Lydiard Imitations

Bling zzz wrote:

Gypsy, if you think the recovery cycle is always 48 hrs, you have not done your research.

#1 It really depends on the type of breakdown before you can judge how long the recovery and supercompensation will be.

#2 It has become quite common practice to allow 72 hrs recovery for hard breakdown workouts - especially for more elite runners.

I've been doing this for years.

Hey

I don't think the recovery cycle is always 48 hours, as there are 'sometimes' situations that require more. An upcoming competition is the most common situation probably, although slight over-training may require it as well to keep the balance in place.

From my own experience you work hard in the gym, hard enough to create muscle soreness, and it is two days time when the soreness has gone. When you work a hard jumping session on the track, the next day there is an obvious reduction in spring, which returns the day after. I would have to train for 2 hours on the track jumping, hurdling and sprinting three times a week, there was no way i could do those in consecutive days, yet there was no need to take a day off, apart from those sometimes situations. It would look something like this

m - run 30, weights 60, gymnastics 30, tech 30

t - track 150s, tech 90

w - as monday in structure

t - track 300s tech 90

f - as monday in stucture

s - track sprints tech 90

s - rest or golf or long run (rare)

This increases to 3 hours per session and then adds morning sessions, which whilst mainly technical, still take 90mins to complete. With all of that volume, the only way to get through it is to overlap the training. Fortunately the muscle soreness from a heavy lifting day doesn't interfere in any real way with the sharper stuff on the track the following day. And nothing done on the track seems to interfere with what is done on gym days.

The only regular time i would have 3 days rest between same type hard sessions is over the weekend, so one in three recovery periods are 3 days anyway. The other is for competitions, but the need for 2 full days rest only occurred for me before a decathlon. As it was, it went 48 hour cycles for every different component of training, except over the weekend when 72 hours was gained. (actually we had 3.5 days recovery over the weekend from sat am to tues pm for track related activities).

From where i stand, to use 72 hour recoveries as a regular thing indicates either over-training or under-training is occurring. If the 72 hours are necessary to allow for recovery, then its over-training and if they are not, we find under-training. 48 hours is how long it takes from normal hard training, i thought this was common knowledge.

rekrunner wrote:Besides that Lydiard is not Pfitzinger, nor gypsy, the answer is in the 5 bullets you quoted before. Training by feeling and regulating by response helps ensure adequate recovery in the reality, regardless of the initial plan. If Snell ever felt stale, they would bag the session and do it another day. If Snell went harder, he must have felt it was OK. Lydiard was a genius.

Hey i would go further than that, to have ones own self honesty honed to such a high level as Lydiard did with himself is a rare thing. To then implant this into others far rarer still. For me across time and space (that's for you Antonio), if Arthur can speak to me and reveal truisms about what we are doing, it is like reading a great author, who can describe deep concepts with simple everyday language. I don't see him as a genius of the intellectual kind, i see him as a genius of the intuitive kind, or maybe he just had a really strong will (a given) and a lot of patience to just chip away. If i know the standard new Zealander well enough to comment the chipping away ideal is well inbred.

asdff wrote:

He posted a lot of shit as Peter Winter.

Thanks!! .....

So Gypsy / Flow / Peter Winter .... posts annonymously, & his credentials are very unclear ....

By his own words he would like to dissect Antonio's every sentence, but does not have the time (very disturbing)

Moreover, his understanding of training methodology (for middle & long distance runners) is clearly very simplistic (e.g. always 48 hours recovery) & deeply flawed ... understandable for a former decathlete.

Antonio on the other hand posts under his own name (most of the time) .... is clearly recognised & acknowledged by other leading coaches (Hadd, Canova etc.) as a respected thinker on training methodology.

And where is the evidence he did not coach Albert Chaichia (Spelling) his 2-09 Marathoner?

Antonio makes it clear when he speaks of other athletes that he has/does not coach (e.g. Rui Silva) ... that he was/is not their coach, & acknowledges who actually is.

