Interval training every day?

Where are the endurance runs?

Bruce Tulloh did interval training monday to thursday, race saturday, long run sunday 10-12 miles at a decent pace. 50 races a year 35-40 miles per week.

The problem with hitting intervals all the time is 1- it won't allow you to build the aerobic base for the high intensity workouts required for top performance; 2 - the lactic acid build up is believed to actually be counter productive to the aerobic enzymes built up during the base phase.

Give it a try but you'll find out that you'll be running fast in winter but will be flat by Spring and burned out come track season.

Friday's session is pretty much an endurance session for a 1500m runner. Add a longish (say 10 mile) run on Sunday instead of the rest and you have a decent weekly schedule here.

Interval work is NOT necessarily anaerobic; it can be almost completely aerobic. In the same way a long run is not 100% aerobic unless it is very slow, does not include running up any significant hill or into any strong winds!

You need to read more carefully about the training of Igloi and Gerschler from the 1950s to see the way that intervals were used during the winter months before moving on to the more intense (anaerobic) stuff in spring & summer.

What I would suggest is to not run each day at such a strict pace. You're putting the cart before the horse there, especially in winter.

It's fine to say, like for your Monday:

5 X 1km moderately hard, adequate rest. If that ends up being 5k pace, great. If it's closer to 10k or half marathon pace, then that's fine too.

Apply that same approach to each day, and throw in a race or time trial on a measured course if you want to make sure you are making progress.

Look up Verheul method or stuff about Igloi on these boards. Don't go too hard seems to be take home message if you try this style of training.

Well this is my idea, no endurance runs.

The longer interval sessions at a comfortable pace replace these. Less distance, time and repetitive stress on the body.

You will definitely improve aerobically doing these sessions. My question is will it be better than a long run or not?

ALL these workouts are "endurance" training. You are not lacking endurance runs.

This type of training was pretty common before guys like Lydiard and Van Aaken came around. Search the forum for "How They Train" 1959 edition.

Metric Miler wrote:

Well this is my idea, no endurance runs.

The longer interval sessions at a comfortable pace replace these. Less distance, time and repetitive stress on the body.

You will definitely improve aerobically doing these sessions. My question is will it be better than a long run or not?

My question is; can you run efficiently at slow, medium and fast paces?

I prefer the East African method of endurance runs: Start very slowly and try to run as efficiently as possible and gradually build up the pace. When I can finish with a few miles at a decent pace I know I'm ready for an interval training session.

Why are the best runners able to run the sessions at around 4 minute mile pace? Because they can run very easily at 6 minute mile pace. I'm talking about 65% of their max heart rate, which is very easy.

That doesn't mean all young runners should do their easy runs faster, it means that by doing easy runs efficiently and transitioning to medium pace efficiently, you get faster naturally.

What do you think are the potential drawbacks of this training method?

For what reason are long runs and then short intervals preferred to more interval sessions and less overall mileage?

Metric Miler wrote:

What do you think are the potential drawbacks of this training method?

For what reason are long runs and then short intervals preferred to more interval sessions and less overall mileage?

Not recovering from anything.

If you do 800, 1500, 3k, and 5k pace work every week over base training (or pretty much any phase) you have 2 options. Either do so little that it's pointless and you could be doing easy runs to build endurance or burn out very quickly. 3k pace and faster is very hard on the body and cells, but I'd be interested to see results if you do try this

Check out this old thread:

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=3334569

As someone else mentioned, there was a time when people did intervals pretty much daily and almost nothing else. I've had stretches of time when I did 10-12 interval sessions a week. One of the drawbacks to this sort of thing is that it's very hard not to hammer yourself when there's a watch going for each rep and mostly you run interval sessions on a track which many of us found tedious after a while.

