Principles of a Daniels Approach to Distance Training

Awesome thread idea. I would love to see one on Tinman as well.

I always found Daniels guideline of improving only one component of running in one workout to be limiting. One could work on various components throughout a workout by using different paces as in a fartlek. Of course, that would be deviating from his principle. So my real question is that by altering the training plan itself, would it still help you gain benefits? Or should one strive to adhere to the plan as close as possible. I know this detracts from the discussion but I have always been curious about this.

Werk wrote:

I always found Daniels guideline of improving only one component of running in one workout to be limiting. One could work on various components throughout a workout by using different paces as in a fartlek. Of course, that would be deviating from his principle. So my real question is that by altering the training plan itself, would it still help you gain benefits? Or should one strive to adhere to the plan as close as possible. I know this detracts from the discussion but I have always been curious about this.

My rule of thumb is look at variety of training philosophies, and adapt it to you. Don't be a cult follower to any one training philosophy.

I'd say that is probably the difference that I see from Daniels' approach to training as compared to more modern approaches. Daniels does tend to mix short fast rep work in with threshold pace work - he does it in limited amounts though.

My take is that if you are doing two workouts per week, with just a touch of tweaking, you can touch a combination of all of the main training components during any given phase of training, and maybe in any given week.

But more fundamentally, I wonder how important that regular contact with each component is. I think I t takes at least 4 and probably more like 6 weeks of doing a particular type of workout to get almost all available adaptation. And you can maintain that for a couple of weeks with doing much of anything beyond just running, and various types of hard running tend to do a better job of maintaining those benefits even more. So if you do rep work for 6 weeks, but then spend the next six weeks emphasizing interval work before closing out your cycle with threshold and interval workouts that included modest snouts of rep work, I don't think your missing out on anything.

Of course, that approach to periodization has other challenges in that you really are not anywhere near top performance race shape until pretty deep into the cycle since you may not have even touched on a key training component until half way through the cycle.

I would amend the section you indicated each phase should be 6 weeks because he had a specific section on the flexibility of his training cycle. If I remember correctly, he puts numbers 1 through 24 in a diagram with each phase and indicates where to cut workouts out/etc. based on how many weeks you have until a goal race. He also kind of ranks the importance of each phase and which you should cut out or add to, depending on if you have a surplus or deficit of time.

I guess the biggest thing I took from Daniel's is that he emphasizes training cycles with proper pacing/effort, and above all he seems to preach flexibility. (whether that is listening to your body or adjusting to life factors or race timing). Of course he also stressed to not race workouts and run to your current fitness, but I think all good coaches preach that.

I'm no Daniel's disciple, but I've read the 2nd edition a few times. I could probably benefit from trying to follow one of his plans for a cycle, but I mostly fart around with tempo runs and cruise intervals (with a small dose of speedwork) until I get closer to a series of races, so take all I say with a grain of salt.

I would add one more cornerstone principle for Daniels: Training each energy system is most efficiently done at the pace that optimally stresses each system. So v02max work is done at v02max pace, and LT work is done at LT pace. It sounds obvious, but it actually contrasts sharply with systems that stress race paces rather than energy systems.

Before getting to the particular you have to start from the general, this scheme of the Italian Carlo Buzzichelli illustrates all the possible periodizations and integrations of quality and means.

If you do not understand this and you do not know how to place a philosophy in here, everyone does not go very far.

Fix your pediodization knowledge:

http://www.isci.education/fix-your-periodization-knowledge-3/

Smoove wrote:

But more fundamentally, I wonder how important that regular contact with each component is. I think I t takes at least 4 and probably more like 6 weeks of doing a particular type of workout to get almost all available adaptation. And you can maintain that for a couple of weeks with doing much of anything beyond just running, and various types of hard running tend to do a better job of maintaining those benefits even more. So if you do rep work for 6 weeks, but then spend the next six weeks emphasizing interval work before closing out your cycle with threshold and interval workouts that included modest snouts of rep work, I don't think your missing out on anything.

I'll try not to spam your Daniels thread too much, but I think this is basically correct. 4-6 weeks is a pretty common range for a mesocycle. The exact length of a mesocycle should ideally be customized to the athlete. We all respond at different rates. You would normally want the cycle to last as long as the response curve is staying reasonably steep, then transition to something else once gains are harder to find.

Maintenance is typically pretty easy. A workout with 50% of the volume of quality running that you were doing when focusing on a particular pace is usually enough. Some degradation is inevitable, as it's likely impossible to "max out every physiological attribute" (as you'd say) or be in PR shape at every distance (as I'd say).

As an aside, have you ever read Olbrecht's The Science of Winning? It's a swimming book, but applicable. All about lactate curves, and it rocked my world when I first read it. I don't think it really caught on because applying the methods really faithfully requires frequent lactate testing, but the principles are still useful even without testing.

i have used Daniels extensively on HS state CC teams.