One (Antonio) appears knowledgable & very rational to me, the other (Gypsy) does not.

well not really i would be happy to go into them for you. I am repsonding immediately to this post because it seems you are here.

i thought i said i could disect but wouldn't because it would take up too much space, but the time thing is true, i don't have enough of it to be doing such things even if i had a desire to

well brushing the slight aside, although feel free to explain and let me defend myself, i wouldn't go jumping to any broad based conclusions based on me stating a fact true to all living organisms, the stimulus-response cycle and it's duration after full system suppression is 48 hours. Go ask a horse trainer, see what he has to say if you don't believe me.

I'm undoing that belief through occasionally disecting his understanding of methodology in this thread, but i agree he is a pretty good thinker in this area, if he knew how to slow his thinking down a bit more then he could really work some subtle stuff out. As it is, he can definitely recognised the good stuff in his research because he has pulled out most of it as far as i can see. I think we would come to the same conclusions on most things, just from a slightly different angle. Really we just have this one point of argument. He wants to be specific to race pace over all other considerations and i want to be specific to the event ahead of all other considerations.

How about we get the evidence he did instead. Antonio?

ps good articles thanks, i read them once and will try and do a response tonight if i get 30 mins.

Canada Coach wrote:

The reason I've always tried to error with too much recovery between hard workouts vs too little is because after supercompensation has peaked the slope of the line is less than the slope while supercompensating.

Because it is difficult to plan it so that your next breakdown workout is at the supercompensation peak, you must decide where it is better to miss; to the right of to the left of the peak. When alalyzing Graph 1 on this page

http://www.teamunify.com/cseksc/__doc__/Shea_FatigueRecoverySupercompensation-2.pdf

It is obvious that missing to the right side of the peak is more advantagious.

Read the article above. It is valuable and it is the graph that I used 25 years ago to help develop the basic system I've been using.

thankyou very much CC. This is an aspect i have never considered but of course is true, like any eruption. It fills in a gap in my knowledge nicely and i appreciate you for bringing it to my attention. And now there is a more logically precise reason to aim for 99% most of the time instead of 101%.

Quote from Gypsy: " I wouldn't go jumping to any broad based conclusions based on me stating a fact true to all living organisms, the stimulus-response cycle and it's duration after full system suppression is 48 hours. Go ask a horse trainer, see what he has to say if you don't believe me.

Gypsy .... this statement ("fact") is plainly absurd .... "after full system suppression" .... so the stimulus-response cycle is 48 Hours after any stimulus (e.g. racing a marathon) ... are you seriously saying that an individual is sufficiently recovered to race another marathon after 2 days, & again after another 2 days?

The length of the stimulus-response cycle depends entirely on the length & intensity of the stimulus itself. .... Ask your horse training friends why they only race their horses on average once a month, not every other day.

Jackanory wrote:

Quote from Gypsy: " I wouldn't go jumping to any broad based conclusions based on me stating a fact true to all living organisms, the stimulus-response cycle and it's duration after full system suppression is 48 hours. Go ask a horse trainer, see what he has to say if you don't believe me.

Gypsy .... this statement ("fact") is plainly absurd .... "after full system suppression" .... so the stimulus-response cycle is 48 Hours after any stimulus (e.g. racing a marathon) ... are you seriously saying that an individual is sufficiently recovered to race another marathon after 2 days, & again after another 2 days?

The length of the stimulus-response cycle depends entirely on the length & intensity of the stimulus itself. .... Ask your horse training friends why they only race their horses on average once a month, not every other day.

Humans should follow that advice, but it's not entirely true, they tend to have short seasons though if racing frequently.

