If Tim Noakes "Central Governor" Model is Correct AND there is NO Lactate Threshold, HOW should this effect my train

rivas,

The central governor is not at odds with my beliefs. It is integrated into my theories. Here is the link to the article explaining how power running and the central governor work together:

http://www.powerrunning.com/Exercise%20Physiology/Central%20Governor%20Model%20-%20a%20review%20part%202.htm

More recently, I formulated a new model of fatigue, which I call the dynamic model of fatigue. I believe this model more accurately explains fatigue (and, hence, performance) than any other. Here's the link:

http://www.powerrunning.com/Exercise%20Physiology/Why%20do%20we%20fatigue%20A%20Dynamic%20Model%20of%20Fatigue.htm

All training sessions - high intensity or low - primarily train the muscles. This doesn't mean that other body systems and organs don't adapt; they clearly do. There is no question, for example, that your cardiovascular system adapts to endurance training. Of course, this doesn't mean that your cardiovascular system was limiting your performance in the first place. The dynamic model offers an explanation for the adaptations we know take place in different systems & organs.

Yes but why do you hurt? Why doesn't your body just let you go without feeling pain and discomfort? Why do you know how to run a 5k race? Why do you know that if you set into a certain pace you'll continue on for about 5k? Why not faster? Why not slower? You have all of these things going on around you, all of this sensory input, internal input, etc. Why do you know what 5k effort feels like?

What would happen if you didn't have this sensory input, internal input. What would happen if your body just let you go. What would happen to your heart? Your lungs? Your muscles? You would basically rip apart at the seams, croak out and die a few feet from the start. Something protects your heart, something protects homeostasis. Something allows you to get just so far away from homeostasis before it lets you know who's boss. Of course sometimes the signals are lost and we have an Alberto Salazar almost dying on us after running Boston.

Alan

Runningart2004 wrote:

[quote]Average_Joe wrote:

[quote]Runningart2004 wrote:

Something protects your heart, something protects homeostasis. Something allows you to get just so far away from homeostasis before it lets you know who's boss. Of course sometimes the signals are lost and we have an Alberto Salazar almost dying on us after running Boston.

Alan

But isn't this something actually homeostasis. Is it not the muscle stretch reflex in the Golgi tendon organs excactly the same thing?

I think the conscious mind can if needed over ride the homeostatic rules ala Salazar and the liquifying muscle guy. It needs to be able to for that utlimate pife protection. I think we see the example fo this when the desperate mother lifts a giant pipe off her young son. Something she couldn't budge normally she squatted and lifted off her son. What is this thing?

I like the central governor because it agrees with the idea that less is more ( this is a naturopathic principle and also a spiritual principle if such things exist. It supports the belief that if you strengthen from within your comfort zone you are automatically developing your outer ranges to some degree as well. The wrongly held belief that we need to maximise out top end (which may have been led by the physiological emphasis on that top end - which is now changing).

The thing is I'm still waiting on some practicality arising out of this thoery.

You guys think better than most physiologists i've known and more holistically than most coaches. Very interesting. Surely the process into coaching would be fast and easy for guys such as you. Then, i think your minds can really do the job they were intended for in our sport.

Richard_ wrote:

Pretty amazing, isn't it? And all this time runners have been told performance was due mostly due to limitations in oxygen consumption and lactate threshold.

It doesn’t. We all know that Bekele have only one lung and a poor lactate threshold. What matters that´s Bekele Central Governator efficiency.

I know a friend that have only one lung a little heart and a poor maxVO2, but that doesn´t enable him to be a top class runner.

Looks similar to what I've written here in the past. There is not one cause.

The thing with these theories is that they do not apply so easily to everyone. There are different "profiles" of athletes, so fatigue changes according to the individual.

Question about the Central Governor Theory.... I have the most recent edition of Noakes' book and have read some of the theory (don't recall any of the details). Here's the question: has the theory been published (and defended) by Noakes in peer reviewed journals also, or just in the book? It strikes me that the theory was being presented in the book as a new idea, which suggested to me that it hadn't been published elsewhere. Just curious. Anyone?

I think you are spot on with this observation. However, I believe that what you need to do is both maximise the top end AND push the envelope of your comfort zone.

In terms of practical implications, I dont think there is a need for any new or radically different training from what the good coaches have been doing for years.

If you use terms such as 'general' and 'specific' training, then we know that specific training makes you better at your chosen event while (in well trained athletes anyway) further general training has little direct impact on your competitive ability. It does however allow you to do better specific training, thereby indirectly influencing competitive ability.

Most athletes who have spent a winter doing 'base work' are probably familiar with the first track session of the year - its a disaster. However, within a very small number of sessions they see enormous improvements in their ability to do these sessions. What has caused this improvement? Its unlikely to be any metabolic / physiological change within skeletal muscle or the heart within such a short time frame. I suspect that you have simply learned to use your existing resources in a more efficient manner. If you want then perhaps you could say that maybe your central governor has learned to accept a higher workload before you are forced to stop.

