance. So we're just gonna have to do longer distance running. And that is generally a good idea because we know that there's an asymptotic relationship between the amount of training that you do in performance. Jackie's is this example. If you take somebody who runs 10 miles and take them to 20 miles a week, you might say their performance, their 5K might go from 35 minutes to 25 minutes. But if I take somebody who's currently a 13 flat 5K runner and I take them from 90 to 100 miles per week, same increase in workload, right? Or let's actually, technically I double the workload. So let's say we take them from 60 miles a week to 120 miles a week. Even if I double the workload, I do the exact same linear increase in workload, I will not see their 5K drop by five minutes or 10 minutes or whatever it is that I said. It might drop by 10 seconds and that might be a fantastic win. They went from 13 flat to 1250. That is huge. That's a great sign of a great coach. That's because at the higher level, the more fit people get, the harder it is to make them better. And so we wanna think about that and say, okay, well let's raise all the systems, let's bring up where someone is deficient based on their metabolic profile or the relationship between their 100 meter dash, their 400 meter, their 800, their mile, their two mile, their 5K, their 10K. Quite literally, I ask everybody who gets on the phone with me, hey, what are your times in these events? Because I wanna build their metabolic profile. I wanna figure out where they're good and where they're bad. That gives me an idea of, first off, what type of runner they are based on their training. Do they tend to have more type one fibery or type two X fibery, whatever. And then it tells me where they're probably deficient and that's usually a good place to start. However, there may be an instant where you don't wanna do that. For example, Georgia Hunter Bell, right? She runs 30 miles a week. She is a great middle distance runner. A lot of people would look at her and say, oh, the easiest out of turn is volume, just run more, okay? That may not be the answer for middle distance runners. Justin Ranaldi is a classic example of this. He has them sprint, he has them do a ton of sprint work. Why? Because they are getting, you are optimizing their strengths. And then something like the 800, where it is primarily determined by this one very specific metabolic system that happens to last about the duration of the 800, you're probably gonna get your best ROI if you just slam that system. Classic example, Isaiah Jewett, he tempos at six flat pace, right? Brandon Miller tempos at four or 50 pace, five flat pace. Some other 800 runners, they can tempo it, four or 48 pace, Riley Whitt, he's more of a strength based 800 runner. He does 10, you know, 10 one case at four or 48 with a minute rest, or sorry, at three flat pace, right? And I would argue that's not a threshold pace, but we'll come back to that later. So like there's more than one way to skid a cat in the 800. That is kind of, this is where you can't just view, you can't just view everything the same way. You have to understand the demands of your event. And you have to understand what's gonna move the needle the most. And sometimes this is where good periodization comes in. Because for example, if you know that somebody's 5K is 15 flat so they can run 448 or 72s, but they're mile PR, they're only running, I don't know, this is ridiculous, but let's say they only run 435, okay, or 430. Okay, well that means that at mile pace, they can only run 68s or 67s. And maybe they're 400 PR 60 seconds. You might say, hey, it's actually gonna be really helpful if we focus on their sprint speed for a bit. And then we can come back in periodized to work on the other stuff because they're actually so deficient in this area that it's almost impossible for them to get better because they're working at such a high percentage of their top velocity, right? And that would be a deficit-based approach. Or you might say, hey, look, we're two and a half months out from race day, we don't have enough time. We don't have that privilege, right? If we do that, we're gonna give up sessions elsewhere that we could be using to make them better at the thing we want them to be good at. And so instead, we're gonna focus on actually having them do very specific work. We're gonna focus on building, running economy, and we're gonna work with what they have. So this is why you have to look at each piece individually and why when someone's like, well, what is your philosophy? Are you high volume or are you high intensity or are you field-to-max or are you double threshold? I'm like, it depends. Are you early in a season? Are you deficient in one area or another? Well, that's gonna determine how I answer that question. And so if you were to ask me what my philosophy is, I would say, I am a deficit-based coach who is going to prioritize each system according to the needs of that race, depending on where you're at in your season. And I've given enough examples in this podcast to where you can hopefully go back and figure out where those are. But hopefully that kind of addresses how I think about training. You know, like I like what Arthur Lydia does. I like the fact that he says, hey, we're gonna build this massive base and then you're gonna be able to tolerate any workout that I throw you. Great. His approach is basically saying, let's build a structural integrity as much as we can. And then we're just gonna do a ton of work. And if we do enough work, then we're gonna hit your metabolic system, your neurological stress and we've already built your structural resilience. Great, we hit all three, that's gonna work. Or you could say, hey, we're just gonna do very specific 800 work all year round. Like, we're gonna make you really, really fast and then we're gonna do speed endurance. And we're gonna do that all year round. Okay, great. You're saying, look, this speed work is gonna improve their structural integrity. I don't really care about their threshold pace. It's two minutes in duration or a minute 40 at the elite level. Your glycolic system should be able to tolerate that exclusively. There should be very little contribution from the aerobic system, even though there will be. And so we're just gonna optimize that system. And we're gonna say, hey, this system is a system we wanna focus on and we're just gonna hit this system again and again and again and again. Well, that's not necessarily a deficit-based approach all of a sudden, but it still says that you are going to get more specific and target this 800, given the demands of the race. And so that's kind of how I think about the training system is like, there's more than one way to do it. There's more than one way to do it. And if you understand the purpose of what you're doing and why you're doing it, and you're consistent in that approach and not constantly changing things again and again and again, they're going to get better. Like they're not going to stagnate. If you increase workload and make things harder and more progressively specific and you have rationale for what you're doing, chances are they're gonna get better. Chances are they're gonna get better. Especially if you've got somebody who is new to the sport, they're definitely gonna get better. If they're 55 and they're aging, it's a different conversation. The conversation you might wanna have is, look, your fighting age, father time is undefeated. Our goal for you is to retain as much