Ok my statement of fact needs modification - full system suppression is obviously not the words to use to describe my view. The suppression you get from a training session is obviously different from that of a marathon. I think they can both be the same breadth, but obviously the marathon goes deeper. So if full is not the right word to describe a broad but somewhat shallow suppression, only so deep as to enable normal continuity of training, so it guess that is why there is the caveat to training as hard as you can, you must be able to make it repeatable. Didn't Arthur say something along those lines?

ps thanks to those guys a few pages back for that information of Bill Rodgers. That training diary was fascinating as is his story of his intuitive training approach. How many marathons did i see him do in only a few months. Was it 3 in 5 months or 4 in 7 months. Is this normal? It seems not so i wonder how he could achieve it along with also running really, really fast for his time.

Maybe if you are fully prepared you can run back to back marathons? Maybe you can run multiple marathons a week at slightly submaximal speeds. These Tamahumarans are running incredible distances at good speeds all year round. Maybe we just aren't prepared in the same way so a marathon becomes some sort of freaky endeavour only to be attempted on a rare occasion.

Don't confuse yourself with irrelevant questions, lets just look at your first statement. 'rule of thumb' is the perfect way to put it thanks. I will try and give it some perspective.

When we are developing the biomotor qualities, we want to optimise the time available for best gain. For best gain we want to train as much as possible, but find we are limited to what we can handle. Looking at what people have found, we can determine 48 hours is the MINIMUM time required for recovery between 'developmental sessions'. Since this is the mimimum and since we are attempting to optimise our time, it also becomes the maximum. Unless 'sometimes' factors intrude. One of those 'sometimes' factors is competition and this schedule is a competition phase program, so we see an elongation of training program recovery cycle, which i consider normal, as it promotes bringing out full condition. We don't need to develop anything at this time, so there is no need to apply an upper limit on the recovery cycle anymore. Interestingly, we also see a reduction in workload and the correct combination of these two factors bring out the peak performance.

Hi Antonio:

I would love to see what Snell really did leading up to double gold in 1964. I respect your agreement with Nobby and understand why you are keeping it private. Do you happen to know when Snell decided to go his own way? How long before the 1964 Olympics?

Thanks for posting the link in the Double Whammy thread awhile back about cyclists and how everyone is different. Maybe other readers would be interested:

http://www.53x12.com/do/show?page=article&id=41

Another guy who talks about supercompensation is Jan Olbrecht, the "Science of winning" guy. His diagrams are a little hard to read, and more for swimmers than runners, but they are on pages 4 and 5:

http://www.simforbundet.se/files/Utbildning/Jan%20Olbrecht.pdf

Bowerman used to talk about supercompensation and how everyone is different. He couldn't train Kenny Moore the same as Pre, because Kenny needed much more time after a hard workout than Pre did. Kenny's pattern was hard-easy-easy while Pre's was more hard-hard-easy.

SlowFatMaster wrote:

Bowerman used to talk about supercompensation and how everyone is different. He couldn't train Kenny Moore the same as Pre, because Kenny needed much more time after a hard workout than Pre did. Kenny's pattern was hard-easy-easy while Pre's was more hard-hard-easy.

Exactly, & hence the "48 Hours Rule of Thumb" nonsense/myth is debunked ..... Bowerman was a very intelligent coach ... he understood (what Antonio has often emphasised as being a central plank of the modern training methodology) that all training must be individualized.

& a final nail in the "48 Hour myth" ....

Gypsy ... please read that excellent article (link) provided by Canada Coach above ....

some quotes from this article ....

"73 Hours may be too short for supercompensation to occur" (page 1)

"48 Hours may not be enough time for recovery to the initial baseline level of compensation to occur, never mind, reaching supercompensation" (page 1)

"to avoid this (overtraining) autoregulatory training methods are used. This teaches athletes to listen to their bodies & rest & train accordingly" (page 2)

"remember each athlete is an individual so each program/system has to be individualized to increase his/her performance" (page 3)

In simple terms .... supercompensation depends on the individual's response rate, NOT a set number of hours!