One thing is for sure, if you stick to the perentages you wont pver train

Smoove, I think you'd be an even better runner if you left Daniels in the library where he belongs.

Spam away. Even though you are not a Daniels fan, you always make thoughtful contributions and are objective. I agree with you and LetsEatDoughnutsInstead on the variable duration of a training phase. Definitely why I put it in the second category rather than the first. I honestly don't think I need much rep work, for example, and as a middle aged guy primarily focused on longer distance races, the toll it takes on my body is hard to justify, so I rarely put more than 3-4 weeks into a rep phase for myself. I think that falls under the "have a good reason" approach. I have not read it, but maybe I need to add it to the dusty pile on my nightstand.

I agree that this should be a cornerstone, although I might change the word "pace" to "effort" and then would probably add something about specific paces to the Rules of Thumb section. I think most people who have read Daniels would understand that distinction without it having to be made, but for the less familiar, it is a distinction worth noting.

I think that even those people who read Daniels and are familiar with it would have a hard time knowing what vo2max effort is without being given a pace to work around. I would substitute the relationship between pace and energy system (a Daniels hallmark) with the relationship between effort and race demands.

Like an above poster mentioned, I'd love to see a good synopsis of Tinman's philosophies.

I've had a lot of success being a speed based running and doing the longer tempos ~ marathon pace and the CV repeats ~10k-12k pace with short rest. These types of workouts seem to contrast daniel's in that they aren't necessarily targeting one specific energy group by running at specifically that pace (ex; boosting lactate threshold by running at 1-hour effort).

My college coach trained us a little more in the style of Daniels, and I always struggled during XC season because we didn't do tempos early on and we did a lot of Vo2 max work which I felt like burned me out without me gaining anything. Not to knock Daniels in any way, I just don't really prefer the way its set-up and I only like doing Vo2 work if I'm training for 800-1500 or if I'm pretty close to a goal race. Otherwise it just drains me, where-as the CV stuff seems to really give me a noticeable benefit.

While I am not familar with daniels and am not knocking him specifically, the above are just my opinions based on my own experiences.

I do really like the thread idea, Smoove.

Salazar would not fully agree

Smoove:

- Athletes should seek to maximize the possible adaptation within each workout while incurring the least amount of stress on their body as possible.

my 2c wrote:

I would add one more cornerstone principle for Daniels: Training each energy system is most efficiently done at the pace that optimally stresses each system. So v02max work is done at v02max pace, and LT work is done at LT pace. It sounds obvious, but it actually contrasts sharply with systems that stress race paces rather than energy systems.

Hi me again from the last thread. A few questions of I have with regards to both of these comments as they same to be related. My understanding is that this concept of maximizing adaptation and minimizing stress primarily applies to I/v02max pace training. It's driven by the issue that it takes 2 minutes or so to get up to v02max and that the reps only last 3-4 minutes. This makes pacing in v02max intervals particularly important as going too fast or too slow can have major impacts on the time spent at v02max. Daniels spends a fair amount of text walking through this.

For T/LT pace training and R pace training, is it as crucial to maximize adaption while minimizing stress? It's also not clear to me what that means in the context of LT training as well and if the science exists to support the idea. Is there really such an optimal point in LT training? There aren't the same constraints as with v02max training. A great example would be the prevalence of alternations as a method for LT training, whereas such a concept wouldn't exist with v02max training. Alternating paces, Daniels would/does argue, would reduce the time spent at v02max and thereby increase stress while reducing benefit. Daniels also does not emphasize maximizing adaption when discussing LT. Instead he emphasizes the need for LT training to be comfortably hard.

With R training, the principle is more easily applied, however, I would argue that my 2c's principle would not apply as R training is not tied to pace. On a given day there may be an appropriate pace but fundamentally the R training effect is not tied to paces as much as it's tied to mechanics and a physiology. I think this is may have been what too hot is saying.

I only mention this because I think emphasizing pace in a principle may mislead athletes and place too much emphasis on hitting times, which is not what Daniels' advocates, it's hitting the right time for that day. Even with respect to v02max training, I doubt he would emphasize exact paces for most athletes because people don't know their true v02max! As he explains two athletes with different v02maxs could have the exact same 3k and 5k times. Each would have their own v02max pace, no? So again you'd be back to basing the workout on feel and Daniels point on v02max workouts would be more about the pitfalls of going too hard or not hard enough. Maybe that's not correct though.

Note, the above more applicable to my 2c's comment, since Smoove's principal is a bit more general.

