Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

Hi all,
I wanted to share my experience after a couple of months following the Norwegian Singles Method (NSM).

At the end of June I ran a 5K race in 20:45, an evening event in very warm conditions, and I was happy enough with it. Around mid July I stumbled onto the NSM thread here on LetsRun, started reading from the very beginning, and a lot of what Sirpoc84 and others described made sense to me.

Implementation:
I began following NSM properly on 26 July. Since then, I’ve averaged around 85 km per week, running every day and targeting three sub threshold sessions per week, each about 30 minutes of work.

Progress:
30 August: I felt ready to break 20 minutes at my local parkrun, ran 20:05.
28 September: In a competitive club- hosted 5K, I ran 19:30, finishing strong and definitely leaving seconds on the course after starting cautiously.
I’ve gone under 20 minutes plenty of times in the past, but what’s new is that I did it weighing over 77 kg, something I’ve never done before.
I’m closer to 50 than 40, and have been running for years, so I’m not new to structured training. But NSM has given me something very different and I’m completely sold on it.

My Observations:
1. Strength & Aerobic Capacity: The sustained aerobic load builds strength that I’ve never felt before.
2. Cadence: My cadence has increased noticeably, I suspect running every day helps with becoming more economical, and usual niggles have subsided.
3. Motivation: Through the roof. I actually look forward to the sessions. Also having not PBd in a number of years, I'm becoming optimistic.
4. Recovery: After sub threshold work, my evening resting HR (just sitting on the couch) is far lower than after any VO₂ type session. I’m clearly recovering better.
5. Session Enjoyment: Some say NSM is “vanilla”, I completely disagree. Whether it’s 3*10min off 60s at 30K pace or 15*2min at 10k pace off 45s, you touch a wide range of speeds and always finish feeling good.
6. Easy Runs: The magic of running slow. I’m running 6:00/km, listening to podcasts or planning my day ahead. It’s just refreshing.

Right now, I’ve never felt stronger, or more motivated, and hopefully soon - fitter. The structure and the aerobic emphasis are spot on for me. I can’t wait to see where this approach taps out, fully on board.

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Didn't he basically play around with all this BEFORE he came to thread? 400s, training with vo2 max workouts, making it sustainable. I'm sure all this will be in the book. In fact it's developed as we have gone through the thread. I'm sure if you asked him what his training was at the start versus now, it would be different. Hell, the dude has even experimented for how to extend it for a marathon and hen ran it for us to follow along in real time, just to see it works. Spoiler, it does for anyone from sub 2:30 to 4+ hour total mid to back packers like us.

Of all the noise and busy periods of this thread, it always comes back to someone's long term review and usually glowing praise. I don't think this thread will ever die or it'll outlive just about any other long term thread. More and more people are definitely realising when people this say 'it could be for you' that it genuinely just might be true for a large proportion of us.

Maybe he has finally got some spinsi or something. You couldn't really blame him if he's shilling for them. Although I always figured he isn't the guy to want to get into that sort of thing.

I haven’t had the time to read up on the Reddit thread, although Bakken is now contributing there. Is this thread still the place to be, or is the Reddit thread as good?

Based on his disdain for the product on his strava and reddit comments I highly doubt he is shilling or being paid to review it 🤣

More likely he is simply experimenting with another proxy for lactate to see if it works like he did with Stryd.

You got it ha ha.

Definitely no shilling here. I unfortunately paid for the tymewear with my own money. I have been asked to promote products, but I don't see the point. I was told with one company it would fit in well with the NSM, but i couldn't say anything negative. That doesn't work for me. I guess I call a spade a spade, so I would be the worst shiller ever. On the flip side, if something is good I'll happily endorse it for free if asked for an opinion (hey Li-ning, feel free to send me some free shoes after all the nice things I said recently though ha ha).

Anyway, back to tymewear. Stryd just didn't work for me. As I've said, that sucks I really wanted it to work. I really want to say to everyone, go buy a tymewear. But I can't.

Does it work? Yes. Does it work great? No. The data is pretty noisy when you use 30-60s smoothing/average on workouts. In that sense, it's really not anymore useful than HR, which also has it's problems in the middle of a workout or a race, in terms of where your pacing needs to be pitched. I do think maybe it's a little better than HR, but worth the money? Absolutely not.

The company itself isn't great. 3+ months to get it. Had 9 emails saying it would be shipping imminently over those 3 months or so. App is horrendous. They should actually just scrap that, until it's not Beta.

Also, you can only get your ride or run analysed by then, if you use the app to record. Well my device drops out when connected to the app. And has on all 5 devices I have tried the app on. Yet tymewear insist it must be my user error, or all my devices are broken. Despite it working for around 20 mins, dropping out and then you need to take the battery out and repair. But they don't seem to even accept it could be an app issue, especially when it connects fine with my Garmin with the app not involved.

