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Presumably there is some minimum training threshold over which all this must exceed to be valid. 1 mile per week at high intensity has surely got to bring more improvements than 1 mile easy if that's the sum total of training. At 120 miles per week it feels entirely intuitive that a very large proportion of easy miles must be an important component if for no other reason than it prevents excessive injury risk.
Would 1 mile a week, with no other training or any other changes to lifestyle etc, yield any noticeable improvements (presuming by improvement we mean getting quicker to do that mile)? I do not know the answer, so this is a genuine question.
Also again, it's all about individual overload. I think you're all talking from a place of 20-30 miles is easy. I ran 4:42 for 1500 probably off 20-30 mile weeks mostly, I've never hammered training.
At age 4 (going on 5) when I started running to school, I lived only half a mile from school. I ran approximately half a mile twice a day 5 times a week. It was all at an easy pace. I didn’t increase the training load until I moved to a more distant school at age 8. I wasn’t aware I was training for anything at that time but in retrospect I was training for a schoolboy mile championship at age 16. Up age 16 and for several years beyond that age, I was not even aware of the possibility of running injuries.
The theorem is that endurance gains are earned by low intensity training. My question is at what volume of training does that begin, and is there a volume of training below that at which high intensity training will produce bigger benefits?
I'm fundamentally lazy, so if I had the choice between a 30 mile week with 24 miles low intensity and 6 miles high intensity, or 15 miles of high intensity training only, I'd take the latter. That would be nonsense if I was an elite of course, but I'm not, I'm just someone looking to get half decent outcomes.
Polarised training is a form of training that places emphasis on the two extremes of intensity. There is a large amount of low intensity training (comfortably below lactate threshold) and an appreciable minority of high intensity training (above LT).
Polarised training does also include some training near lactate threshold, but the amount of threshold training is modest, in contrast to the relatively high proportion of threshold running that is popular among some recreational runners.
Polarised training is not new. It has been used for many years by many elites and some recreational runners. However, it has attracted great interest in recent years for two reasons.
First, detailed reviews of the training of many elite endurance athletes confirms that they employ a polarised approach (typically 80% low intensity, 10% threshold and 10% high intensity. )
Secondly, several scientific studies have demonstrated that for well trained athletes who have reached a plateau of performance, polarised training produces greater gains in fitness and performance, than other forms of training such as threshold training on the one hand, or high volume, low intensity training on the other.
Much of the this evidence was reviewed by Stephen Seiler in a lecture delivered in Paris in 2013 . vimeo.com
In case you cannot access that lecture by Seiler in 2013, here is a link to his more recent TED talk.
ted.com This has less technical detail than his 2013 talk, but is nonetheless a very good introduction to the topic. It should be noted that from the historical perspective, Seiler shows a US bias.
Here is another useful video by Stephen Seiler in which he discusses the question of the optimum intensity and duration of low intensity sessions. Although the answer ‘depends on circumstances’ he proposes that a low intensity session should be long enough to reach the point where there are detectable indications of rising stress (either the beginning of upwards drift of HR or increased in perceived effort). If longer than this, there is increasing risk of damaging effects. A session shorter than this might not be enough to produce enough stress to achieve a useful training effect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GXc474Hu5U
The coach who probably deserves the greatest credit for emphasis on the value of low intensity training was Arthur Lydiard, who coached some of the great New Zealanders in the 1960's and Scandinavians in the 1970’s. One of his catch-phrases was 'train, don't strain'. However Lydiard never made it really clear what he meant by ‘quarter effort’. I have discussed Lydiard’s ideas on several occasions on my Wordpress blog. For example: canute1.wordpress.com
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80/20
Jun 2019