PAAVO system of training...

I have talked with and been around many coaches and kids that have used this program very successfully. To each his own. What works for one may not work for another and that is ok....lets not bash everything and everyone for not being on the same page.....especially those who work hard and love the sport regardless of what system they use! :)

I went to a PAAVO clinic a few years ago and was unconvinced. Intensity was too high and I thought that the "easy day" workouts were too intense, and I didn't like the idea of setting a timed goal for what should be a relaxing recovery run. I was also unconvinced that doing a lot of 400s 2 days before championship meets would work as well as the championship progression I'd been using.

The school in our state that is best known for using PAAVO finished 6 points ahead of us at State. With their talent they should've finished well over 50 points ahead of us. I remain unconvinced.

What kind of Championship progression do you use and do you know everything about why that team only finished 6pts. ahead of you? Curious? Just asking.....but is it possible that had you used the PAAVO TRAINING that you might have finished 50pts ahead of the team that beat you by 6pts??

All I know is that both my son and my daughter follow the Paavo training system and both of them had a great deal of success with it. He cut 2 minutes off his time in one year. She went from never running a varsity race to All-State in one season. How awful is that? Race three times a week during the off season? Never. 12 miles on the track on most days? No hway. Make either of them not like running? Fuggedaboutit. They love it. Both have been all-state, and one was on a two-time state runner-up champ team.

Like anything else, training methods are not one-size-fits all. If it doesn't work for you, then you need to do something else.

Ok so sppm and lppm and the saturday all out mile is not 3 races in a week. Ok so having 16 slow intervals with 2 minute job between them and 4 minute jog between each set of 4 doesn't add up to 12 miles. I think it does. Ok so having every run you run be timed except for one a week and having it all have to be on a certain pace on a course that you know ever mile doesn't make it so that you don't like running ok. I will admit Pavvo will take a runner that is inexperience have them run well for 2 years and then trash them and make it so that they cannot run very well in college. Of course long term improvement is not an important thing. The fat is that if you are a decent runner and you do Paavo you will burn out. Everything physiological points towards that of course Paavo states that burning out is actually a mental thing and not a physical. Tell me that isn't a bunch of crap.

One season of success may be enticing for you and your children, but in the long term, PAAVO athletes are well-known to fizzle and or quit the sport together. With all of the athletes in this cult nation-wide, there are few who are running well at the collegiate level.

More than bad for your running, this program is bad for your health. Instead of building up the aerobic system and programming a healthy metabolism for these children, it exploits their youthful anaerobic strengths for a quit and short-lived run of success.

Name a runner in NCAA top 20 CC that used PAVVO in high school. I can't think of any?

Alicia Craig/Stanford and several others ran at the 2004 Olympic Trials!

Your statement about playing on the Anaerobic strength of young kids is WAY OFF base.

Most Paavo Trained kids quit their college programs because the training is inferior and they don't improve as a result.

If the good old fashion american work ethic is going to be labeled as cultic then we are all in trouble....Henry Ford showed us that if you do this and this and this then you will get a car as the end product....the Paavo system as I understand it can show a person how to run faster by following physioligically sound training principles.....if you follow and read other programs you will find that they have 2 or 3 QUALITY SESSIONS per week and you will find that the "easy days" are run at a tempo that is conducive to recovering, but not considered "junk mileage". If I'm an athlete I would really appreciate a coach who could tell me with some certainty how and why I am going to improve....the Paavo Coaches and kids I have run in to can do this!

What kind of Championship progression do you use and do you know everything about why that team only finished 6pts. ahead of you? Curious? Just asking.....but is it possible that had you used the PAAVO TRAINING that you might have finished 50pts ahead of the team that beat you by 6pts?? >>

The coach of that program is the one that told me about PAAVO and I was curious enough to go to the clinic. The coach told me this year the workouts went well, everyone was healthy, they just raced bad.

My championship progression is to do threshold cruise intervals on the Monday before the State Meet with some race pace 200s at the end, recovery run on Tuesday, 5 or 6 race pace 200s on Wed, very easy recovery run on Thurs, go through warm-up routine on Fri and race on Sat. One of the Tinman posts awhile ago suggested a routine almost exactly what we've been using for years. It's always worked well for us and IMHO, there's no reason to fix what isn't broken.