ACM wrote:

Hodgie-san, I don't know where you see the similarities, I sometimes see rolling stones in red hot chili peppers... but really, if there is a coach that Canova's training is similar to it's the great Joe vigil's.

I do believe that better training methods have a lot to do with today's performances, I just watched a hanson's video on flotrack where groups of women and men ran at SPECIFIC paces.

One more thing, maybe Bill just didn't have the talent to run 2:08 or 2:05 no matter what?

Look more closely, also look here:

Matt Fitzgerald is one of those free-will thinkers that is not afraid to research the latest ideas and try them for himself. Good for you that you stumbled upon him as part of your research. This would have been a good link for you to provide years ago, to help explain the difference between the two methods of periodicity.Did you catch in the article that Pete Pfitzinger's method uses a "NON-linear" periodicity, in stark contrast to Lydiard's linear periodicity? So it appears that, completely contrary to what you said, Pfitzinger is not like Lydiard after all. Pfitzinger uses a periodization that does not follow Lydiard's method.In Timothy Noakes "Lore of Running", he credits Franz Stampfl as "one of the first coaches to introduce the idea of background and peaking training." "But unquestionably, the coaches who refined this concept, and first described it in detail were the Australian swimming coach Forbes Carlile, and the New Zealand running coach, Arthur Lydiard." Lydiard deserves credit for explaining the concept, and making it popular.Noakes also credits Franz Stampfl as being responsible for "introducing the notion of interval training as we know it today". Perhaps Stampfl deserves a lot more praise than he got.

Antonio Cabral wrote:

Lydiard imitations. Discuss Lydiardism through the eyes of coaches and athletes who follow his methodology.

For this guy the history of the training periodisation is resumed to “shadow” before Lydiard, “Light” with Lydiard, and after Lydiard nothing is the same, everything is enlighten by Lydiard contribute. For him, Lydiard did change the path of the training history.

You can also read what I said to you, about Pfitzinger periodisation approach.

http://www.peaksware.com/articles/running/linear-vs-non-linear-periodization-in-running.aspx

Hodgie-San .....

WWith all due respect, you're missing the point somewhat .....

No one is saying that Bill R. or Greg M. didn't train properly .... they clearly did. Volume & number of workouts would be very similar to those that Canova might have his athletes do.

What they did not do is train specifically (as per Canova's method) ....

Examples ....

* Paces for 800m / 1200m / 1600m reps were considerably FASTER than goal race pace (Canova's athletes would do more volume e.g. 12-15 x 1K (as opposed to 6 x 1M) @ the EXACT goal race pace or just marginally faster)

* Longest reps for Rogers etc. appears to be 2K (Canova would likely include 3K or even 5K reps @ EXACT goal race pace)

* Canova would be very unlikely to include 400m reps @ a pace considerably faster than target race pace

* Hills are 500/600m reps: essentially anaerobic (Canova would proscribe SHORT 80/100m Hill SPRINTS: essentially alactic)

* Schedules for Rogers/Meyer don't specify the pace of easy/steady runs (Canova's athletes would do regeneration runs @ proscribed paces: probably 80% of race pace)

Total volume etc. may be similar, but the detail IS different.

[quote]rekrunner wrote:

Besides that Lydiard is not Pfitzinger, nor gypsy, the answer is in the 5 bullets you quoted before. Training by feeling and regulating by response helps ensure adequate recovery in the reality, regardless of the initial plan. If Snell ever felt stale, they would bag the session and do it another day. If Snell went harder, he must have felt it was OK. Lydiard was a genius.

[quote]Antonio Cabral wrote:

So, the logical conclusion from your reply, and if we consider that Lydiard was right for both, Peter Snell and John Davies, then Pfitzinger can´t say what he says (the need of longer recovery), and Gypsy doesn´t either (the fundamental 48 hours of recovery that everybody knows...except Lydiard).

Same conclusion once again. We need to focus just on Lydiard and not every kind if Lidiardism revisionist, Lydiard imitations, people that for every kind of ignorant reason or reason of oportunity says "i´m Lydiard" or "I´m Lydiard influenced."