However, what happens if you continue to run high intensity track sessions week after week? The usual response is a plateau in performance followed by fatigue / injury. I suspect that the performance plateau occurs because once you are able to affectively utilise your existing physical resources then there is no avenue for further improvement unless you go back to more general training (i.e. you work on the base or your muscular strength / power). After a while you come back to more specific work again which you should now be able to perform at a higher intensity / volume. Most training systems I have ever read about adhere to this basic principle.

I dont know whether the central governor theory is correct or not (although it does seem a convincing argument). If it is proved to be true does this have major implications for the training of athletes? Probably not, it just helps explain why the training the best athletes are doing anyway works.

Pete wrote:

Question about the Central Governor Theory.... I have the most recent edition of Noakes' book and have read some of the theory (don't recall any of the details). Here's the question: has the theory been published (and defended) by Noakes in peer reviewed journals also, or just in the book? It strikes me that the theory was being presented in the book as a new idea, which suggested to me that it hadn't been published elsewhere. Just curious. Anyone?

It was published several years ago in peer reviewed journals. Since then, there have been multiple research studies designed to test for the existence of the cg.

If you are intersted in reading some of the studies, Prof Noakes granted persimission to put some of them on my web site. You can access them from the "central governor" part of the phsyiology page of my web site here:

http://www.powerrunning.com/Exercise%20Physiology/Exercise%20Physiology.htm

Oi! wrote:

So you read R4YL too. Great mag hey.

I found the first issue on a newstand while visiting Perth and liked it so well that I took out a subscription.

Certainly there are people with credentials as physiologists who have done very well as coaches. Joe Vigil, Jack Daniels, Dick Brown, Dick Telford, you could go on for quite a while and still leave off deserving names. But all of those people have spent time coaching real athletes and understand how to put things together and who also have some knowledge of the history of the sport and of how people have trained over the years.

On the other hand, there are now people like Richard who seem to want to be taken as experts but who really have done nothing but acquire degrees or read articles and have NO actual accomplishments in the sport either as coaches or as athletes. They write this jargon and say, "Pay attention to me because I'm up to speed on the most cutting edge ideas about training."

Yet as I read this thread, I don't see any practical suggestions for new ways to train and certainly no evidence of any effective applications of these new ideas. I don't see anything suggested that we weren't doing in the 70s and we learned to do those things from people who'd run in the 60s. What I see are new terms and explanations.

Richard's going on about training the muscles as a revolutionary new idea. Right. It never occurred to anyone that getting your muscles fit for running would improve your performance until early in this decade. Nice to know we can throw out cardiovascular development as a factor now. Odd that runners have way fewer heart attacks than non runners if we're only improving our muscles unless maybe the heart is a muscle too. Maybe someone should look into that.

Seriously, if you're trying to isolate what's being trained to understand how to improve your fitness, and that's what a lot of physiology seems to be doing, you'll never understand anything. You're training an entire human being, muscles, heart, capillary beds, mind, and perhaps the elected executive of some state between the Appalachians and the Rockies. That's what a central governor is, right?

Thanks and i agree with you as well. I'm just an ex-international decathlete so i'm well used to the maximising performance side of things. Now i coach i see the need in others to redevelop their comfort zone more foten than not. I think the comfort zone needs to be equally developed with what you are adding on top. Often in today;s society an athlete will need more comfort zone re-development than the past. Posture is worsening on a global scale but led by the West.

HRE wrote:

Richard's going on about training the muscles as a revolutionary new idea. Right.

In relation to the history of the belief about muscles and performance that is an amazing comment. When I first started telling runners years ago that performance was primarily limited by muscles and not the cardiovascular system the howls of protests were deafening and the name calling was unrelenting. I encountered very few who were even open to the idea that muscles might be really important.

Today, the idea that muscles might play a big role in performance is not only not heretical but now HRE is claiming we've known muscle was really important all along.

Thank you, HRE, for your ackowledgement that muscles do play a very important role in performance. I believe the debate is now close to officially being declared to be over.

HRE wrote:

Yet as I read this thread, I don't see any practical suggestions for new ways to train and certainly no evidence of any effective applications of these new ideas.

Ever notice how many different training methods there are out there? It's probably safe to say that pretty much every reasonably distinct training method has been tried at some point by some number of people. There isn't much new under the sun, as the saying goes.

And, all over the world right now different groups are using different training programs. While all training methods have some components in common they all also real differences.

So, there are probably no training methods that haven't been tried at some point, but there also isn't any real consensus on which particular training method works best.

In light of these facts it shouldn't come as any surprise that new physiological facts don't produce new training methods. How could they when basically every distinct training method has been tried.

