Month: November 2009

Having completed my examination of the different methods of endurance training in Interval Training Part 2, I want to examine their application.  As with so many different issues in training, how these methods will be specifically used depends entirely on context.   What a full-time elite endurance athlete might do will be different from a more recreational racer and a mixed sport athlete or general public trainee will differ further.

To adequately address application, I need to examine a few more variables. First I’ll summarize the different methods of endurance training that have been discussed.    I also want to examine the idea of both why endurance athletes often focus their energies on building the aerobic engine from the “Bottom up” and how it works in a performance standpoint.

Methods of Endurance Training

First let me summarize all of the different methods of endurance training I’ve discussed.  Since I’m most familiar with cycling volumes, I’ll be using those most of the time. … Keep Reading

Continuing from Interval Training: Part 1, I now want to look at three distinct “Types” of intervals.  Each type tend to have a fairly specific goal and this will be reflected in its loading parameters.

The Three “Types” of Interval Training

As I discussed in Interval Training: Part 1, early ideas about interval training was that the heart was the primary site of adaptation.  Also, the focus was more on the recovery interval than the work interval.   I doubt many had much of an idea physiologically what was being targeted beyond that.  As much as anything HIIT allowed athletes to accumulate volumes at higher paces than they could perform continuously.

In more modern times, the focus of interval training tends to be on improving fairly specific physiologically based performance measures.  Of course, allowing the athlete to accumulate volume at a higher than steady state pace is still important.

This is especially true for extremely time based sport such as track and field, track cycling, swimming, ice speed skating and others. … Keep Reading

Having examined threshold training in Part 3, I want to move up to the next level of training and look at interval training, sometimes called High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).  Now, I’v written about this on this website rather extensively.  The context was a little bit different, more addressing the rather asinine either/or between steady state and HIIT that had developed in the fitness industry.

Here I want to focus on HIIT more as an endurance training method although I’ll touch on other topics as well.   HIIT actually encompasses several different “Types” of training itself (really, more applications of HIIT for different goals) and is a bit more complex to discuss than the other methods so far.  For that reason, I want to focus on some general concepts here and discuss specifics in Interval Training Part 2.

Defining Interval Training/HIIT

In its most general form, interval training refers to a type of training that alternates period of higher intensity activity with periods of lower intensity training.     … Keep Reading

In Part 2, I discussed intensive endurance/tempo training and Sweet Spot training as conceptualized by Andrew Coggan in the power meter community.  There I mentioned the idea of a threshold representing the maximum intensity that can be sustained for some time period (usually defined as one hour).   I called it Threshold Training and that is the topic of this part of the series.

Threshold Training

Early in the study of endurance performance, a great deal of focus was placed on VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen that the body could process.  And while it was thought to be a primary factor determining performance, that turned out not to be the case.  Certainly a high VO2 max was required to be an elite endurance athlete but it was not sufficient.

Later research would turn to a concept that has had many names over the years including lactate threshold, anerobic threshold, individual anaerobic threshold, OBLA, ventilatory threshold and more. … Keep Reading

On Tuesday, in Methods of Endurance Training Part 2: Miles Build Champions, I discussed what is probably the most traditional and common of endurance development methods, to whit “pissing around” at fairly low intensities of perhaps 130-150 hear rate for hours at a time and doing it almost daily.

The Problem with Miles Build Champions in the Real World

There is no doubt that this method of training “works” and “has worked” for decades in terms of developing the aerobic engine.  It has certain advantages and, like all training methods, certain disadvantages.  Perhaps the biggest disadvantage for real humans being the enormous time commitment required.  With weekly training volumes of 20-40 weeks, that’s still 2.5-6.5 hours per day (depending on the sport) if someone trains 6 days/week.

Realistically only full-time athletes can do that.  At most the average citizen racer might get in several shorter workouts during the week and devote more time on the weekends. … Keep Reading