Methods of Endurance Training Part 2: Miles Build Champions
On Friday, in Methods of Endurance Training Part 1, I took a quick look at some of the major adaptations that occur to endurance type training and talked about one of the prime ‘drivers’ for at least some of the adaptations (especially as they occur in skeletal muscle), a cellular energy sensor called AMPk. AMPk is ‘turned on’ in response to disruptions in the energy state of the cell and this ends up explaining a lot about why many of the types of endurance training do what they do (e.g. how they basically ‘work’).
Today I want to continue by looking at some general concepts of endurance training methods focusing on the most commonly used method which is the Miles Build Champions approach to endurance development. I’ll look at other methods in Part 3 (and possibly beyond depending on how wordy I get) on Friday.
I want to make it clear that this probably won’t be completely comprehensive, there are a lot of ways to achieve certain goals from training and while I’m going to focus on some of the more traditional methods, just note that there are other approaches that can achieve the same types of adaptations (through creative use of work and rest intervals). I’ll make mention of these a bit as I go.
Pure Endurance Athletes vs. Other Athletes Who Need Endurance
Before getting into the methods, I want to make a point that I think some folks tend to miss or confuse. And that’s that pure endurance athletes are a different animal with different goals and needs than athletes (usually team sports but even some individual stuff like MMA or strongman have a mixed set of requirements for optimal performance) who need some level of endurance as part of their overall performance goals.
For the pure endurance athlete, developing things like VO2 max, Lactate threshold and efficiency to the absolute maximum levels is going to be more or less the be-all, end-all of their training goals and this determines how they train. Strength per se is rarely a massive determinant of overall performance although this depends on the sport (e.g. the start in rowing requires a good deal of strength to overcome inertia).
In contrast, athletes who need some degree or type of endurance as part of their overall performance won’t need nearly the development in those terms. Aerobic endurance is certainly part of the overall package but it’s not the be-all, end-all of performance. Which is why you tend to see more average values for things like VO2 max. and such in those types of athletes (you also see more moderate levels of strength compared to say, pure strength athletes). They are simply having to balance out those metabolic needs with strength, power, technique, etc. Endurance is part of the package but not the whole thing.
I mention this because you’ll often see these truly silly arguments along the lines of “Look at marathon runners, they are small and weak, why would a [insert non-running athlete here] every do steady state cardio like that?” And the answer is that they wouldn’t, or at least not to that extreme. But that doesn’t mean that you throw out the baby with the bathwater and NEVER do continuous aerobic work or apply the methodologies used to improve endurance.
Because where the marathoner might need a 2.5 hour run once/week and 120 miles per week total to perform optimally, a non-marathon athlete who needs endurance might only be doing 30 minutes of continuous running/aerobic work a few times per week to develop some basic endurance or what have you. But people play game of ‘excluding the middle’ where it’s either you’re running 120 miles per week or you NEVER do aerobic steady state work.
Not only is it a logical fallacy to exclude the middle, it ignores how real-world athletes actually train.
My point being that the methods used by the pure endurance athletes can still have some application to the non-pure endurance athletes. They simply aren’t used to nearly the same extent or degree since they don’t make up the entirety of the performance structure. But the methods can still be useful when applied within some reasonable level.
And with that out of the way, let me look at the first and arguably most common method of developing endurance which is the Miles Build Champions method.
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Method 1: Miles Build Champions
Arguably the most commonly popular (or certainly most traditional) approach to developing endurance over the years has been a volume oriented ‘miles build champions’ type of approach. Many coaches (and a lot of supporting scientific literature) echo that idea that unless you can do ‘X amount of miles/kilometers/volume per week’ you simply can’t succeed at the highest levels or build maximal endurance.
The focus with this philosophy is basically on more, I saw it summed up on one power training forum with the simple coaching mantra “Ride lots”. But the goal is, up to the some limits, you do more.
