intervals question?

Tanya Skagle wrote:

And I still don't see any published work or even a general consensus disputing the notion contained in these quotes. In addition, I have said that I'm open to correction if such dispute does exist.

I want to bet my 2 cents that from the physiology perspective the danger of short fast intervals overall intensity isn’t anaerobic, lactate concentration, Ph as some they say.

The main danger is cortisol change.

I still don't see many published work but I admit that can be published eventually. My conclusion is the result of my observation in cortisol tests during training blocks of extreme short type fast intervals.

malmo wrote:

I particularly like this one:

"Detraining results in a gradual but fairly rapid loss of muscle mitochondrial content. Studies have demonstrated that approximately 50 percent of the increased muscle mitochondrial content induced by training can be lost within one week of detraining (3). The time period to return muscle mitochondrial content to pre-detraining levels is longer than the detraining time period."

I don't know what constitutes "detraining" but if 50% of the increase in muscle mitochondria content can be lost or given back in a week, that just shows you how little we should be paying attention to cellular organelles when it comes to athletic training. The benefits and responses to athletic training are many.

Exactly, that conclusion is so completely and utterly ridiculous, that I am at a loss to find words to express my concern about the bullshitification of the subject of mitochondria, 14 years after I first read about that study.

Thanks malmo for your input on this subject, which requires someone even smarter than me to debunk the nonsense.

Tanya, forget about mitochondria. Worrying about the best way to maximize mitochondrial mass is silly. All runners need to maintain their aerobic capacity is a moderate amount of training at various intensities.

I love the subject of exercise physiology just as much as you do, but I don't believe in 'scientific training' and I think you would also use your knowledge better for coaching purposes, if you were equally skeptical of certain areas of dogma in the field of sports science.

I have raised this issue of widely accepted nonsense about the general subject of of 'aerobic development' many times.

There is a general ignorance about the subject which has increased year upon year, until quite recently. I hope this recent development is a watershed.

Tanya Skagle wrote:

And herein is a danger in relying on lab findings to design a game plan..it never addresses the gestalt that is human performance.

Nor, indeed, rat performance.

That's all very well, but middle and long distance runners need to be able to transfer that shorter ground contact (faster speed) to longer and longer efforts. Do you have a plan for that?

How can young American men do sevral 1000m efforts in under 2.30 and still recover in 2 days?

That's exactly right. See, I do get where you're coming from here. I really do. I've seen plenty of people blather to support an agenda-related stance that frankly has very little (or even counterproductive) practical use. I just don't get the need for the original "football hooligan reacting to a questionable call" impersonation. When the subject has come up (quite infrequently, mind you), the prevailing view among the people I've chatted with - people who were long-time serious runners first and exercise scientists second - is (and I quote one of them) "For mitochondrial development, intensity is preferable to duration." If it's bullshitology, so be it. I'm just relaying what I've learned from others I have no reason to doubt. Don't. Shoot. The. Messenger.

Bullshitology, BTW, is pronounced with a medium stress on the first syllable and a heavier stress on the third.

But I see where you're coming from. People suggest practical applications for fizzyology at the expense of the basics all the time. In the end, mitochondria have no bearing on why someone would do 10 x 400 as opposed to 20 x 400. For the record, as much as this thread smacks of an article straight out of Peak Performance, I did not mention any principle for the purpose of application. I never advocated selecting one workout over the other because of anything to do with mitochondria.

There are barmy types who stubbornly harp on some isolated finding in a decades-old or obscure study (regardless of its truth or falsehood) to justify some laughable, cockamamie training concept that's already been put under real-world trial time and again and has rightly been rejected. For example, Richard Gibbens likes to cite this same 1982 Dudley report in his "Power Running" manifesto. Not to single him out for ridicule, but he's posted as Richard_ on this forum in the past, so he's fair game. Guys like that not only can't see the forest for the trees; they incessantly try to nurture the only birch tree in the forest and don't notice that rest of the forest is comprised of Douglas-firs.

But I'm not cut from that mold. As I said, at the end of the day, I believe we're on the same team. I'm not using fizzyocrap with the intent of advocating anything here, and I take as dim a view of that nonsense as anyone ever has, because 1) a theoretical approach doesn't work in the real world and 2) it wouldn't qualify as the primary justification for doing something even if it did work.

