Posted In: Blog Discussion
Recent research in the past 10 years has indicated that the contribution to activities of short to moderate duration is not what was once thought. Exercise physiology books from the past 20 years (and even many still published today) suggest that the ATP-PC energy system was the overwhelmingly dominant energy source for activities through 6-10 seconds and that activities remained primarily anaerob
ELITETRACK Founder
Mike,
Great post!
I am on a isolation kick these days and physiologically nothing happens in isolation. I was at the Illinois high school association girls state track meet this weekend and talked with several coaches. One coach of a highly successful team for several years was talking about how he no longer did maniac Monday’s as he called it with 10 400s that day, because his kids started not showing up for those days somehow, but i believe he still did a lot of the same work on other days. He’s been somewhat frustrated by this because the team hasn’t performed as well since this started happening and this provoked some deep thought on my part, partly because I am guessing his training throughout the week and the season. There is no doubt there is a huge contribution of aerobic work doing 4k of 400s, but maybe keeping everything else the same in the training plan did not fit anymore. I am just guessing here, but there is a huge difference in loading and unloading when you take out 4k of volume of what would be high intensity work for that volume and replace it with something else over the course of a training week and season. What seems to be occurring is his weekly and seasonal plan relied on his maniac Monday workout and the adaptations they provided in context to the work they did in other practice sessions and the whole course of the season.
Mike, based on this new research how has it altered your training design?
What I’ve found for several years is the difficulty of getting the proper aerobic work in that doesn’t completely absorb the AnT maturation level during SPP and mid-Comp phases. The range of Ae is so much broader and I often think there are times when too much is exhibited in our training design.
With external contributers being relatively high in our area it is always deemed the safe route. On the other hand, many of our athletes simply respond better from short-fast duration work with high flying compensatory splits than Hart’s Ae type sessions for example. Of course recognizing that these are not world class elites!
I have found that the kids I have worked with respond better to faster speeds and lower volumes of work. I used to have a lot more aerobic work in my training, but since I changed the times have been better over 100m, 200m, and to some degree 400m with sprinters. This year I worked with mid distance girls who out of necessity I worked at 6-12 miles per week in volume because those were the volumes I could get quality work out of them. A lot of the work they did was at 2:40 pace for 800m and by seasons end they could run 4×8 and 800 in same meet at 2:40 pace or do 4×8 and 1600 in 2:40 and 6:00 to 6:25 which were significant improvements over their previous bests. I am hoping next season we can work at nearly twice those volumes to provide a little more variety in the training plan, but I do not have the luxury of controlling their XC training which is rather poor for XC and severe lack of competitiveness in that sport. I do hope I can build their competitiveness in XC over the summer by building them to 150 miles with a high of 22.5 miles in week 11 of the summer training those girls to run 6:30-6:45 per mile for at least two miles and hopefully 3 miles before their XC season starts and their XC coach starts training them, then hopefully they pr in week 3 or 4 of XC and still hold their fitness for another 8 weeks, because of the amount of racing they will incur during the season the slowly get them up to about 25-28 miles per week. When I did send these kids on distance runs 4.5-6 miles during track they came back in 55-75 minutes when I wanted 35-50 minutes of training time. When you start getting over the 8 minute per mile time frame the work done is almost useless to the athlete, you could have accomplished more by having them go on a 90 minute walk especially when they are jogging at a 11 minute per mile pace or worse.
I have found that the kids I have worked with respond better to faster speeds and lower volumes of work. I used to have a lot more aerobic work in my training, but since I changed the times have been better over 100m, 200m, and to some degree 400m with sprinters. This year I worked with mid distance girls who out of necessity I worked at 6-12 miles per week in volume because those were the volumes I could get quality work out of them. A lot of the work they did was at 2:40 pace for 800m and by seasons end they could run 4×8 and 800 in same meet at 2:40 pace or do 4×8 and 1600 in 2:40 and 6:00 to 6:25 which were significant improvements over their previous bests. I am hoping next season we can work at nearly twice those volumes to provide a little more variety in the training plan, but I do not have the luxury of controlling their XC training which is rather poor for XC and severe lack of competitiveness in that sport. I do hope I can build their competitiveness in XC over the summer by building them to 150 miles with a high of 22.5 miles in week 11 of the summer training those girls to run 6:30-6:45 per mile for at least two miles and hopefully 3 miles before their XC season starts and their XC coach starts training them, then hopefully they pr in week 3 or 4 of XC and still hold their fitness for another 8 weeks, because of the amount of racing they will incur during the season the slowly get them up to about 25-28 miles per week. When I did send these kids on distance runs 4.5-6 miles during track they came back in 55-75 minutes when I wanted 35-50 minutes of training time. When you start getting over the 8 minute per mile time frame the work done is almost useless to the athlete, you could have accomplished more by having them go on a 90 minute walk especially when they are jogging at a 11 minute per mile pace or worse.
Found this quite informative. How much would you say the ratio of aerobic to anaerobic threshold work (if utilized) is there in your buildup plan?
Build up for them over the summer? Most of it is aerobic, with mondays being 800s, 1000s, or mile repeats at goal pace for 10 weeks which for their sake I hope is in the 6:30 range and not the 7+ minutes per mile they had last year and coming into track. A couple of the harder days may be AT work and early on some of shorter faster runs will be more AT than aerobic.