What About Arthur Lydiard Training?

800 and 1500 Gold in Tokyo on a cinder track.

I've trained on a cinder track. It was noticeably slower than my local stadium track.

Why do you believe that his training was sub optimal?

Lydiard went to Finland in the late 60's as a consultant coach. I think it fair to say Finnish athletes enjoyed quite a bit of success in the early 70's. There was also a generation of Kiwi athletes from the late 60's through to the 70's who were successful internationally, who had all been influenced by Lydiard. This was no "lightning in a bottle"; Lydiard's methods worked.

It was never about Snell's weight. It was simply to add endurance to his explosive speed.

This. Lydiard completely changed the way Finnish runners trained. Before him they trained very little in the winter and kick started the training in the spring by doing a ton of track work.

Lydiard system is still solid but surpassed by micro epo and the new shoes.

Lydiard system with micro-dosed epo and new shoes --- unbeatable.

You have that backwards --- It was simply to add speed to his endurance ability.

Yeah, an then there's what Jakob does - double threshold

I remember looking at BYU XC training a few years back and thinking it had Lydiard tendencies. Pure volume for a good stretch in summer before even introducing strides. I think consensus today is that doing “other stuff” in the base phase is beneficial. But I think most coaches go too far in introducing anaerobic work too early and not fully developing the aerobic system. The Norwegian method is also about developing the aerobic system in base phase. It just has a 3-1 low end aerobic to high end aerobic ratio. What Bakken figured out was that you could manipulate rest variables in base phase and get massive amounts of faster training while still being aerobic. People like Igloi did that decades ago to a much lesser extent but it was nowhere near as scientific or systematic.

And then there's what most other world record-holders and championship gold medallists do, which isn't double threshold.

And where's there amazing range and 3kwr? 2 mile? 2k? Future 1500, mile, 5, 10, half at least? You can't deny this stuff works which is why we need to talk about Jakob more in this

He isn't being ruled out of the conversation - he is clearly in it. But he hasn't shown as much range as some other of the greats and nor has he yet matched what some of them achieved. At this stage I don't think he has revolutionised the sport in terms of training methods.

Stay on topic please. Also the Norwegian method follows Lydiards principles of heavy endurance building and peaking.

Jakob and I aren't listening

So did Zatopek's "run hard intervals all the time" method... for a while.

They worked for a while in their given era, but neither approach was sustainable in the long run.

It was difficult for westerners to know exactly what Zatopek's training was like what with the Cold War going on. But he wasn't doing hard intervals all the time. Van Aaken was heavily influenced and impressed by Zatopek, like Lydiard was, and for the same reason; the heavy volume he was doing. But van Aaken claimed Zatopek's reps were not all that hard. He described the sessions as 400 meters of jogging and 200 meters of less than jogging.

Zatopek's idea of "jogging" is closer to what most of us would call marathon pace.

Intervals of course are the recoveries, the repetitions were the hard word. So, he referred to this as anaerobic training. Not "speed work" and not "interval training."

He learned from others and self experimentation. Jack Dolan was a great influence.

I see someone mentioned to "improve Snell's speed," later in this thread. No, Snell had the slowest 200m personal best on the start line of the finals in Rome and Tokyo Olympics. But with 200m to go (in the 800), he dropped everyone. So, the question was how, if he was the slowest over 200m?

The answer is that the 800m is not about muscular speed. It is about having the aerobic conditioning to take advantage of whatever speed one may have. Look at Keely Hodgkinson, although not a volume based athlete, her 400m is much slower than Mu and Moraa's yet she beats them on occassion and like Snell has Olympic gold.

Volume was important for Arthur's athletes, but when asked which phase of training is the most important, he said, "everything." Interestingly one of the more overlooked phases of his training is the hill phase. Ironically, the hill phase's purpose is to develop power in the foot, ankle and lower leg and activate the lifting muscles in the upper leg, this, to prepare the athlete for anaerobic training on the track. To develop the power to top up the limited anaerobic capacity.

What do we have today instead of development of the foot, ankle area, lower leg? Super shoes that do all the work.

But to answer your question, I fully support HRE's well-informed answer.....

The Lydiard Pyramid!