So far, on here, Strava, and Reddit, people are posting up gains. The gains are being achieved, even by FT types, who Magness and other high profile influencers, say threshold doesn’t work.
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but the negative comments appear to be coming from those who haven’t trained this way for a period. If someone has trained for 6 months at vanilla NSM and regressed, we want to hear about it.
Magness does not say that threshold/sub-T doesn't work, or that it doesn't work for FT athletes - when he talks about FT athletes needing work closer to threshold pace, he's literally reading Bakken off the screen. One of his recommendations, to add some shorter faster work, is nearly the same as Bakken's recommendation.
It's unfortunate that some people can't handle back-and-forth discussion with differing views without treating the other side as blowhards and trolls (who do exist!), because Magness vs. NSM is a really interesting debate based on competing views of training with real, important consequences. Stop treating one of the most knowledgeable and accessible people in the sport like some influencer in search of clicks.
One of the great things about NSM is that you can put it in a (small) nutshell very easily: Load is load, and fitness depends overwhelmingly on cumulative load, and the best way to build cumulative approach is with a "sweet spot" approach of 3 sub-T sessions a week.
Compare that to Magness, whose basic model - based on decades of experience and an incredible understanding of the science and history of the sport - is that a training program needs to be tailored to the FT/ST physiology of the runner, and to the demands of the goal races, so that both aerobic and anaerobic fitness are essential, periodization is important, and specificity is key. His model - based in part on Bakken and on some other very reasonable points with good support - tells him that NSM would lead to sub-optimal fitness in important ways, including for 5K and marathon training. This is not a dumb take at all.
NSM even agrees slightly - a special marathon block is recommended - but overall disagrees about the importance of fiber type and specificity in most cases, and sees most periodization as a net negative for long-term training.
So it's very interesting that a lot of people report substantial success with NSM. Maybe there's something about the hobby jogger condition that means specificity and periodization just aren't as important as longer-term term incremental gains. Someone could design a rigorous experiment to find out.
And there are some clear implications about where to go after doing NSM base training. Magness sees a danger of near-term stagnation, with the next step being to work on anaerobic capacity and shift toward event-specific work. NSM instead predicts a plateau only the scale of 1-2 years, with a shift towards adding additional load (through doubles or cross-training) after that. Again, those are concrete, actionable predictions. Someone could test them rigorously in an experiment.
To be clear, it's not Steve Magness' obligation to perform the experiment. He's been giving us free blog posts, videos, and podcasts for the last 15 years. Still, it would be nice if someone could take an empirical look at what's going on, because it's probably interesting. The science might support Magness and Bakken, but my experience aligns with NSM, and I'd like to know why. Maybe, as Magness said, a lot of us just suck at workouts. But can we put parameters on that? Or is something else going on?
Is that really the issue with Magness?
The way I see it the issue with Magness is that after decades of training promising and elite athletes, he has lost touch with what the/his target audience is.
He puts out a video called "Best Training for Amateurs? Norwegian Singles deep dive" and his first conclusion is that the lack of hills will hurt you 400-800m races.
Already there 99.9% of the target amateur audience is hearing nothing but tinnitus .. cause none of them race 400-800m races. It's all 5k+.
Further more I suspect all the slow twitch/fast twitch and what not stuff doesn't come into play, before you're aerobically at your peak. The talents Magness is training might well be, but that is almost never the case for your regular guy trying to balance a job and a family. The gains there are there by improving your aerobic engine are far bigger than what speed work will give you .. especially if you factor in injury risk.
It just feels like Magness is all about giving really good athletes that extra %, so they start actually winning races, which is stellar off course, but not really relevant here.
Agreed on the audience/races. Less sure about FT/ST — Bakken mentioned on Reddit he would always recommend shorter and faster intervals for fast twitch types but sadly didn’t elaborate much further.
Agreed on the audience/races. Less sure about FT/ST — Bakken mentioned on Reddit he would always recommend shorter and faster intervals for fast twitch types but sadly didn’t elaborate much further.
Question is if I'm totally off on the slow/fast twitch .. or that too is rooted in Bakken mostly talking about sub-elite to olympian athlethes?
Magness does not say that threshold/sub-T doesn't work, or that it doesn't work for FT athletes - when he talks about FT athletes needing work closer to threshold pace, he's literally reading Bakken off the screen. One of his recommendations, to add some shorter faster work, is nearly the same as Bakken's recommendation.
It's unfortunate that some people can't handle back-and-forth discussion with differing views without treating the other side as blowhards and trolls (who do exist!), because Magness vs. NSM is a really interesting debate based on competing views of training with real, important consequences. Stop treating one of the most knowledgeable and accessible people in the sport like some influencer in search of clicks.
One of the great things about NSM is that you can put it in a (small) nutshell very easily: Load is load, and fitness depends overwhelmingly on cumulative load, and the best way to build cumulative approach is with a "sweet spot" approach of 3 sub-T sessions a week.
Compare that to Magness, whose basic model - based on decades of experience and an incredible understanding of the science and history of the sport - is that a training program needs to be tailored to the FT/ST physiology of the runner, and to the demands of the goal races, so that both aerobic and anaerobic fitness are essential, periodization is important, and specificity is key. His model - based in part on Bakken and on some other very reasonable points with good support - tells him that NSM would lead to sub-optimal fitness in important ways, including for 5K and marathon training. This is not a dumb take at all.
NSM even agrees slightly - a special marathon block is recommended - but overall disagrees about the importance of fiber type and specificity in most cases, and sees most periodization as a net negative for long-term training.