Some specific examples may help to clarify this. One little German book on endurance training lists some weekly volumes for maximal endurance performance, listing weekly averages of 20-25 hours and peaks of 40 hours/week to maximize adaptations. Do the math on that, that’s 3-4 hours/day 6 days/week as an average and upwards of 7 hours/day 6 days/week at the high end.
A more specific example is the paper I keep mentioning on the site which was an analysis of the training of the German 2000 4km team pursuit’s training. Now this is an event lasting roughly 4 minutes and the team is described as doing the grand majority of training as easy aerobic work to the tune of 29,000-35,000 km/year (18,000-21,000 miles/year). That’s 400 miles/week on average, assuming a fairly reasonable 20 mph, that’s 20 hours/week of cycling. For an event lasting 4 minutes.
For completeness, this was supplemented with some stage races (which adds a bit of intensity) along with interval training in the 10 days prior to competition to maximize things like lactate buffering and speed. Please read that again, for an event lasting 4 minutes, interval training and some speed work was done for about 10 days immediately prior to competition.
Other sports use similar volumes, running volumes of 100-120 miles/week are fairly common at the highest levels with the occasional athlete doing much higher for at least short periods (e.g. 200 miles/week). Current rowing training seems to be based around tons and tons of aerobic training, swimming has always used pretty much massive volumes although the training of swimmers confuses me to the point that I won’t comment further on it to hide my own ignorance. Cross country skiing does the same, hours and hours and hours. I think you get the idea.
Before moving on, let me talk a little bit about intensity here. Generally with this type of training the intensity is fairly low. In cycling it’s called ‘all-day pace’, in running its ‘easy’ running. I like to call it ‘pissing around’ intensity. It barely feels like you’re doing anything at all but the stimulus in this case comes from the sheer volume (and frequency) of training being done.
There are a ton of different methods of determining optimal intensity for this type of work but they all end up putting folks in about the same place. The German track cycling team set intensity as heart rate at individual anaerobic threshold (IAT) minus 30-50 beats. So for someone with an IAT at around 175, that’s a HR of 125-145. With an IAT of 180, that’s 130-150. There are other systems to determine intensity (such as using percentage of functional threshold power for the power meter folks, or using some percentage of heart rate over a time trial or whatever) but, when you work them through, they all end up about the same place.
Rowing and swimming often use lactate levels with a lactate level of 1.5-2 mmol/l being the cutoff. For most, this will occur in about those same heart rate ranges. I’d note that running heart rates often ends up a touch higher (due to being upright and using more muscle mass) but easy/long runs are generally at about 75% of maximum heart rate. Perhaps 140-150 on average. My understanding is that swimming HR’s can be a touch lower as a function of being horizontal in the water along with the cold. Perhaps someone can verify this or tell me I’m an idiot in the comments. But training of this sort is always sort of in that range.
Basically, it’s pretty easy. A little bit of stress and strain but that’s it and, as I’ll mention when I talk about the next method on Friday, working at too high of an intensity with this kind of volume can do more harm than good.
I’d note that a commonality with this approach is near daily training. Due to the low intensity of training, it can be done daily or even multiple times daily (Kenyan runners are known for runing 2-3 times per day at least 6 days/week). While I focused on AMPk in Methods of Endurance Training Part 1 there are certainly other parts of the adaptation process and one of these is gene expression (which is related, mind you to the metabolic perturbations during training) which is kept nearly constant trough this type of training; this leads to long-term adaptations in muscle which improves performance. Again, this is a key for pure endurance athletes trying to maximize those adaptations; they need to keep gene expression humming along daily. For non-endurance athletes, it’s not quite as important since the level of adaptation required isn’t nearly as high.
There are other potential benefits to this type of training as well. For sports with any sort of technical requirements (rowing, swimming and cross-country skiing come to mind), doing massive volumes of low-intensity work allows athletes to accumulate zillions (give or take millions) of proper repetitions. Technique can stay pretty stable for most of the workout and this just builds proper motor patterning. Even running has a technical element and part of developing running efficiency is probably related to the repetition of putting in the miles.