Someone mentioned van Aaken as influencing runners to do long runs. He absolutely did that but he also was devotee of Zatopek and used interval training quite a lot. But the reps were "gentle," the sessions could be quite long, and he usually had his athletes running in a forest rather than on the track. He was not a bad runner himself though not a star. He managed 46 plus for a 10k when he was 62, right before he lost his legs. His training for that was to run 10k each night after work in an hour. But he did not run a steady 6:00/km pace. He ran much faster than that for short distances and walked afterward taking the overall time to an hour.

Some of the links on that old thread don't work anymore. Here's a better description:

http://www.avphoenix.nl/leden/72-trainen/topsport-main/trainingsmethoden/709-de-verheul-methode

Metric Miler wrote:

What do you think are the potential drawbacks of this training method?

For what reason are long runs and then short intervals preferred to more interval sessions and less overall mileage?

Potential drawbacks? Getting obsessed with your times, getting tired. Losing endurance. Not recovering. Training harder to maintain paces, when it should get easier.

The reason we do a cycle of endurance and interval training is because they complement each other.

Every possible mix of intervals and distance running has been tried. If a program like what you are describing worked well, all the elites would be doing it.

Metric Miler wrote:

Mon (easy): 5 x 1km @ 5k pace with adequate rest

Tues (hard): 15 x 200m @ 1500m pace, 45s rest

Wed (easy): 5 x 600m @ 3k pace with adequate rest

Thurs (hard): 8 x 400m @ 1500m pace, 1:30 rest

Fri (easy): 6 x 1.6km (or mile) @ 10k pace adequate rest

Sat (hard): 5 x 300m @ 800m pace, 3:00 rest

Sun: Rest

there's nothing wrong with lots of intervals (see: danny henderson training). but this is an absolutely terrible plan. 5x1k @5k pace is NOT easy, even with full (4-10minute) rests, especially in the off-season, but in-season too. Neither is 5x600 @3k, nor 6xmile @10k pace. Tough workouts all.

See the summer of antonio thread, which includes some similar workouts to these, EXCEPT NO MORE THAN TWO A WEEK. I promise you that if you actually did this plan as written for a month you would end up running slower than before.

And lastly, you need to progress into any intervals like these. Take 8x400 @ 1500 pace /w 90sec rests. A classic workout and for good reason. You might start the season with the same eight quarters at 10k/5k pace (quite manageable), and gradually bring the pace down over several weeks and months, or else bring the quantity up, or else keep the pace at first while shortening the rest.

I think, however, that if you cut every session in half (2-3 x 1k on monday... 2-3x300 on saturday) and progressed the pace from slow to fast over several months, you might do OK. Not optimal training, but not nearly as awful as the original idea.

You're right, HRE, I must be thinking of a different coach. I didn't want to say Lydiard was the only one advocating high volume easy mileage.

To deconstruct it even further, you should employee Canova's idea of "Global volume" for workouts:

So 5 x 1km with 5 minute rests is about 35 minutes of running.

Step 1: Build up to 35 minutes of running

Step 2: Keeping the rest as a constant, start with 30-60 seconds of hard running and 5 min rest for 35 minutes. This would be 5-6 of the "hard" reps.

Step 3: Increase the length of those reps to 90 seconds, 2 minutes, etc. until you are covering about 1km per segment.

Any other approach and you end up altering multiple variable at a time. You're increasing overall volume AND intensity AND the percentage of volume done at a harder pace simultaneously.

In a nutshell, it is a micro version of why people do higher mileage in the first place. But I for one would vote against just doing half the workout, because then you take away a lot of the aerobic benefit of the run.

No downsides if you can do it correctly I suppose. As mentioned, at one era it was pretty much the norm.

You could probably get similar benefits from an easy run vs. easy repeats on full recovery that don't push you to the edge. But if you structure everything as an interval workout you may end up running them too hard in order to force some sort of progression. I think it would be hard to time your peak correctly.

There's a good argument from rojo on why more focus on volume is the best way to improve consistently:

http://www.letsrun.com/2009/training1209.php