HR-training: can running too fast inhibit aerobic adaptations?

yes, it can affect aerobic ability, and you will plateau. If your running easy runs as tempos your not getting the aerobic work you need, your switching over. While you still will be getting aerobic work in, it wont be where you need it to be and you will plateau fast.

You won't develop your 'aerobic system' that is a popular myth. Your heart isn't going to keep growing and growing, that doesn't happen.

Training adaptions are neural, you get more skilled, you get more spring in your stride and become more efficient.

Hadd didn't know how to explain this in terms of real physiology, he just wrote in the style of conventional wisdom which is not really scientific, it is a reductionist style, meaning that it focuses on a small area and missed the big picture.

But your basic question; "Are certain adaptations inhibited when easy runs are done too quickly?" is a good one, and the answer is yes, because easy runs should be easy and allow your body to adapt to the stress of faster paced work, instead of allowing the stress to carry over to the next day when you might be better off with an easy day.

However some runners' easy pace is quite a lot faster naturally than others. These are usually the runners who aren't fast at shorter distances. They recover better from interval training and tempo runs than faster runners.

Thanks for the serious answers.I'm struggling to understand if you are saying the same thing or not.

You are saying that running too fast on recovery days can keep you from recoving so you don't profit from the taining. Is this an issue even if you are far from overtaining? I gave 60mpw in my example because I'm trying to understand if running easy days too fast is bad even if you aren't obviously tearing yourself down. Say I cut my volume to 40mpw. Is it still detrimental to run the easy days fast?

Can you point to the mechanisms that cause this plateau or do you just know from experience that this happens?

This is spot on. You're getting "aerobic benefit" at pretty much every pace of running. Would add two things:

1) Whether you could get a similar level of aerobic benefit at a significantly slower pace, and therefore, a lower risk of injury/overtraining, is another question. It would appear that the answer is a resounding YES AND NO. The marginal aerobic benefits of running faster to get basically the same aerobic benefit (difference between say 140bpm and 155 bpm) may be negliglbe, but there ARE marginal benefits. If you're a hobby jogger, then this doesn't really matter to you, you're better off focusing on not getting injured. If you're an elite, or college athlete, then this is critical, and you have to risk the injury in order to compete.

2) Hobber Joggers take longer to adapt, and therefore "need" their "easy" days to allow adapations to properly occur. Elite runners, and part of what makes them elite, is their relatively much faster recovery and adapation process. So the elite runner may do a 10 miler at 5:30 pace, and then follow that up with a "Michigan" workout the next day. Sounds a bit intense, but they can recover that much quicker and reap all that aerobic benefit.

formerD1 wrote:

The marginal aerobic benefits of running faster to get basically the same aerobic benefit (difference between say 140bpm and 155 bpm) may be negliglbe, but there ARE marginal benefits.

You are saying that as long as you are getting adaquet recovery, running faster is better aerobically. I take that to mean you would answer my question in the subject line, "Can running too fast inhibit aerobic adaptations?" with a simple, "No."

aaaabvc wrote:

yes, it can affect aerobic ability, and you will plateau. If your running easy runs as tempos your not getting the aerobic work you need, your switching over. While you still will be getting aerobic work in, it wont be where you need it to be and you will plateau fast.

The near consensus so far is that fast running doesn't inhibit anything so long as your are getting adaquet recovery. aaaabvc wrote:, yours is the only possibly dissenting post. Do you disagree?

You have to figure out what works for you and not follow everything that you are told, because some of it will work and some of it won't. We are all different.

The adaptions you need to improve are all skill based. You get a springier stride with a better warm up and you can run faster and longer with less effort.

For me, the more mileage I did, the faster I recovered. I could do more running at every pace. The problem many runners have is that they try to run the same when they reach a point of fatigue. I would just take it easy for a few days and never worry. Runners often get too obsessed with doing the same mileage week after week.

bad_stats wrote:

You are saying that as long as you are getting adaquet recovery, running faster is better aerobically. I take that to mean you would answer my question in the subject line, "Can running too fast inhibit aerobic adaptations?" with a simple, "No."

Almost yes. The problem is, most people run say once a day, or twice a day. So you have either a 12 or 24 hour window to recover sufficiently for your next workout.

