Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

Is there any explanation why the benefits from this method take so long to show up (e.g.up to 6 months)?

I was wondering the same and have some thoughts. I know people have warned about this slow build, but wasn't prepared for it when it played out for real. I was doing the same thing over and over, repeating sirpoc method as much as possible. Nothing happened for 2 months. Like literally nothing. Was ready to quit. Made a small gain on maybe week 10. Then nothing. Then suddenly an absolute huge gain unexpectedly around another 4 weeks after that. Then it all started flowing and after 8 months I'm in lifetime shape and still gaining at 43 years old.

That seems to be the pattern, give or take , for a lot of people. It takes a lot of guts or courage I guess to absolutely go all in with this method when you don't see that initial gain. I've suspected it's because using let's say a textbook Daniel's plan, you can overload and get quite good gains. But likely you will need a break after a block and some decent downtime. Whereas this is more linear, you just build and build and build. So you can grow fitness at a slow rate in comparison, but when you scale it up to 50 weeks instead of like 10 with a traditional plan, suddenly you have a huge amount more training load stored in the bank with never needing a rest, taper etc. I don't think it's much more complicated than that, going on how some of the much smarter guys than me on here or Strava have tried to explain it.

It would be very interesting for those that have had success with this method, to post up their improvement. Say, %age improvement in race times after 6 months. What event did they see the most improvement etc.

What endurance pursuit doesn’t take a lot of time to bear fruit?

Even Daniels system, which everyone incorrectly identifies as a short tradeoff, is actually predicated upon the person using the system to have done quite a bit of base/previous work. Those are the folks that love it and espouse that approach, the ones where ppl are coming in with big base training (Z2 etc) and throw the cherry on the top.

In this system performance will be performance. How are you going to know you can go out in 6:00 pace until youve done it? (or faster, obv 6:00 pace is an arbitrary marker here). Just because you are changing the modality here doesn’t also mean you won’t be changing the psychology here as well, assuming you care about performance. Since you are doing so much work that not super intense it will take you longer to understand the pointy end here. Until you can learn how your body feels and reacts to certain loads/paces you’re going to be slightly lost at race intensity. This is not a system of time trials or ‘test’/predictor workouts, its a system of sustained and repeated load building which you are hopefully confident enough, by workout feel, etc, to translate that into significant performance gains

Just ask Coggan, and i bet his reply will be ‘the best predictor of performance is performance itself’

I.e. you wont know until you get there. And youll never know if you dont start and keep at it for a while

Not out of character in the slightest. I have been thinking about/studying endurance training for 50 years, and tend to be quite pragmatic when it comes to applying what I have learned along the way.

Physiological adaptations to training are rapid (i.e., hours to days), but the resulting improvements in performance may not be evident until you have taken enough such "baby steps". That's especially true for athletes, since the fitter you are, the harder it is to improve. You can try to accelerate the process by increasing the "dose", but only at the risk of "overdosing" and going backwards. Unfortunately, most people are too impatient, and end up in an endless cycle of chasing quick gains, getting injured or burned, recovering, jumping on the next training bandwagon, ad nauseum. Instead, they should just accept that making significant forward progress takes time, ignore all the noise ("polarized!" - "zone 2!" - etc.), apply established principles like as specificity and overload, and stay the course. Obviously, though, this can be difficult to do when you have influencers like Inigo san Milan spouting nonsense right, left, and center, and media types like Henderson hyping every new study like the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Feel free to point to anyone in cycling doing or advocating 2 x 20 minute intervals prior to the start of the wattage list in 2001.

Of course, you won't be able to, not just because such long intervals weren't popular, but because interval training itself was uncommon. Coming into competitive cycling from a running background in 1975, I of course did plenty of intervals, but none of my contemporaries ever did. Instead, they just rode a lot a miles and then "iced the cake" via frequent group rides/racing.

At least that is the way it was in the US. The Europeans had the CONI "blue book" and the English TTers Peter Reed's "black book", both of which included much shorter intervals.. However, even this approach didn't catch on in the US until Eddy Borsewicz was ",imported" from Poland in the Greg Lemond era. Long intervals, though? Nope

Boardman was doing long repeats way before 2001 and doing it to power as well. So let's not rewrite history here.

You really do love to embellish your past. It's a little odd to be honest. This is probably why you are posting here. It's the last hole on the internet you aren't banned or unwelcome . Well yet.

Is it the neural adaptations that take longer to catch up?

As I said, let's see it.

I still have some of my training diaries from the mid-1970s, and am happy to share.

No. Any neural adaptations would be quite rapid. For example, if you take up resistance training, most of the gains in strength over the first month are due to changes in motor control (increased recruitment/firing rates, increased synchronicity, reduced inhibition of both agonist and antagonist muscles). Muscle growth is triggered by the very first workout, but many such "baby steps" must add up before that becomes the more important driver.

Although I generally hate teleological arguments, you could say that this me makes sense when you consider that the latter requires altering bodily structures, whereas the former simply means changing how we use what already exists.