In fact, I strongly suspect that this is one reason that swimmers do such massive volumes compared to the rather short length of their sport: humans are so inefficient in the water and swimming is so technically demanding that swimmers need as many good repetitions as humanly possible. That can only be achieved through volumes of relatively low intensity work (because technique invariably degrades at higher intensities).
So, so far so good, we’ve got a type of training that develops aerobic endurance, is relatively strain and stress free due to the low intensity, develops technique through the accumulation of a zillion repetitions, etc. Of course, you burn a metric crapload of calories with this type of training which means you can still eat a ton and stay lean.
Now, the drawbacks. And there’s one huge one that I imagine everybody has already noticed: the time commitment. Simply put, outside of professional athletes who can do nothing during the day but train, the time requirements of this type of training is impossible. The average person simply can’t put in 3-4 hours/day of training on top of a full-time job. As well, depending on your mindset, it can be incredibly boring. Sitting on a hard bike seat 3-4 hours/day 6 days/week is not most people’s idea of fun.
Of course, for non-endurance athletes, so much other training needs to be done (Technical, tactical, strength, power, etc.) that putting that much time into pure endurance training would be absurd and unnecessary. But, as I discussed above, those athletes don’t have nearly the endurance/aerobic requirements as pure endurance athletes so they would never need those kinds of volumes in the first place.
Another potential negative, and this is certainly true for an impact sport like running, is injuries. The sheer daily pounding can destroy joints if people aren’t careful. Even non-impact sports can generate a lot of overuse type injuries: shoulder issues are endemic in swimming, rowers get weird imbalances from how they row (one oar above the other), back pain in speed skaters is common due to the odd posture and always turning left. This is simply exacerbated by doing endless volumes, even at a low intensity. This can actually be made worse by the ability to train daily. Connective tissues tend to be the slowest to adapt so even if muscles and such are recovered, your joints may fall off with daily training.
A final potential drawback, that I sort of alluded to in Methods of Endurance Training Part 1 is that this type of training tends to only promote adaptations in Type I muscle fibers. The intensity simply isn’t high enough to hit Type II fibers for the most part. In essence, this method can’t be the only thing done in training to maximize performance. I’ll come back to this in the final part of this series when I finish up.
But for most the big drawback to this type of training will be the sheer time commitment involved. Outside of a professional athlete who does nothing but train and recover, the miles build champions approach simply may not be workable. Certainly for non-pure endurance athletes the methodology still holds but, as noted above, the amount of aerobic development required isn’t as high and neither are the volumes.
As a final teaser for what I’m going to talk about on Friday, and this is especially true for pure endurance athletes, outside of relative beginners, pissing around at low intensities for short periods doesn’t generate a ton of adaptations. Basically, this type of low intensity training only generates a lot of adaptations when you’re just starting and/or able to do a lot of it. If you don’t have that time, you need something else.
That something else I’m going to refer to as Sweet Spot Training, a term stolen from Andrew Coggan, PhD who is on the cutting edge of power meter training. And that’s what I’ll talk about Friday.
Read Methods of Endurance Training Part 3: Tempo and Sweet Spot Training
Fascinating. Thanks for the lengthy and thorough explanation as to how this all works. I’m planning a lengthy and arduous hike next year in the mountains (about 10 days), and am beginning to seriously consider what sort of conditioning I need to do to accomplish it with both ease and enjoyment. Clearly the Miles Builds Champions formula is out for me, due to not only a lack of time during the course of the day but also my position as a relative beginner to endurance training. Thus I’m intensely curious to see what you discuss this Friday. Cheers!
