Fascinating! Training improves VO2Max 44% in 10 weeks

My mistake then. I must have misunderstood when you said "Steve doesn't understand"

They did track body weight. In the 1977 paper, here they were (subject, age, sex, height in cm, weight in kg before, weight in kg after):

A 29 M 193.7 100.0 90.9
B 42 M 187.3 78.2 78.2
C 33 M 186.1 75.5 74.5
D 20 M 185.4 103.2 99.1
E 30 M 182.9 86.8 85.7
F 33 M 177.8 62.7 61.8
G 40 M 177.8 73.6 72.7
H 25 F 165.1 53.6 55.0

I don't understand why Steve would value exercise science in the slightest, when actual coaches and athletes are the ones who are properly studying the sport. I find it hard to believe someone who has trained and coached for as long as he did, to find any value in these garbage studies. (to the extent that he doesn't completely denounce them).

He did completely denounce it.

Dude, you've picked a weird hill to die on. Magness has basically made a career out of talking about why studies are not useful in practice. As he does with this one. (too short of a duration, testing group isn't advanced athletes, etc). There is nothing in what he wrote that suggests he thinks that this study was valuable. You've missed the point entirely but are stubbornly sticking to your guns. Just take the L and move on.

Since no one wrote the workout:

For 3 days/wk they performed six 5-min intervals of bicycling on an ergometer against a resistance that elicited VO2 max, separated by 2-min intervals of exercise requiring 50-60% of Vo2 max. On the alternate 3 days, they ran as far as they could in 40 min.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Linear increase in aerobic power induced by a strenuous program of endurance exercise - PubMed

Eight subjects exercised for 40 min/day, 6 days/wk for 10 wk. For 3 days/wk they performed six 5-min intervals of bicycling on an ergometer against a resistance that elicited VO2 max, separated by 2-min intervals of exercise...

Open link

Plenty have already debunked but it's not wholly dissimilar to Horwill's crash training theory albeit that was for a shorter period (week I want to say?) but saw similar results.

You've also got Brendan Foster's plan to bang in loads of training after running his target race on borrowed fitness but there's been less scientific research on how training hard affects your race result a few weeks before you started training.

Magness basically used this 1977 study to show why many studies are flawed because they look at such a short window of time. His article was very thoughtful, in my opinion.

One other note of interest that's a bit overlooked in this thread is that the subjects only ran three days a week... spinning the other three days and resting one day. Also, the running workouts started at 30 minutes in week 1 and progressed to 40 minutes by week 10.

Granted, the spinning was hard, but for those of us who occasionally cycle, six 5-minute intervals on a bike is a lot easier workout to recover from the next day than six 5-minute track intervals.

I wonder if changing the 1977 workout by keeping the running the same but changing the spinning days to 40 total minutes of spinning with some low aerobic zone spinning for 20 minutes to warm up followed by two 5-minute VO2Max sessions with a five minute recovery spin between them and ending with a 5 minute cool down might produce similar results and been more sustainable.

Has such an approach been studied?

something to think about for those kids who ONLY run for those 10 weeks during track season. no summers, no winters, no cross country. A first time senior with some talent. How do you maximize that?

A big problem is that the higher your VO2max, the smaller the possible gains especially on a percentage basis.

My mom had open heart surgery. Before the surgery they did a graded exercise test ("stress test") and her Vo2max was estimated to be somewhere around 20 ml/kg/min. Had a valve replacement and went to cardiac rehab. In 8 weeks it had doubled! Of course that was to 40 ml/kg/min--roughly the Vo2max of a sedentary college age male.

In the study reference intervals were running and cycling...alternating days.

https://sci-hub.se/10.1152/jappl.1977.42.3.372

You are being a prick...The studies are not "garbage". They add to the understanding of training and such.

This is a gross oversimplification. Within a pool of elite athletes VO2max itself will not tell you much about who will win, but you pretty darn sure want to have a high enough one to get you into the competition.

Until they 1) stop doing it because it is very hard and tiring and/or 2) they get injured.

Wait, what? What are you trying to accomplish here? Improve your vo2max? I thought you knew that vo2max isn't trainable for advanced athletes, meaning that once you have your initial improvement it's not going to budge. In fact, for elite athletes it will often slightly decline over their careers despite getting faster. That has been studied and reported ad nauseam. Ironically given the discussion of him in this thread, Magness has written a ton about the faulty premise of vo2max training and how, because it is measurable and has been so for a hundred years, vo2max has been given way too much importance in the discussion of training and performance.

One approach is to use the knowledge gained from science and apply it appropriately to the individuals. Another is to document and track what you find with athletes.

The study did add value to the body of knowledge (especially considering it was done in 1977). It would be the fault of a coach to take this study and say "Yeah that is all I am going to do". To answer a research question requires controlling for a lot of things so you can find out what makes a difference.

AlSal stopped by a poster I had at ACSM (he saw the poster and where I was working so he stopped). It was on Nordic combined skiers. We got to talking and he said he had just put in (or they were about to put in) altitude rooms in a house in Portland. Then he started talking about all these other interventions they were going to try to see how they worked. I asked a simple question: if you make all these changes at once how will you know what works? His answer (to some extent was the correct one for a coach): my job is to get them faster. He certainly could achieve that and it was true, but he also was not going to know what contributed (or was detrimental) to getting them faster. If he did three interventions, what percentage improvement (or decrement) were from each? Did the 3 together have a synergistic effect?

That is where science (and a scientific approach) can aid in training. Of course a coach does not have that luxury either so it is often throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks.

Often scientists can help to figure out why or how something worked (or did not work).

The studies are indeed garbage. If your understanding had increased you would know that most of them are full of fantastic claims with a click bait headline as a title.