See once again the problem of the Lydiard method. We are running in circles. It´s reponse is feeling regulated, and by feeling is something individual, no one really knows...can´t be built one standard from feeling regulated, it´s the feeling of the runner ? The feeling of the coach (when the runer is coached by one coach) ? The interpretation by the coach of the feeeling of the runner ? Totally undefined. Absolutely.

To be in agreement with what you say then Gipsy (precribes 48 hours fundamental) and Pfitzinger (prescribes long need of overcompensation)then both Gipsy and Pfitzinger are just very 2 poor imitation of Lydiard, just Lydiard trash training version.

What you say moves us for another question. If the response is regulated, regulated to what ? Regulated by Peter Snell feeeling, regulated by Arthur, regulated by me or you.

With the principle of response regulated it´s not possible to get one clear methodologic definition of the lenght of recovery training principle, and it would be impossible to define overcompensation related to 2 efforts.

So why could Gypsy or Pfitzinger have a fundamental and trustfull define in time duration of recovery. they don´t. No one really does byu feeling regulated.

However it´s possible to define by physiology parameters and the lenght of duration of the period after the workout, that every individual case might require some adjustement.

It´s possible, but it´s not the "feeling regulated" that is able to define.

...And the Matt Fitzgerald article about Periodisation.

Just one trash Lydiardist version of the history of distance training periodisation.

A few aspects that he says it´s true. But as someone said "the lie and demagogy for better be catch in truth, needs a few points of real truth they way to validate the lies". It´s what the this article does.

ps - Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to you all.

I wish the best to all Lydiardists as the non-Lydiartists as well.

Special greetings to HRE, Rekrunner, Skuj, Hodgie-san, Gypsy, Wetcoast (mr. Keshall), mr. Nobby and some more.

I hope that the 2012 will bring you the best.

Thank you, Antonio. Merry Christmas and a wonderful 2012 to you as well.

As you wished us Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, I will regulate my response.

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to you too.

I'm sure you and Renato have a point when you talk about influence in English speaking countries. Perhaps if Stampfl and Igloi and Gerschler and Reindell and Zatopek and the Soviets and many others had published books in perfect English, Lydiard would get much less discussion here. I mentioned before Timothy Noakes "Lore of Running". In that book, Lydiard gets some mention, but not as much as another Arthur before him, Arthur Newton, who developed the idea of a strong aerobic foundation in training.

Besides giving historical credit to linear periodization to Lydiard, the rest of Matt Fitzgerald's article seemed fairly sensible to me, as a description of the differences between linear and non-linear periodization, and some of the criticisms for and against. I'm curious what else you found incorrect.

Horses for courses Gypsy, but horses are not people, they can't be compared by reference to a recovery period. I think someone in this thread mentioned the 48 hours in reference to the normal club nights for training. That was my experience in UK and here in Aus it is the same. Coaches are available for training Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday and so it goes on. When dealing with developing athletes some athletes recover more quickly than others and others can't or won't inform you of their condition. You observe and adjust the training to suit but that 48 hours recovery is fixed by that programme. Again with developing athletes one tries to introduce a more flexible system and allow for a longer recovery period because over time experience tells one as a coach that 48 hours is not enough recovery for hard sessions. Howver the younger athletes (and their parents) find that flexible approach confusing (they need to know training is Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday) With my elite athletes I am introducing a hard/moderate/easy/hard format that I know from experience is much more beneficial to their long term development than hard/easy/hard.

Incidentally, I believe I know Antonio very well from years of correspondence. I find him to be a very considerate and knowledgeable coach, I would consider him a mentor and a friend. He has much to offer in teaching and understanding from both an historical and modern perspective, if one has respect and patience since English is not his first language (it is one of his 5 or so languages). He is passionate and strong in his views and prepared to debate but that just makes him more interesting.