MOST PEOPLE cannot recover from a "fast" run within that 12 or 24 hour window. That is a natural ability thing (sure, it can be trained up with more mileage and experience, but it is keyed to your talent level). Therefore, when people say, you are losing aerobic benefits by running "too fast", they mean, you're not adequately recovered for the speeds you are running.

So what happens when you're not adequately recovered? Your body breaks down, and due to muscular failure, you're running slower and shorter than you ordinarily should be, and therefore, because you are running less and slower, you have taken a loss to your potential aerobic benefit.

formerD1 wrote:

Almost yes. The problem is, most people run say once a day, or twice a day. So you have either a 12 or 24 hour window to recover sufficiently for your next workout.

MOST PEOPLE cannot recover from a "fast" run within that 12 or 24 hour window. That is a natural ability thing (sure, it can be trained up with more mileage and experience, but it is keyed to your talent level). Therefore, when people say, you are losing aerobic benefits by running "too fast", they mean, you're not adequately recovered for the speeds you are running.

So what happens when you're not adequately recovered? Your body breaks down, and due to muscular failure, you're running slower and shorter than you ordinarily should be, and therefore, because you are running less and slower, you have taken a loss to your potential aerobic benefit.

this.

And by the way, the reason why the "old timers" from like a 100 years ago, could run decent times despite poor poor training methods, is because what training they did, it was all done FAST.

People like Paavo Nurmi, the old timers, believed that a good workout meant you were winded and sweaty at the end. None of this "long slow distance nonsense" that modern runners use.

His sample training day:

7.5 mile walk in the morning.

4-5 hard sprints followed by a 400-1000m hard timed run all on the track

3-4km run with a hard last lap again on the track.

In the evening a hilly run in the countryside of 2.5-4.5 miles

As you can tell, very low mileage for a "distance" runner, yet it was all done very fast, so he was getting a huge amount of aerobic benefit for the little amount of running that he did, and his body was tough enough to handle this everyday.

What you forget is that most of the people in those days had manual jobs, so they got a lot of low intensity "base" training from their jobs. Nurmi didn´t spend his days in some office cubicle.

Well,., wrote:

What you forget is that most of the people in those days had manual jobs, so they got a lot of low intensity "base" training from their jobs. Nurmi didn´t spend his days in some office cubicle.

I'm pretty sure Paavo was not a manual laborer. A lot of these older runners had cushy government jobs which basically amounted to state sponsorship for their running careers, not to mention the runners who were legit royalty or upperclass students at places like Oxford and Yale.

Thanks all.

Your statement is true, but I don't think it is quite what you think it is.

Manual labor would more than likely fall into the category of strength, not aerobic capacity.

bad_stats wrote:It's the word "either" that strikes me. He's saying that running too fast can hinder aerobic development. Is this true? Are certain adaptations inhibited when easy runs are done too quickly?

It is true that this is what Hadd believed and wrote on here. Personally, I made solid gains following that advice (as a hobbyist, mind you), and doing most of my running slowly (at < 70-70 % of HRmax, which corresponded to roughly M-pace + 60s/mile or slower). Of course the slow running isn't the only (or the most important) component of the training, there is a solid measure (in his training approach) of very, very hard running, and that's what helps you actually get faster. But he wrote (and I believe, and you all can choose to believe or not, no matter) that doing *most* of the running slowly optimizes your ability to make gains from the hard training, and actually does yield some specific benefits in aerobic fitness. Provided, of course, you do *enough* running. That's all I got for this year...

You're over thinking it.

1. If you're not aerobic ally fit you're getting enough miles.

2. If you're running too fast it limits how many miles you can run.

Thus,

Run more miles.

I STRONGLY SUGGEST YOU STOP TALKING ABOUT THINGS YOU DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT.

He didn't even read my post before he agreed with it. Weird. I'm saying the concept of 'aerobic benefit' is nonsense, pure pseudocience. Neural adaptions are what we are looking for.

" I'm saying the concept of 'aerobic benefit' is nonsense, pure pseudocience. Neural adaptions are what we are looking for."

Some people have aerobic adaptation talent and need neural work and some people have neural adaptation talent and need aerobic work, we are not all looking for the same thing. There is too much transferred ability between endurance events and coordination events for it to be one or the other.