I agree with your general idea that using a specific pace has its challenges (thus my note that effort would be the guiding principle and specific paces would be a rule of thumb). But I do think that the paces are a meaningful rule of thumb. I think that they would get you up to your max heart rate, which will improve your vo2max. As you point out, almost none of us will know our exact vo2max, and there will be variations over the course of a training cycle, so you can almost never train to your specific vo2max, but specific training paces are an awfully good starting point. And having a soundly thought through and reasonable starting point which will ultimately get us the benefit that we are looking for is really all that you can expect. And yes, adjustments would be made for heat, hills, fatigue, illness, etc. But by and large, those are minor tweaks - a few seconds here or there.

As to maximizing T work, I do think that there are meaningful ways to do that, particularly with cruise interval workouts. The 5:1 work:rest ration is one example of that in that it allows the work bouts to be long enough relative to the rest bouts for there to be some accumulation of waste products. Not everyone agrees with me on this one, but taking passive rest rather than active rest on those is also a way to optimize the benefit since that would reduce the clearance of waste products during the rest periods and thus allow the accumulation, and the adaptation to, the presence of those waste products. Staying in the right pace range on continuous LT runs so that you can go for the full 20 minutes is probably another example.

Smoove wrote:

I agree with your general idea that (thus my note that effort would be the guiding principle and specific paces would be a rule of thumb).

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If we are going by Daniels here then I would not classify “effort” as a guiding principle. Daniels is not a perceived effort system as noted by the previous poster who states that it is important to Daniels that runners be in quite a narrow range of paces to maximize a desired training effect...as you noted as well, a few seconds here or there...but I would argue that a system whose guiding principle is effort would have a much greater margin of error. Note also the poster above who experiences success with CV pace and slower intervals. The v02 max “box” is too restricting of a space.

I disagree with the notion that the Daniels approach is the only viable approach to training or to effectuate specific desired adaptations.

I do disagree with the assertion that Daniels is more about hitting paces than effort. I have documented to you in the past my basis for that, and I think those who have spent time reading Daniels' text would agree with that.

For Example, he gives you 5 ways of testing whether you are running at LT Pace, with the VDOT pace being only one of those 4 ways (the other 4 being: (I) the very subjective "comfortably hard", (ii) the pace at which you can still respond to questions, but no longer comfortably maintain a conversation, (iii) the pace which you could maintain for an hour race on that day, and (iv) the pace at which your breathing pattern shifts from its traditional easy distance pace rhythm to a faster rhythm). Yet somehow, every discussion about Daniels on this forum seems to include the idea that he restricts you to a narrow band of paces.

VDOT generated paces are a rule of thumb. They are not intended to be the be all and end all of effort in a workout. He keys on perceived effort throughout his book: R workouts should be done at the pace at which you could race mile on that day; I workouts should be done at the pace at which you could race for 10-15 minutes (depending on how fit you are) on that day; LT workouts should be done at that pace that you could maintain in an hour long race for that day. Being able to do that by feel is admittedly going to be very tough for an inexperienced runner, and that is where the VDOT tables come in to play. They give you a starting point for your workout. If you are running a hilly loop, or if it is 90 degrees or windy out, or if you are coming off of a high mileage week, you are less likely to be able to hit those times and, in those cases, Daniels would say that hitting the effort associated with those paces on an ideal day is the desired approach, not hitting the specific VDOT paces themselves regardless of the conditions.

Smoove wrote:

- Athletes should seek to maximize the possible adaptation within each workout while incurring the least amount of stress on their body as possible.

Do you mean one should apply the minimum stimulus that produces an adaptation, and then only increase the stimulus when it's insufficient to produce further adaptation? Or are you saying that there are both easy and hard ways to get the same adaptation?

As to the former statement, I certainly think it makes sense to start easy with any type of training (because adaptation comes quickly without much hard work at the start), and then move toward harder workouts. But if you get too religious about the minimum possible stimulus increase, you will end up with very slow progress. Same for macrocycles. Progressively increasing mileage over the course of years is a tried and true approach, but some coaches take it to an extreme. Any college senior that isn't hitting 80-90 from time to time has probably been way too conservative. For what it's worth, I never really thought Daniels was being literal about this advice. I saw it as a corrective statement because he knew that the prevailing attitude was to train as hard as possible. Certainly his schedules don't look like they truly follow the minimum possible stimulus principle.

As to the latter statement, I also generally agree, but I think it's slightly more complicated. If you're getting a certain adaptation the hard way, you're probably also getting some other adaptations that the easy way wouldn't have gotten you. Then the question becomes whether those other adaptations are meaningful for you. For instance, Frank Shorter got into great marathon shape by running some very hard track workouts. That's the hard way to get into marathon shape, but as a side effect, it also got him into great 10k shape. So was it wrong? Depends totally on your objectives.

And thanks for the kind words. I'm always interested in your posts as well.