What physiology can do, though, is help determine which training methods work better than others. And it can help explain why one method works better than another. In other words, physiology is unlikely to produce some radical new training method; instead it is likely to help refine training methods - to help eliminate less effective methods and focus training on those methods proven to better than other methods.

you're ego posturing is very annoying. YOU aren't leading this thought process, you are following it.

Science is still a very developmental art but because you are a student of it you have too much bias. You think the whole world is explainable through science. This was just the view the scientific community wanted in their takeover from the church. What was it 1600s? Earlier? History student? So you are still of this belief that science has replaced God. bit old school don't you think?

Richard you have various systems in the body. Training the weak link, the weak system, brings about the best results. If the muscular system is weak then bring it up to speed. If the cardio weak same thing.

I ran 10.64, 47.65 and 4:42.06. I jumped 7.69 for long, 2.03 for high and 5.10 for pole. hurdles was 14.11 and the throws were 14.72 shot, 44.78 disc and 64.60 for jav. My bench was 290lbs, sqaut 450 and clean just over 300.

What do you think my weak link was? Do you see how I was in a different situation than what you are looking at?

Richard_, here is something to think about.

If we were to group fatigue in two broad groups we would have:

1. Peripheral fatigue & 2. Central fatigue.

Peripheral - energy supply, muscle fiber-type distribution, any factor outside the brain

Central - being the brain and central nervous system

Your "muscle power" concept falls along the lines with oxygen uptake, threshold, etc. Do you see why I made the comment earlier. You maybe disproving yourself along with the other concepts.

Pete, check out www.pubmed.com and search "central govenor". There are several reviews for and against it.

erivas wrote: Pete, check out http://www.pubmed.com and search "central govenor". There are several reviews for and against it.

Thanks man. Actually, after I posted I did search on-line and found a few articles, and I see the topic is the subject of some controversy in the literature. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion. Me, I have no opinion one way or another. I suppose I should read the stuff in his book, but honestly I don't have a taste for ex phys writing, so I probably won't get around to it.

Eric,

If I understand what you said with your 2 sources of fatigue, you are suggesting that with central fatigue the source of the fatigue is occuring centrally, within the brain and/or central nervous system. In other words, the brain and/or central nervous system is tiring and are the direct source of fatigue.

To the best of my knowledge Noakes has not suggested the central governor is fatiguing. He suggests the central governor is monitoring the body and alters things as necessary to ensure homeostasis is maintained.

There is a difference between being the source of fatigue and monitoring the source of fatigue - sort of like a fire alarm is not the source of the fire, it just monitors and alerts when a fire breaks out.

In accordance with my dynamic model of fatigue, any part of the body, including the brain or central nervous system, could be a source of fatigue under particular circumstances. But, that doesn't mean the muscles aren't the primary influencer of performance. It only means you may fatigue prior to your muscles working at 100% of the capability during any particular circumstance - i.e. you can never run faster than your muscles are capable to performing, but some aspect of your physiology could force you to run slower than your muscles are capable of performing.

Here's a simple example of this. Let's say that based on your lifetime 5K PR & 10K PR your predicted best marathon time is 3 hours. If you are fully trained you could run a marathon in 3 hours. Your muscles have the potential to propel you to a 3 hour marathon. But if you aren't fully trained, then some part of your physiology will prevent you from running a marathon in 3 hours. What prevents you from running faster than a 3 hour marathon? The inherent limitations within the muscle fibers themselves. What could cause you to run slower than 3 hours in the marathon? It could be any number of physiological factors.

mmmm wrote:

Richard you have various systems in the body. Training the weak link, the weak system, brings about the best results. If the muscular system is weak then bring it up to speed. If the cardio weak same thing.

I couldn't agree more and said so with the introduction of my dynamic model of fatigue a couple of years ago. The point is that it is unlikely that any one system is always the source of fatigue or the weak link. IMO too often some have pointed to one aspect of the body (usually the cardiovascular system) and proclaimed it to always be the sole or primary source of limitation.

Let me put the thing straight and simple.

No one knows why Kenenisa Bekele is the world best. No one knows why he is fast and best than his own brother. No one. If you ask Dr. Kostre he will say that he doesn´t know. Ther´s no scientific evidence why Bekele runs fast than Tadesse. Genes... may be. Hummm ? Best than his own brother, why ? Training ? Age ? But he was best than his brother at the same age his young brother. Any physical or mental quality that all the others they don´t have ? We have no data to confirm this.

Is there anyone on this board that want to let us know ? Impossible.

Every scientific attempt to demonstrate why Kenenisa is the world best it fails or is inaccurate or is no good science. That´s speculation rather than science. When no science isn´t able to let us know or understand by the rationale logic we are in the unknown zone. Some folks try to create new imaginary theories that they consider science but that´s nothing than pseudo science and in the ultimate analysis that´s blind faith. Others they try to justify the unknown by certain concepts – like God or path or destiny. Recently name that unknown area by Central Governor.