Paavo works at a high school level for two reasons:

1) High school kids really need to believe in what they're doing. If you tell them that doing 100 one-armed pushups like Rocky will make them run fast, they will believe you and will run faster. This psychological aspect is often overlooked.

2) The Paavo system includes all of the aspects of any successful training program: running every day, long runs, tempo runs, and intervals. The Paavo evangelists will tell you that it's THE ONLY WAY, everybody else is wrong, our runners are at an advantage because they do this system, etc. They make it out to be a supplement to the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai but kept to himself for a few thousand years.

So why don't college programs and elite runners use it? Because their coaches are able to think for themselves and not rely on a program that a stranger at a coaching clinic wrote for their athletes. They make a long term plan but adjust the plan daily based on fatigue, soreness, performance, etc.

They also know that placing time requirements on every single run and every single interval saps the joy out of running. What difference does it make if you do an easy run today at 6:20 pace or 6:40? On an easy day, if 6:40 is enjoyable and 6:20 is a chore, why not do 6:40 for a change? Such limits turn an enjoyable sport into drudgery.

Most of all, they don't create a culture in which the ultimate badge of honor is how many days in a row you've run. They don't run their athletes into the ground because "Paavo" tells them that they have a tempo run scheduled for that day. They give their athletes the day off if their legs are dead or they show signs of an impending overuse injury. That day off may keep them from being so dead that they can't do tomorrow's workout, or keep them from getting hurt, or (worst of all) from hating running.

2) The Paavo system includes all of the aspects of any successful training program: running every day, long runs, tempo runs, and intervals. The Paavo evangelists will tell you that it's THE ONLY WAY, everybody else is wrong, our runners are at an advantage because they do this system, etc. They make it out to be a supplement to the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai but kept to himself for a few thousand years.

So why don't college programs and elite runners use it? Because their coaches are able to think for themselves and not rely on a program that a stranger at a coaching clinic wrote for their athletes. They make a long term plan but adjust the plan daily based on fatigue, soreness, performance, etc.

They also know that placing time requirements on every single run and every single interval saps the joy out of running. What difference does it make if you do an easy run today at 6:20 pace or 6:40? On an easy day, if 6:40 is enjoyable and 6:20 is a chore, why not do 6:40 for a change? Such limits turn an enjoyable sport into drudgery >>

You must have been reading my mind, and thank you for putting into words much better than I could have.

Collective et. al., they have actually had more than one season of success, thank you very much for your snide comment. I am not so short-sighted to trade immediate success for long term well-being.

My daughter followed the program for two years and had great success. (her only two years of hs xc, by the way) She's in college now and ran her freshman year before she quit at the end of the year. Why? After following the college program for the whole year, her times continued to get worse instead of better. She went from a 19:10's 5k runner to 21's. It was the coach's way or the highway, so she chose the highway. She still runs and runs road races for no reason other than she wants to, and she is back down into the 19's. So is she some kind of "Collegiate Paavo Loser" because her times got worse under a different program? Her major? Phys Ed - because she wants to coach Track and XC. Guess that Paavo really soured her on running.

Define "running well at the collegiate level". What I find interesting is that a fair number of the kids I know that ran and ran well in HS don't necessarily continue to do so in college, Paavo runners or not. Many get injured because the college programs are far more intense than HS. College can be demanding and many drop running to concentrate on academics. Some choose not to run in college at all. Some have experiences like my daughter. Let's face it, unless you are Ritz or Webb, most of these kids will not be running for a living - that degree might come in handy some day.

There are good coaches and bad coaches using all programs.

But I find it amusing that you use the term "his way or the highway" to describe your daughter's former college coach. One of my big criticisms about PAAVO is that the program doesn't consider the possibility that there might be better ways for certain individuals to train than PAAVO, however good it might be.

"My daughter followed the program for two years and had great success. (her only two years of hs xc, by the way) She's in college now and ran her freshman year before she quit at the end of the year. Why? After following the college program for the whole year, her times continued to get worse instead of better. She went from a 19:10's 5k runner to 21's. It was the coach's way or the highway, so she chose the highway. She still runs and runs road races for no reason other than she wants to, and she is back down into the 19's."

