Steady State and Interval Training: Part 2
As mentioned in Part 1, interval training hurts. It’s difficult and you have to be willing to push to make them effective. Put differently, if someone is not going to work sufficiently hard at interval training, then there’s really no question about intervals versus aerobics. A half-effort interval workout doesn’t accomplish any of the things that interval training is trying to accomplish; if you aren’t willing to push yourself on the intervals, you should simply do regular aerobic training.
Steady State and Interval Training: Part 1
In recent years, there has been quite the over-popularization of the concept of interval training, along with a rather major backlash against traditional forms of aerobic training, for fat loss. It’s not uncommon to read how low intensity aerobics is useless for fat loss, everybody should just do intervals, regular aerobics makes you lose muscle, etc.
Keep the Hard Days Hard and the Easy Days Easy: Part 2
In that post, I also mentioned at least one exception, that of block training. A concept that has primarily been applied to cycling (at least that I’ve seen), this has athlete performing multiple days of hard training in a row (the idea being to accumulate fatigue to stimulate fitness) which is then followed by several days of easy training.
Keep the Hard Days Hard and the Easy Days Easy: Part 1
The original idea of alternating hard and easy days appears to have come out of early running training (probably the Oregon system underBowerman ); that’s at least the first modern appearance of the concept I’m aware of. I suspect a lot of this had to do with keeping the runner’s joints from exploding while they were running on a hard track. In any case, alternating harder workout days with easier workout days worked better than trying to go hard all the time.
Stead State vs. Intervals: A Conclusion
Over the past month of articles, I’ve been talking about the current fascination with interval training (for either fat loss or performance) with the main focus being on what I see as a myopic ‘intervals are always superior’ mentality (usually based on poor arguments).
Steady State vs. Interval Training: Getting to the Point Part 2
In Steady State vs. interval training: Summing up Part 1, I started to put together some of the information I’m blogging about by making a point about the types of problems I’m seeing in practice with the pro-interval myopia. Simply: given that a majority of trainees train more frequently than 3X/week, once they have been convinced that intervals are the only way to train, problems start. They end up trying to do intervals at every session, in addition to a heavy weight training load for the legs and they blow up.
Steady State vs. Interval Training: Summing Up Part 1
There is also the issue of how intervals integrate with training when OTHER TYPES OF TRAINING (e.g. weight training) are being done. That is, what happens if someone is training their legs heavily in the weight room twice/week. How realistic is it to then add high intensity interval training to that workload?
Exercise Efficiency
One of the common arguments against steady state cardio is something akin to ‘Steady state is useless because you become more efficient at it and burn less calories doing it.’
I’ve already addressed part of why this argument is stupid but want to go into a bit more detail.
Sprinters vs. Marathoners
First off, I want you to look around the next time you’re in the weight room. Go look at all the people who are lifting weights. I bet some of them are not very muscular. Does this allow me to conclude that “Weight training doesn’t build muscles”"? Of course not, that would be moronic. What it means is that there are other factors (e.g. how they are training and their diet) that are interacting with the weight training.
Pole Vaulting for a Hot Body
Training like a pole vaulter won’t make you look like the girl above and the idea that 400m guys are lean because they interval train is simply, completely, utterly wrong anyhow. Most of the training for the 400m is low intensity aerobic work, the speed work that is done has nothing in common with the types of interval training being advocated by the folks claiming that 400m runners are lean because of intervals.
