Antonio Cabral wrote:
Just take a sprinter, supposedly someone with high anaerobic alactic capacity and ask him to run for instance 15 times 100m at his maximum ability but some 3:00 minutes interval recovery lengths.
I van grant that despite that short distance set and the long recovery as well as his ability to run faster because he got high anaerobic alactic ability, he isn´t able to run all the 15 intervals at his best pace. I would say that he will decrease his ability to run as fast as he did the first repetition at about the 5th rep.
Why ? Because the repetition process - even with short distance and long recovery - moves his lactate up.
Conclusion ? This kind of short repetitions wityhj long recovery aren´t as alactic as some supposed to be. Just take the lactate meter before and after the repetition and you will see that this kind of repetitions some name speed are anaerobic alactic, niot the same kind of long repetitions, but alactic as well.
But the problem isn´t about very short repetitions as are 50m or 100m, is about that if we mean the classic 400m intervals, Lydiard continues to say we must avoid it because it´s anaerobic.
The 400m intervals with SHORT RECOVERY is less anaerobic that the same intervals with long recovery, due to 2 maian reasons
1/if you run fast pace intervals, the long recovery take you to high anaerobics, that the short recovery doesn´t able to charge so high lactate.
2/if you run fast intrevals with short recovery (and active as well) the recovery length is so short that while the pace is still fast, that doesn´t permit/able you to eb as fast if the recovery is longer. Therefore, if the pace is slower that the long recovery by this reason is more aerobic.
Example for the same runner:
15X200m recovery=2:00minutes he does it 29-30secs pace average; but if he does the same 15X200m but now with 30-40secs recovery he does is in 32-33secs pace average but he goes more aerobic that with the longest 2 minutes recovery.
This is the misunderstand of some.
However the main problem is another one, and not what kind of "fast pace training will do. the problem is that the concept "aerobic first" spread by Lydiard is a misconception, absolutely.
Just think about Lydiard season. He starts with early season aerobic training and late season with anaerobic training. Right ? ! Yes he did "aerobic first" that first season. Then he starts the second season (or might be the 3rd or the 4th or the 5th etc). When he start the NEXT season and he repeats the early season aerobic training, you tell me ? What he is doing, he does "aerobic first" or he does aerobic after he did the late anaerobic of the last season eventually. Let me answer. The next seasons, all the ones after the first one, he doesn´t aerobic first, but aerobic last, related to the previous season. But it works as season periodisation and it works as multi-season periodisation and performance improve.
Conclusion. Aerobic first is just a fallacy. The best efficient way to performance progress and the best efficient way to is to combine in each season aerobic and anaerobic training, each one in different percents and different intensity (speed)in the same micro-cycle of training cycle and meso-cycle and not aerobic first and anaerobic later.
Thousand and thousand of runners during decades, from the average runner up to the world top class runner, they did follow modern training combine of aerobic with aerobic stimulus in the same period of training proves that i´m right.
Another different questions (that Lydiard was right) are:
- Does the anaerobic training is important and necessary? Yes, it does.
- Does the aerobic training must be then highest training percent related to the anaerobic percent ? Yes, it does.
- Does the rich aerobic condition is necessary to promote the performance maximize of the distance runner ? yes it does.
But don´t fall in the trap that is to think that because aerobics is very important as the training of the distance events, the aerobic first is necessary or the efficient one way to deal with the aerobic-anaerobic systems, or to imagine that “aerobic first”. Don´t fall in that training mistake, that training misunderstand.