On top of that, your Garmin files can upload to tymewear app, but then if you do that, they won't analyse them for you. No idea why. They don't seem to want to explain that, even as a paid subscriber. You must record via the app for tests is all they say, even though I replicated them exactly as they said, just used my Garmin so I could actually get through it without losing connection. Other people have reported the connection issue to the app, FWIW.

They basically have told me to go away now and that they are too busy trying to help other users get set up, than trying to go round in circles helping me. When I asked them for some features to make it better, they basically told me not to email them ever again ha ha to be fair I probably would tell me to F-off as well I'm annoying , but it's not great customer service. This is despite me telling them I doubt they have one person on the planet who understands how useful this could be, or want it to work great more than me and I really have a few simple things or displays that could improve it massively.

On top of that I did a cycle workout, a run workout on Thursday and a few easy runs this week, with just using ventilation turning points (to be fair, it wasn't hard to determine these from the test myself, in intervals, then enter the values myself in the app, I wish they had told me first you could do this, but I'm not sure they even realised this and consistently made out like you HAD to use the app, plus you have to be confident on reading data yoirself) on screen and nothing else, they came out the same as.......

An easy run exactly the same had I just used HR, a sub threshold run workout the same had I used pace with weather adjustments or a ride identical had I just used power. I mean that's nice confirmation, but again, it was only really useful to look at the data after.

Last bit of a long post. I might go back and lactate test at the various ventilation turning points as I'm not really training properly still or have a focus, but I'm not sure I can be bothered. I probably should, but the whole thing feels like massive hard work, rather than it working for you.

Anyway, for anyone interested, that's my current non shilling view on tymewear. I also suspect it's a very small company, over the few months I've had quite a lot of people and names sign off emails, but i feel like it's the same person writing each time with a load of different names to maybe make the company seem bigger than it is.

TL:DR the actual tech works probably better than I expected, but real time data is still noisy. The company is a bit of a cluster and probably using us poor suckers as beta testers and definitely do not want to hear about any of the problems.

Edit: oh the HR monitor that comes with it sucks as well. Never had so many spikes/potential cadence lock. Usually only ever have got that with wrist based monitors.

Thanks for the honest review. I've been curious about it for a few months as a potential lactate proxy, but I have a couple things preventing me from jumping onboard: "respiration rate lock" and the durability of the chest strap.

Regarding "respiration rate lock", I've found that when in sub-threshold territory, low or high, I breathe in two steps then breathe out two steps. It's only when I'm in very easy or very high VO2 max territories that it breaks the 2/2 pattern. I'm curious how that influences my VT1/VT2 boundaries, if any.

Regarding the durability of the chest strap, I know that the RRM module is not removable unlike the HRM module. The RRM module uses a strain gauge to measure chest expansion and this seems like something that would wear out over time.

I emailed Tymewear about the durability of the RRM module and chest strap on the whole. I wanted to know would have to pay another $300 for a replacement. They responded "good question, we'll get back to you" and never got back to me.

I figured as a result I would let the early adopters like yourself fiddle with it, hopefully work out the bugs, and then decide if it's worth replacing my reliable Polar H10.

I know Seiler is a fan of RR. I can’t understand how RR can ever be particularly good at measuring intensity to any level of detail, when the range of RR is always going to be small.

What about deeper breathing at the same RR, will this be picked up by the measuring device?

Is not just the RR values. You can do a bunch of analysis on RR values and estimate some things.

for some data-a1 with a well as estimated VT1. This is based on RR.

You are being kind. I have it. It's cheap feeling, the HR part is the worst I've ever had and the app was made by a high school kid. There's quite a few people I think who have your problems. I queried the data from the test that cannot possibly be right, of where they estimated my LT1, LT2 , based on previous lab tests. It's so far out the margin of error it's laughable. Lucky like you, I had someone who could read data and then I pinpoint where it actually is. It's not far off a lab. But how useful? I'm not so sure. The data noise actually worse than HR and I agree other than easy days, HR is tricky to use itself. So have I learned anything new? I don't think so.

Also they are very rude the customer team. Maybe they are out of their depth? I think you have been too kind to them. For the price of this product it is total disgrace that users are having to interpret their own data or work around things. They have the tech from another company making bespoke, I think from Asia. So hopefully that company starts selling non branded versions and we can just forget horrible tymewear.

They tell me 300 uses a few months ago. After then, strain guage is broken. CS agent tell me only use it in important situations. Yet they seem it like it is for everyday training use. I don't think they have thought this product through before putting to market. Really is terrible in state it is. But mainly company fault with bad, so bad, communication and contradictory.

VE minute volume is the key metric. RR is just an afterthought. Everything and training is linked to VE first and foremost. VE and RR don't seem hugely linked, you can keep one stable without the other. So you have to ask the question. What it is measuring exactly? I know they have said what they said, but I am not convinced it even does what say on tin.

The importance of any tool is consistency from day to day. This was big problem with Stryd.

One more note, if you do not do strap up EXACTLY same way as first time you do test, you will never get same results again. I try this. VT1 is minute volume 112 for me. But if I do strap up just a notch looser on belt, I can ride 90 VE but clearly I am still at same HR, same power and same effect as before until I loosen strap.