Thanks for reminding me of a negative aspect of Paavo that I neglected to include in my little diatribe. As I said, Paavo instills complete faith in the system by convincing the kids that their program is not just the best way, but the only way. That's great until it's time to leave the nest and move on. Paavo kids often have a hard time believing in other systems, no matter how successful they've been in the past. Without faith in their coach and, more importantly, their training, athletes come to the line having already lost the race.

This happens to college freshmen from many systems, but is much more prevalent with Paavo alumni and kids from other systems that deify the coach or the program.

Diatribe is right. Let's get one thing straight. I never said that Paavo was the one true religion for running well. I said that it has worked for my kids. I've seen it work for other kids. I'm sure that there are kids who do not do well under this program. They shouldn't do it.

Secondly, there was no deification of this program or coach. She followed it, it worked for her. period. She had complete faith in her college coach. She was one of six other runners who quit the college team because they got worse, not better. The other 5 were not Paavo runners. For you to imply that she did not succeed in college because she didn't try is ridiculous.

Finally, I just took my son to see Arthur Lydiard last week. For as close-minded as Paavo runners are supposed to be, I saw about a dozen of them there. They all liked it, they all found things to incorporate into their training. I suppose Lydiard is all wrong, too.

That is a completely unfair assertion. For you to make it sound like Paavo runners do this more often is ridiculous. Have you done a study or something on the subject? I think we all saw the high-profile Alan Webb lose faith in his college coach (a very reputable coach) and cling to his high school coach, and he wasn't a Paavo runner. He did exactly what you were just discussing. And for the rest of you people who say that Paavo runners don't do anything in college and burnout, stop making generalizations. You also can't start pointing fingers at them, because you yourself need to take a look at all the Foot Locker finalists who went on to do nothing once in college. They're a dime a dozen. They weren't all Paavo runners, and many them "burned out" and did horribly in college.

Evil PAAVO:

Have you ever been to a PAAVO clinic? It's part running clinic but also part religious revival with more than a little snake oil salesmanship thrown in. They like to promote their program as being "superior to others". It sounds like your daughter had a good coach who recognized that PAAVO is one of many roads that can get you to Rome. But that's not the philosophy of the organizers.

The PAAVO people mean well, but open-mindedness is not among their virtues.

You name one actual physiologist that will state that what Paavo i, is beneficial to ones aeorobic capactiy increasing and I will give the program a little respece. All I know is this that with your daughter I would imagine that she took time off after quiting her college team which then probably helped her to no longer be burned out. Also I have seen a high school team on paavo that went from never being out of the top 5 in the state to now not even qualifying for state because no one stays around for more then two years because it just isn't fun which is what running is supposed to be especially for high schoolers as a college runner I can say that I had to refind the fun in running so that I could be as succesful as I am now. I mean really your easy days are supposed to be easy days for a reason. There are people that actually advicate junk mileage so that people can just shake thier legs out. Look at many of the best runners in the world and look at the fact that many africans run over half of thier runs at 8 minute mile pace. Of course I am guessing that that is just junk mileage and they could actually destroy the world records if they did Paavo because they don't actually know what they are doing. One of the major downsides to paavo is the fact that it makes it so that you are unaware of your body which is one of the most important things about running and to understand what the things you do are supposed to help you with. I will offer up a challenge and that is talk to your children and find out why they did ppm runs and ct days and slow intervals and all of that and actually see if they understood what it was supposed to do or if they just did it becuase a sheet of paper said to. I mean really with paavo is there actually any need for a coach no I don't think there is.

I've sent my kids to Paavo camps for two years and this will be the third year for my son. I am about two hours from the U of Mich camp, and I sent both of them there as well. Given the choice, they both picked Paavo over U of M. On a cost basis, I wish they would have picked the U of M camp because it costs half as much.

Been to one myself? No, I'm too old. They've never had a clinic around here that I know of. Superior to others? It has been a great program for my kids, but clearly it wasn't the program for oh goodness gracious. That doesn't mean I think goodness gracious is any less a runner than someone that does follow Paavo, didn't stick with it long enough, didn't do it right etc., he/she needs to find what works for him/her and go with that instead. There are lots of kids that do just as well with other training programs. I don't get the snake-oil feeling from the paperwork I get from Paavo any more than any other running camp stuff that I get from any of the other camps.