Drills: Do they work and how?

Jiminy Cricket wrote:

So essentially nobody has any semblance of solid proof beyond "well all the elites do it" that drills actually do anything?

Its pretty similiar to the ice bath thing...people do it because everybody else is doing it but there is zero scientific evidence of their effectiveness.

What I can nderstand is why more people are not doing studies into the effects of things like Ice Baths and drills.

There is no scientific evidence that high mileage works, just the "anecdotal" evidence from thousands of top runners through the years.

U.N.O. wrote:

Some of us distance runners are lazy who try to convince themselves that they can just run and get the best results.

this is so true.

Runningart2004 wrote:

Ancillary work is done by all other sports across the world. Why are distance runners so against doing things that improve performance? (eat right, strength train, plyos, etc)

We are not against things that improve performance. We are against things that waste time. The whole point of this thread is trying to figure which category drills fall into.

Drills do work and do help.

The question then becomes, when should you do drills and which ones should you do?

Before warming up, AS your warmup, after warming up?

How much should you do? How many?

30m, 50m, 100m, 400m? 1 set, 2 sets, 3 sets?

"There is no scientific evidence that high mileage works, just the "anecdotal" evidence from thousands of top runners through the years."

Completely different. It has been studied why running more would improve performance and the "anecdotal" evidence you talk of is pretty strong. Its very well understood why and how increasing mileage leads to improved performance.

Id love nothing more to do drills before a workout and hop into an ice bath after if I thought they would improve my running but there is absolutely nothing to suggest they will aside from a number of already very good runners doing it because everybody else does.

I am not of the belief that scientific evidence is required to justify every belief we might have about training. However, I do at least require a sound rationale, and I don't see that one exists to support the philosophy of doing form drills.

Take the example of a hurdler. He does not improve by simply taking hurdles every day. Yes, taking hurdles is an integral part of his training, but it alone cannot make him a great hurdler. He must do drills to ISOLATE SPECIFIC aspects of hurdling. Trail leg, lead leg, etc. Hurdle drills are an integral part to any hurdler's training. Why, then, are running drills so controversial? They isolate a specific aspect of the gait cycle (footstrike, knee drive, etc) and improve it.

Jiminy Cricket: Id love nothing more to do drills before a workout and hop into an ice bath after if I thought they would improve my running but there is absolutely nothing to suggest they will aside from a number of already very good runners doing it because everybody else does.

Well, so if you have no faith in the fact that so many others do these things in the belief that they help, and really believe that the vast majority of us are mindless lemmings and too stoopid to notice the things we spend time and effort on make no difference and just waste our time, then by all means test it for yourself. Spend a season or two doing drills, then drop them for the next season or two. Do the same with ice baths. Try it with running doubles vs. singles too, and various other aspects of training. You'll definitively sort out what works for you.

Of course you'll be at least fifty by the time you know it all, and you'll also likely be insufferable in insisting that whatever did and didn't work for you, will or won't work for everyone else. Most of us are like that.

But the bottom line is, you pays your money and takes your choices. The world isn't often going to provide you with definitive proof of everything - it's going to give you definitive proof of very, very little in fact, and as humans we'll usually make a mess of interpreting those few shreds of apparent certainty. For instance from the world of running: observe the results of American training programs of the last quarter century or so, as we often based our training less on experience and tradition and more on Researched And Proven And Quantified Science.

Closing tangentially with a quote from a smart guy named Henri Poincare: “To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.”

Adeyabo wrote:

Drills do work and do help.

Oh, thanks for clearing that up. We should have just asked you all along. And here we were looking for evidence, when really we just needed your assertion. Great.

nsmb part deux in 2D wrote:

Well, so if you have no faith in the fact that so many others do these things in the belief that they help, and really believe that the vast majority of us are mindless lemmings and too stoopid to notice the things we spend time and effort on make no difference and just waste our time, then by all means test it for yourself. Spend a season or two doing drills, then drop them for the next season or two. Do the same with ice baths. Try it with running doubles vs. singles too, and various other aspects of training. You'll definitively sort out what works for you.

Is this how you came to the conclusion that drills work? How can you be sure your improvement was the drills and not the fact that you had one more year of aerobic development under your belt?

i am dead serious: Is this how you came to the conclusion that drills work? How can you be sure your improvement was the drills and not the fact that you had one more year of aerobic development under your belt?

Nope, I didn't do that with drills.

In fact I'm not sure whether or how much the drills work. I don't lose sleep over the fact that I can't be sure. I'm very aware of how little we can be sure of in life, and think our increasing desire verging on desperation for certainty in the 21st century is a disorder. Societal OCD, if you will.