The bottom line is that we do workouts to improve our race results. Are we getting fitter and faster and are we moving up the pecking order? I previously mentioned the notion of doing workouts with the right timing. The concept of "now is the right time" for including a workout is quite important. Even if it's executed to perfection, if it's included at a very inappropriate time, something might not turn out as well as it could. Everybody pretty much knows what kind of pace, how many reps, and how much recovery between reps make for good guidelines to follow for these individual workouts. Hence, in threads about workouts, you'll get the same responses from many people concerning pace, rest intervals and number of reps. What is very hard to communicate is how to formulate the overall game plan, since that depends on too many things - age, experience, the type of athlete someone is (fiber composition, etc. do play a role in this), psychological makeup (this might include something like whether a guy is a workout king or steps it up to a different level on race day), what kind of workouts were done during the last 12, 8, 4, 2 weeks, susceptibility to injury, and so on. People who rely on "scientific training" aren't going to grasp any of this.

Up until about a decade ago, I was as gung ho about that prospect as anyone has ever been about any subject. Unfortunately, the spirit of the sport that was so prevalent in the 1970s was missing among the vast majority of would-be runners. I came to realize that it was unhealthy to "want it more than the athletes." Other runners from the 1970s and early 1980s shared the frustration and suggested I should give up on the USA and move to Mexico, where the runners of the time were committed in both thought and in action. This idea that it's bad for the sanity to want it more than your runners is a notion that I've also heard Jack Daniels and Mick Byrne express (perhaps with different words).

In some ways, guiding somebody along a career trail can be rewarding. Even after 100 journeys, it never gets old to say, "Another 50 yards ahead, you should be coming to a gnarly old oak tree. You can either go left there or can go straight ahead. Going left takes longer and some people find it a little less scenic, but it's not as rocky. It's up to you, but based on how you handled that rocky patch a few miles ago and the fact that you like to take your time and not care about the view, I think going left will work out better for you."

But my thoughts on what a runner's long-term goals should be have generally been much more demanding and far-reaching than the willingness I've seen in these runners. Additionally, no one ever knows how far along that trail they will get during their career, and I see far fewer runners now who will do it for the enjoyment of the journey itself; rather, they seem entitled to the guarantee they will reach a specific destination. Alas, this is too frustrating to deal with for a perfectionist and a purist runner like I am. It's downright unhealthy, in fact.

So we can agree about one thing - let's start over and forget about mitochondria. Look where it's gotten us.

Thanks Tanya, I really enjoyed that post. I agree with everything you say there.

The wanting it more than the athletes thing, possibly highlights the fact that you are more serious than them?

That's why I have decided that I don't want to coach anyone unless they beg me to help them. I will continue to act as a mentor for anyone and everyone who is interested, and contribute and share ideas.

About my question of why African runners are better, latelely I have been trying to distil to the essence of running, concerning stride length and how I believe that they way we develop this as kids is how we should continue to develop at any age. The natural bounding style of a child seems to be discouraged here and in magazine articles, with writers advising a faster stride rather than a longer one. This is a false notion. The basics of biomechanics show that as we get faster, stride rate increases naturally. So all this 180 strides per minute stuff and the 'avoid overstriding' stuff (what do they mean by that?) is nonsense, whadya think?

BOLLOCKS!

Just kidding. :-P

J.O. wrote:

So all this 180 strides per minute stuff and the 'avoid overstriding' stuff (what do they mean by that?) is nonsense, whadya think?

People stride longer because they are running faster, not the other way round.

I have a physics degree and I see it as simple arithmetic - rather than biomechanics. Speed = stride length x frequency.

A pendulum (forced or not) tends to have a resonant frequency and it requires massive energy to speed it up. As people get faster, their stride rate doesn't change much for the above reason, but the stride length does. This is NOT because they are deliberately overstriding but simply because they are going faster, and thus covering more distance in the air.

I don't know of ANY sprinters anywhere who deliberately train to sustain a longer-than-natural stride by 'bounding'. Most of them train to get more powerful and give the ground a much harder kick as they fly over it - and/or to recover fast and pull through a flexed leg.

Overstriding implies some excess or exaggeration of a natural stride. We gather this from the prefix "over".It's basically a question of your old friend, economy. Are you going as fast as you can, for as long as you need, with the least energy cost?It's also inseparably linked to mitochondrial growth, capillary density, and lactic acid avoidance. Well, maybe not.