I’m going to have to bore the pants of everybody again to respond. So, here’s a warning that if boring posts trigger you, both skip this post and send me your email so that all future posts I contemplate making can first be sent to you for approval, in order to save you having to read them on this thread : )

Yes, both those points are what I had in my mind. And this is where I’m trying to find some clarity regarding how resilience/durability is framed (and modeled).

In terms of your two points, based on two of the more prominent articles I’ve read on it (Andy Jones and John Davis):

1. They seem to be suggesting the variance in an individuals decay from their max steady-state speed (so whether CS, MLSS, etc.) should be added to the Joyner Model? However, what I don’t quite understand is 1) why the Joyner model is the reference point and 2) the linear decay you reference (btw, I assume you’re talking about how it appears on a semi-log plot where the decay is modeled logarithmically and the decay factor is about -0.06 +/-, right?) in a more robust model, seems to already be capturing what they are referring to as physiological resilience, no?

2. Assuming what I said in point 1 is a fair representation of the process, one could improve their resilience/durability, without increasing their threshold simply by not falling off as much at the longer events, no? For instance, same threshold basis but seeing an improvement in half marathon and marathon. Jones seems to see that as resilience improving where as you’re saying that’s just realizing what you were physiologically capable of already, since there was no change in the model parameters other than the decay factor (that’s how I refer to the term in my approach but I think it’s stamina in training peaks)?

Is that how you are viewing it and thus why you feel there is not a need for such a concept/variable?

That's a bit more detailed than how I might have phrased it, but essentially, yes. That is, I am not convinced that the terminal decline of the intensity-duration relationship truly significantly varies between individuals.* If you model this as an exponential decay (linear on a semi log plot), this is the same as saying that the "Reigel exponent" is the same for every athlete.

Consider the following:

Assume you have two athletes with absolutely identical running speeds at maximal metabolic state. For athlete A, though, this speed is overestimated by 1%, whereas for athlete B it is underestimated by 1%, just due to normal measurement error/variability in testing. If you then threw them on the treadmill and asked them to run as long as possible at any speed slower than this, athlete B will be able to exercise about 15% longer, simply due to the way small differences in intensity translate into much larger differences in duration as a result of the shallow slope of this relationship in this region. IOW, despite identical muscular metabolic fitness, athlete B will *appear* to have greater "durability", but in fact this is just due to measurement error.

*The exception would be if you push things beyond the distance/duration for which someone has adequately prepared, in which case they may very well "fall off the curve". Obviously this would be more common in running (e.g., attempting a marathon on limited training) vs. cycling.

Recently i had a discussion with an university professor about this training method mentioned herein by Sirpoc and his opinion was that this training might lead to a stagnation at some point.

A lot of studies consider the time above 90% VO2max (i.e. above CV!) important to trigger significant adaptations (e.g for VO2max), especially for well trained athletes. We train here below CV and it can be expected that VO2max will not be improved too much, if at all. CR (cost of running) might be significantly improved (as mentioned). LT% might be improved as well, if you are relatively new to running or you came from another sport (e.g. Sirpoc). Additional i also believe durability will be improved with this training. The brain can't be considered as a perfect system (in contrast to what some scientist (wrongly) assume) and learns.

I had to interrupt this training (i do it similar but lactate guided with cycling) for just one week (holiday) and had significant performance losses after that. Not explainable by a lost of VO2max or different muscle structure, likely because of just muscle coordination ...

This is typical of a non-coach but how well did you explain it? Ever since we weren’t about vo2max we have been opposing about measuring it even though there vo2 is a poor indicator of performance, there is alignment but someone with lower vo2max beat people with higher.

i assume the profession we was discussing that a some points there the percentage gains start getting smaller and smaller and therefore another stimulus is required, your conclusion is ah see CV pace, when you have duration and frequency in this single run daily for 30 ish mins, increasing to 32mins will give the same amount of stimulus as maybe vo2 but guess what I can do another session in the week less if I did that.

back to first principles, highest constant load.

guess what, the number of available hours will expire along with age long before we finish seeing gains

Both your VO2max and your muscle respiratory capacity would have fallen significantly during that week off. No need to invoke unspecified neural (de)adaptations.

Lexel, if you look at sirpoc and what he has said himself, then he will likely run out of time before he stagnates. Once he reached 6 hours he went to 6.5 and so on. He improved each time. He will likely like 99% of us hobbyists run out of time before he reaches his peak or plateaus. Say he gets to 8 hours a week but that's the max he can train, obviously he will stagnate. But I don't think it's the purely sub threshold work in itself, that would limit further growth. Obviously if we are talking 15 hours a week, it's a different story. There might be only a fraction of room there for aerobic development if any. Then you might need to put the cherry on top of the cake.

I think it's way too easy to get swept up into this or that , when likely for a significantly big majority of runners out there, if they copied sirpoc and Kristoffer Ingebrigtsen they would more than likely improve in the medium to long term.

On another note, does anyone know what has happened to KI? I know a few times people joked in the Kerr/Wightman v Jakob days that the true Brit versus Norway matchup we need is sirpoc v K. Ingebrigtsen! But sirpoc seems to have mostly stuck to the method almost religiously and is quite a bit faster than KI now? Seems like ever since KI went for some hills or maybe some X factor injuries have crept in? I never quite understood why he did that as it seemed like he was still improving.