Anyhow, I believe, as noted earlier in this thread, doing a few drills now & again has helped my stride. That's good enough for me. File it away, move on to the next thing. If I'm wrong, ain't much harm gonna come of it.

I've tested other things like doubles vs. singles and types of workouts by making changes various seasons. You're right: even then I cannot be 100% certain of attributing what did what. But come on, you can take that to extremes and ask how you know your fatigue after a 20 mile run was really caused by the run, or by poor sleep the night before, or whatever else. A healthy intelligent mind, I have faith, can generally make sense out of observations. That's what minds do.

777 wrote:

Take the example of a hurdler. He does not improve by simply taking hurdles every day. Yes, taking hurdles is an integral part of his training, but it alone cannot make him a great hurdler. He must do drills to ISOLATE SPECIFIC aspects of hurdling. Trail leg, lead leg, etc. Hurdle drills are an integral part to any hurdler's training. Why, then, are running drills so controversial? They isolate a specific aspect of the gait cycle (footstrike, knee drive, etc) and improve it.

There are at least two major analytical errors here. It's impossible to isolate the benefits of hurdle drills in relation to other training components, so your insistance that one cannot improve by hurdling alone is likely a false premise. Furthermore, hurdling is not analogous to running in a technical context. Hurdling is a consciously executed skill with important technical nuances, while running is a primitive "hind brain" activity which is not very technically demanding- all that matters during running is how much force you apply to the ground in relation to bodyweight.

You're really blowing the issue out of proportion.

"I don't lose sleep over the fact that I can't be sure."

"...think our increasing desire verging on desperation for certainty in the 21st century is a disorder."

"But come on, you can take that to extremes and ask how you know your fatigue after a 20 mile run was really caused by the run, or by poor sleep the night before"

All we're asking is whether the drills work. It's a simple question. No one asking it is losing sleep or trying to take it to extremes or verging on desperation for the answer either.

There is only so much ancillary work you can do before it becomes a waste of time. Asking "why" is smart, it's not a disorder.

Eh, my HTML skills suck. Freaking italics.

Captain Reality wrote:

There are at least two major analytical errors here. It's impossible to isolate the benefits of hurdle drills in relation to other training components, so your insistance that one cannot improve by hurdling alone is likely a false premise. Furthermore, hurdling is not analogous to running in a technical context. Hurdling is a consciously executed skill with important technical nuances, while running is a primitive "hind brain" activity which is not very technically demanding- all that matters during running is how much force you apply to the ground in relation to bodyweight.

To a sufficiently-practiced hurdler, hurdling IS a "hind brain" activity--that is, second nature. I do not think that the neural functioning of hurdling is significantly different than running in a trained hurdler. But neither I nor you have any evidence to back this up. But the fact remains that you WILL NOT ever find an elite hurdler who does not do hurdle drills.

Running is far more than exerting force on the ground. Long distance running is about economy. Elite Kenyans have the same VO2 max as elite Europeans, but they can run faster AT that VO2 max. Why? Their stride is more economical. Less oxygen is required for a given pace. In this respect, hurdling and running are quite the same. The best hurdle technique is one that wastes the least amount of energy and time. Likewise with running.

Running form can be changed. We know that as a fact. Watch young runners early on in a track season, and compare that to their form later. It improves. Mostly because they are running! But at the same time, how often have you seen a veteran jogger who's been at it for 20 years shuffling around with atrocious form? A concious effort is required to optimize running form, and drills, combined with high mileage, accomplish exactly this.

I do think drills work perosonally...again just more anecdotal stuff as backup.

However, while I have my own personal set I;ll go through, I was just wondering if anyone else had some recomendations on what to do?

Drills after your easy day runs and strides, 2x-3x / week.

Adeyabo wrote:

Drills do work and do help.

The question then becomes, when should you do drills and which ones should you do?

Before warming up, AS your warmup, after warming up?

How much should you do? How many?

30m, 50m, 100m, 400m? 1 set, 2 sets, 3 sets?

I think that drills are cool, and I would like to incorporate them into my training, but I just don't know when. To be honest, drills tire me out. During cross country season I did them on my easy days, but I didn't feel comfortable doing them because I wanted to make sure I was recovering. I just don't want to get caught up doing so many extra things that i end up not recovering.

I did hundreds of hours of drills in high school.

The result?

I became more proficient at drills than any other athlete in the state, and probably in the entire country. If drills had been an official event in track meets, I would have been a four time state champion. Meanwhile, my 100m time went from 12.3 as a sophomore to 12.5 as a senior. Great improvement, eh?