J.O. wrote:

So all this 180 strides per minute stuff and the 'avoid overstriding' stuff (what do they mean by that?) is nonsense, whadya think?

Are you kidding? -- that was great entertainment!

Tanya Skagle wrote:

So we can agree about one thing - let's start over and forget about mitochondria. Look where it's gotten us.

J.O. wrote:

... they way we develop this as kids is how we should continue to develop at any age.

Of course runners rely on both stride length and stride frequency, and each runner may favor one over the other for any given speed when compared to the average runner at that speed. It could be that the best distance runners in any given era will be faster than those in previous eras by virtue of being able to transfer greater power into increased stride length as opposed to increasing stride frequency. Kenenisa Bekele seems to have longer strides and lower stride frequency at a steady tempo than some of the other elites have.

Either way, runners who favor force (longer strides) at pace X are going to be using that natural trait whenever they train at pace X anyway, so there probably isn't a need for a lot of supplementary work designed to maintain their force or to consciously improve it. Nor is their any need to go overboard with exercises intended to make that runner slot into some predetermined "ideal" stride frequency. It would be square-peg-in-round-hole silly to waste valuable training time making a long-legged runner adopt a stride rate of 185 steps per minute just because most of the 5'5" elites of the era were doing it. I can't recall the stride frequencies of Jack Bacheler or Peter Maher, but theirs can't have been as high as those of Josiah Thugwane or Juma Ikangaa. In the same vein, if it happens that one of the 5'5" guys is more force-reliant (longer strides) than average, that guy is probably going to run best with that stride pattern, especially if those mechanics were arrived at through plenty of running at a young age.

Force-reliant runners seem to do better when they play to their strengths by regularly touching on that aspect of stride mechanics. But because they're force-reliant, they're doing that anyway whenever they train at or near the speeds of their preferred race distances. So resistance training, calisthenics or plyos above and beyond the cursory "supplemental" amounts might not have as profound an impact as some runners wish it would. Race-pace training goes a long way toward covering that base. Doing fairly short buildups which reach top speed for about 3 seconds (like sprinters do when they do short trials using speed gates) also helps for running-specific force production / stride length.

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You still have to work on your stride length if you want to improve. You seem to be missing this point. Interval training, tempo runs, longs runs etc will only develop this so far. You need some specific stride lengthening work to go beyond your normal limits.

rekrunner wrote:

Overstriding implies some excess or exaggeration of a natural stride. We gather this from the prefix "over".

It's basically a question of your old friend, economy. Are you going as fast as you can, for as long as you need, with the least energy cost?

It's also inseparably linked to mitochondrial growth, capillary density, and lactic acid avoidance. Well, maybe not.

J.O. wrote:

So all this 180 strides per minute stuff and the 'avoid overstriding' stuff (what do they mean by that?) is nonsense, whadya think?

Who overstrides? Do you see any slow runners with a 7 foot stride?

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It doesn't matter what your biomechanics are, whether you have a long loping stride or a short pitter patter stride, the same priciple of improving stride length applies.

I think it's a common mistake of beginners. They try to force themselves to run faster by unnaturally overdoing their strides, for their ability. At least that's what I did when I was about 13. Then I noticed that our "star" runner seemed to be taking lots of little steps. So when I tried to "mimic" him, I instantly cut about 20 seconds of a 1 mile time trial.I haven't done any extensive analysis (like analyzing videos of Ryan Hall, Meb, and Ritz, and claiming a change in form will bring sub-2 hour marathon times). I just think of the overstriding problem really as a question of improving running economy, by improving running technique.

J.O. wrote:

Who overstrides? Do you see any slow runners with a 7 foot stride?

That's how you learn. It's the natural way.

J.O. wrote:

You still have to work on your stride length if you want to improve. You seem to be missing this point. Interval training, tempo runs, longs runs etc will only develop this so far. You need some specific stride lengthening work to go beyond your normal limits.

I am intrigued now. Good middle distance runners work on their muscular power in various ways which can increase speed (and thus stride length): heavy weights, Olympic lifts, hill sprints. Does that count?

They also do drills - both bounding and quick/short drills (high knees, heel flicks etc). Are you saying we all need more bounding? Perhaps we should do LESS of the 'frequency drills' as they are done with a shorter stride?

Or are you saying we all need to add in sustained, substantial sessions of bounding and artificially-longer-stride-then-usual runs?