Very nice post! I would add that the thinking is that at low intensities, eventually even the type I fibers fatigue, and then more type II fibers are recruited, resulting in adaptation of some type II fibers to become oxidative glycolytic fibers and contribute to the workload. I also don’t think the high mileage in itself damages anything, but the fact that your body is not adapted to it (if you are at all new to it or to that level of training) or it is done at too high an intensity, contributes to damage. Many of us were not very athletic as children and so did not develop strong bones and connective tissues when we were young, or, we have not maintained a high level of activity since childhood. Then we are too impatient to allow our bodies to adapt at a pace they are capable of, and push too hard mileage or intensity wise until something blows up. This is especially true with connective tissues as you point out, which may take months or more to strengthen and adapt to stress. I also don’t think boredom is the issue either (but I’ve never tried to train everyday for 6 to 7 hours a day either!), but lack of time would be. Shortcuts such as increased intensity/shorter duration training is fine unless you want to be a world class athlete. In his article also entitled “Miles Make Champions,” Richard Englehart points out that American distance runners are no longer competitive because of reliance on “high intensity” methods as a shortcut to quick performance gains. I also wonder if the lower intensity training is safer for the heart than redlining with maximal efforts during high intensity training?
Cynthia: certainly one thing to consider is years of training, this is something I’m going to talk about a bit tomorrow as a segue from this piece to the next. Top level athletes spend years building their tolerance to volume.
Beginners in all sports often make the logical mistake of “I want to be elite, I’m going to copy what elite performers do”. And get themselves into trouble with too much volume, too much intensity or both. They didn’t factor the 5-10 years that the elites spend building up to that level of training.
So where 30 minutes three times per week of low intensity endurance training is more than sufficient for a rank beginner, over their first months or years of training, this needs to move upwards to some degree but it has to be gradual to allow adaptation. A rule that many coaches apply is to do to the least amount of work that will make you better, only increasing when it stops working.
When people jump into high mileage running from day 1 (on hard pavement no less) their joints tend to fall off. Even cycling and non-impact stuf can cause problems. People’s impatience is usually their own downfall.
I’m a 4th year competitive cyclist (competitive Cat 3) and can completely understand the main points in the article and have been struggling/battling with how to best balance volume/intensity.
I’ve been doing lots of sweetspot workouts (1×60, 3×30… @ 88-94% of LTP) over the past 2 winters and have found them to offer a tremendous bang for your buck method of boosting lactate threshold without generating much mental/physical burnout.
This said, I’ve made the commitment this season to doing more “long” rides this off season in preperation for the long road races that I do starting in the spring. I’ve been slowly increacing the energy output on my long rides, starting at 1500kjs and slowly moving up to the eventual goal of 3200+ kj rides, to approximate the energy expenditure needed for a 3 hour race in the hills.
My lack of rides in this duration last season was not a huge limiter, but I found myself getting in long breakaways with no juice left to finish off races. This makes tons of sense as I was used to a 2 hour (2000kj) training ride, but when I hit that 2 hour mark, I was spent… any efforts over LT were VERY tough. My body was not prepared to do work that deep into a race… I had no practice in training. Too much Sweetspot, not enough long miles, i propose.
This season I want to be the most efficient fat burner possible, so more long rides it is. The intensity I’m targeting for these long rides has been around 300watts for 2 hours (about 86% of LTP, or 86% of LT heartrate). So it’s still serious pace, just long and steady…. I have goals of doing 300w for 3 hours eventually. But, I’m getting towards that “experienced” status as I’ve been training seriously for about 40 months straight.
I’ll also be using SST when time/weather prohibits my longer rides (of which I’ll be doing 6/month).
Thoughts?
-Leo
Certainly length of event plays a huge role in this. This is something I’m going to talk about a bit today but if you have to be able to go for 4 hours in a road race (and folks also need to keep in mind that stage races mean that races have to be able to do that kind of thing day in day out for various lengths of times), some amount of long rides will be absolutely required.
This is in contrast to say, someone racing primarily crits (usually an hour or less with more focus on tactics, cornering and breaks out of the corner). The need to be able to hang in for 4 hours to the end just isn’t as critical. If you can hang at tempo for 3 hours straight, you have my kudos. But it will probably help. Just don’t neglect the other stuff (pushing up FTP/VO2 max/etc.).
Excellent stuff.