But big problem here is the strap you can only adjust I think to clip in, already one of the clips is becoming loose. They do send spare strap in box, I think they know their product will break here, but even after 6 months I think this will be a huge problem and then you can never replicate your numbers again anyways.

You see why sirpoc being too kind, there are so many problems here for $300 these guys are frauds. The money is too much and far too many problems. As sirpoc said, it's more like lactate testing, a confirmation took rather than something that tells us anything new. If you understand this sirpoc training or power on bike, you really do not need this.

I understand what you’re saying. You are describing why I wouldn’t buy a Tymesear.

I bought a metabolic cart years ago. Learned more testing myself than I ever would have using something like Tymewear.

Ah, that's too bad, but not surprising. Hopefully the product improves. It has some interesting potential I think, but like most wearables, will likely remain very niche.

Just adding another "testimonial" and perhaps a data point of one on the relative importance of the race efforts (spoiler: doesn't seem to matter much for me).

Jumped on the NSA bandwagon end of summer 2024. Was a decent, if unfocused, runner, a handful of 2:56-2:57 type marathons, some middle of the road 50k results. That fall did NSA almost to a T, settled around 45 miles a week. My race efforts were as follows: 17:15 5k solo time trial on the track in late September, road 5k in early November of 16:56 (PR) and a Turkey Trot 10k in 34:48 (PR). The week after the 10k I jumped into a 50 miler, predictably the wheels fell off half way but managed to finish.

After recovering from the 50 mile jumped right into the slow build toward Boston. Kept the NSA approach but slowly increased volume, peaked around 75 miles but bulk in the 65 mpw range. I didn't half the benefit of Sirpoc's marathon success to copy, so basically did NSA to begin and then slowly started doing more traditional weeks of one workout (still used sub T) and one long, hard day. Ran a 1:18 high HM in February.

Ended up over cooking it, got a cold two weeks before race day that turned into a sinus infection, went 1:23 through halfway in Boston before blowing up spectatularly and finishing in 3:18.

Put myself back together after that and started back on the NSA train heading into the summer, but with an eye to getting more trail time, so wasn't super strict, lots of weeks the third workout was replaced with a long trail day. Mid July had a big one day run/fast hike in the Sierras, and then end of July did 36 miles on my birthday. Immediately got sick, ran probably 40 miles combined the first three weeks of August, have been slowly ramping back up since then, settling in the 40 mpw range.

So basically been "back" for 5 weeks, first three weeks only did 2 sub T days, two weeks ago was first time doing 3. Was kind of ball-parking paces off effort, but knew I needed to get an actual result to tighten things up, so jumped on the track yesterday morning for a 5k time trial. Ran 17:06 after going out in 3:21 and almost quitting at 2k, holy crap tracks are the worst.

Anyway, in summary in the past 13 months I have done precisely four days faster than 10k pace. The fact that yesterday I was able to settle right into 5:30 pace and basically stick it is a testament to the magic of the method.

I have a hard time imagining a Daniels plan or any other could have gotten me from my lull in August to almost PR shape in 5 weeks, and feeling great while doing it. Anyway, that's my story, sorry it got a little long winded.

Thanks to everyone who has and continues to contribute to this thread, it's basically the only reason I visit this site anymore.

I don't know what to think. It all seeems overblown to me? There are also a group of 3 marathon runners on Strava who all "claim" to suddenly have found the "magic" of this method and ran PBs.

I can't help but think simply people would have perhaps run FASTER had they put some of the suggestions like Magness or more importantly a real thinker in hobby training like Matt Fitzgerald suggested?

Does anyone else get the feeling sirpoc is holding these guys back? I can't help but think a top coach or someone who knows what they are doing would really have hobby joggers peaking at the right time

Not so fast. RR can be interesting if you want to see a decoupling, meaning the point when the internal load (RR) and the external load (pace) decouples, RR increases unproportional at the same pace. Remark: That can be also identified by HR.

I can also imagine that the strap has to be attached exactly the same way, as the
breast expansion is not the same everywhere.

I confronted Tymewear (i have no device), that in science there is VT1 and VT2 only, 2 turnpoints of the minute volume, but the CEO insists that they find 3 turnpoints and they have verified that. Strange.

Based on the feedback here, alpha status at best it seems ...

Ah yes. So all the changes many of us have tried and build too much fatigue, and then come back to sirpoc method, give or take a few minor adaptations.

Posts like this are just boring. Is this the only training method available? Of course not. But it's likely the best, if you randomly gave plans to hobby joggers. A lot of people don't like that and want to put their own spin on it. From 1500 through to marathon, I'm yet to see something for hobby runners provide such consistent results. We have been there, done it when it comes to playing around with this method. But it always comes back to sirpoc and his ideas. Maybe he got lucky. Maybe he's a genius. Who knows. Doesn't really matter. It works. If it's not broken, don't fix it. The balance is pretty much there and this is as close to the golden goose you'll find.