as we can, is to get you as close to your 50 year old best as we can at 55. And we're gonna make you the most competitive master's athlete that you can. And I think a lot of people are like, well, I want to lifetime best at 55. It's like, that's great. And maybe if you're totally new to running, we can do that. But if you've been running for 30 years, It's it's going to be very challenging. It's gonna be borderline impossible because you're fighting every single physiological system No, and demand. I'm not saying it's impossible people do it. It's just very very very very very very very challenging And that's typically where I have a conversation with people about like what are we doing here? One more thing I want to talk about with regard to my philosophy is that it takes time. It takes patience You cannot rush these things. It I'm a I'm an incrementalist So many people are so pressed about getting good at a certain time range I'm like you're just not there yet. It's kind of like in golf if you see people getting upset You know they hit a bad drive or whatever and they slam their club or they throw something under upset I'm like you're actually not good enough to be upset about that my stepdad says that to me all the time He's like you're actually not good enough to even be upset and that's helped me a lot in a lot of things to be like You know what? I'm not a 15 flat 5k guy. I'm a 1535 guy and that's okay. That's where I'm at today. I'm gonna work with that And I'm gonna try and become a 1530 guy and then a 1525 guy and if you look at some of these marathoners This has seen so elegantly like Someone that comes to mind is Flober runs right if you look at his marathon progression or you look at Danny from Life and Stride or you look at Scotty from Life and Stride They're starting at 345 350 and then now they're 230 marathoners and it takes time But you eventually get there and some of them I saw some guy ran 40 some marathons to break 250 in the marathon But guess what he finally did it yesterday in Chicago Like sometimes you just got a throw enough darts at the board and eventually it's gonna work It's all about probability and giving yourself the best chance to execute on the day and PRs are rare They're hard to get so you're all you're just playing a probability game and you're balancing the risks and the rewards and the probabilities of scenario x, y and z and you're saying like Hey, let's be consistent a four second PR in a four-mile race shout out Christobranzi is good That's great. Like that's fantastic. You just PR You did one of the hardest things to do in in the sport and you did it after running for all these years like that is Fantastic, let's keep it up. Let's get another four second PR and if we get another four second PR When now you got a 12 second PR in a year and that is awesome and we need to cherish that so Anyways, I hope that this has been helpful. I know I threw a lot at you But so many people have asked this and I'm not gonna get time to talk about long runs All I'll say about this is that there's several studies that show that when you do long runs So like michelle's nanny had one published. I hope it's michelle. Maybe it's michelle published in 2022 That showed that when you did a 90-minute run versus a 70-minute run or longer than 90 in a 70-minute run Basically, their energy cost at the end of regular long runs or at the end of like this 90-minute treadmill run at lactate threshold if they did long runs Their increase in energy costs are basically how much less efficient they got was only three percent They're only three percent less efficient if they didn't do long runs it was six percent They're max squat force after this 90-minute threshold in the long run group. It only dropped by 12 percent in the no-long run group. It dropped by 20 percent their change in counter-jump movement power from regular long runs was essentially the same like it actually I think it even potentially went up in the no-long run group and went down by roughly 7 percent So you've got to think that you know long runs are important. Now there's a limitation is that the long run group ran more per week So that's actually a pretty big flaw, but the point remains and then there's another study Um, there's actually a lot of studies that Zinnini covers And if you pup med just drop this resource where you can like go through and click on all the references and see who referenced What and where it's actually really really cool There's a ton in there like there's another one on Uh, the effect of 90 and 120 minutes of running on the determinants of endurance performance in well-trained male marathon runners The acute effects of a 60-minute time trial on power related parameters and training endurance runners like all of these studies inform what we know about long runs And then there's there's the dissertation I covered recently Philip Anthony's dissertation in 2018 The influence of continuous versus split training protocols basically he showed that if you do His was interesting because if you did this split training protocol It actually had a better 5k time But it'd be curious if you looked at a longer duration event that's more dependent on long runs And then you might see that oh turns out they need those continuous workloads to do better It's something like the half the full and this goes all the way back to the specificity thing of like if your event involves doing a long run You probably need to do long runs and if your event doesn't Maybe you can get away with it Hobbs Kester doesn't do long runs so there's there's reason to say that hey at the elite level for the 1500 maybe don't need long runs so Anyways, whoo, that was a long podcast. Let's use the sound word give myself some clapping. Thank you Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yes. It's terrific I hope that you guys find this helpful. I know it's a lot and honestly if you guys have questions about this Please just shoot me a DM shoot me an email and ask questions like I want to answer these questions I'll do another follow-up podcast I'm happy to do it on this stuff if you haven't done so already check out the types of training podcast it talks about like Why we do certain types of training and what the work-to-rest ratios are and what the percent of Your VO2 max are right? So just in quick summary if you're running our pace. It's 105 to 120 percent of your VO2 max I pace is 95 to 100 percent Actually disagree with Jax our pace, but whatever Tea pace is 83 to 88 percent. That's pretty accurate marathon pace is 75 to 84 percent again pretty accurate easy Paces 59 to 74 percent again pretty accurate And then the work-to-rest ratios he's got these stated throughout his book, but I'm kind of going off memory here, but I'm pretty sure threshold is like five to one Our pace is definitely one to one or more potentially even a work of one to three or one to four And then if you're doing interval pace, which is what he's kind of saying is VO2 max pace Then you might want a one to one or in some cases maybe Can alter that if you're doing sets. So maybe you do like a not on now three to two or something like that But typically you'd need to do those in sets. So All right That's That's pretty good. I feel pretty good about that All right, that's all I got. I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast. Thanks for listening and if You guys are interested in being coached make sure you apply online and endurance laboratory.com and we hope to see you back. All right. Thanks