So it's very interesting that a lot of people report substantial success with NSM. Maybe there's something about the hobby jogger condition that means specificity and periodization just aren't as important as longer-term term incremental gains. Someone could design a rigorous experiment to find out.
And there are some clear implications about where to go after doing NSM base training. Magness sees a danger of near-term stagnation, with the next step being to work on anaerobic capacity and shift toward event-specific work. NSM instead predicts a plateau only the scale of 1-2 years, with a shift towards adding additional load (through doubles or cross-training) after that. Again, those are concrete, actionable predictions. Someone could test them rigorously in an experiment.
To be clear, it's not Steve Magness' obligation to perform the experiment. He's been giving us free blog posts, videos, and podcasts for the last 15 years. Still, it would be nice if someone could take an empirical look at what's going on, because it's probably interesting. The science might support Magness and Bakken, but my experience aligns with NSM, and I'd like to know why. Maybe, as Magness said, a lot of us just suck at workouts. But can we put parameters on that? Or is something else going on?
Is that really the issue with Magness?
The way I see it the issue with Magness is that after decades of training promising and elite athletes, he has lost touch with what the/his target audience is.
He puts out a video called "Best Training for Amateurs? Norwegian Singles deep dive" and his first conclusion is that the lack of hills will hurt you 400-800m races.
Already there 99.9% of the target amateur audience is hearing nothing but tinnitus .. cause none of them race 400-800m races. It's all 5k+.
Further more I suspect all the slow twitch/fast twitch and what not stuff doesn't come into play, before you're aerobically at your peak. The talents Magness is training might well be, but that is almost never the case for your regular guy trying to balance a job and a family. The gains there are there by improving your aerobic engine are far bigger than what speed work will give you .. especially if you factor in injury risk.
It just feels like Magness is all about giving really good athletes that extra %, so they start actually winning races, which is stellar off course, but not really relevant here.
US coaches and most of Lets Run are obsessed with college athletics. Its very much a USA thing. The coaches in each college take 100 kids, run them into the ground until 1 or 2 show theyre capable of winning races. Then they do the same the next year. It is proven to not work in the long term as US middle and long distance medal winners are very few and far between. Magness is part of this problem
I dont think people like Magness care about us normal hobby joggers. They will deal with mostly people who ran in HS or college where a lot of the world isnt like this. Tons of people in UK, Europe and a like will not do anything like this until their 30s or 40s when they have more time. They didnt run 100s upon 100s of miles in college. They dont have any base at all. He misses this because he cant comprehend people not being run into the ground in college
My view is this. In sport we have different coaches, for different jobs. There might be a youth coach in professional sport, who knows what works for developing athletes.
Consequently, coaches in European football or US sports at the absolute elite, might struggle as they move their way down the professional ladder. On the flip side, someone in UK football for example, might be the coach to get you out of the lower reaches who understands what it takes, but then you need someone who can coach higher level players when you get there.
If I was an elite, I'd probably want the experience of Magness or that calibre coaching me. As I'm a hobby jogger, I would pick sirpoc. If I ever cross that threshold from hobby jogger to elite (which i won't), I might move from one to another. This is just coaching. It would be silly to think elite coaches can scale down their work for hobby joggers, yet that seems to have been to normal up to a point. Personally I think that's why this method is so valuable, as it provides the foundations of training from the bottom up, that you rarely see in these copy and paste plans. Btw, I'm not saying that's everyone, there's a few coaches in this thread who see and understand the value of all this.
My view is this. In sport we have different coaches, for different jobs. There might be a youth coach in professional sport, who knows what works for developing athletes.
Consequently, coaches in European football or US sports at the absolute elite, might struggle as they move their way down the professional ladder. On the flip side, someone in UK football for example, might be the coach to get you out of the lower reaches who understands what it takes, but then you need someone who can coach higher level players when you get there.
If I was an elite, I'd probably want the experience of Magness or that calibre coaching me. As I'm a hobby jogger, I would pick sirpoc. If I ever cross that threshold from hobby jogger to elite (which i won't), I might move from one to another. This is just coaching. It would be silly to think elite coaches can scale down their work for hobby joggers, yet that seems to have been to normal up to a point. Personally I think that's why this method is so valuable, as it provides the foundations of training from the bottom up, that you rarely see in these copy and paste plans. Btw, I'm not saying that's everyone, there's a few coaches in this thread who see and understand the value of all this.
So basically, you are saying I'm Neil Warnock?
I get your point though, I think. I wouldn't dream of coaching elite athletes, I wouldn't know where to start. But, I think I know enough about training to help the majority of hobby joggers. Because everything I have done was to solve the problems I found myself in and I didn't really care about running logic.
I stick by though, that up until a certain point, the composition of training itself isn't that important. The job of any "coach" for a hobby jogger would be getting the balance between load and recover correct. Subthreshold is probably just the most sensible and least time intrusive way of doing it.
I do kind of understand what you mean, because with Grandma's guy (who I have worked quite closely with and is going to be far beyond my talents) I probably will run out of stuff to help, if he can get to the level I think he can. That last bit will be the difference, and that's something either the knowledge from an elite coach to pass on, or working with an elite coach only can help with.
But the flip side of that, is NSM got him to the point he can even think about totally maximising his talent to elite levels and that took patience, discipline and time.
There's no real right or wrong here, just about delivering training in a way that makes sense for the situation. I do think though, for most of us, the cautious and long term approach, is likely the most logical starting point.
My view is this. In sport we have different coaches, for different jobs. There might be a youth coach in professional sport, who knows what works for developing athletes.
Consequently, coaches in European football or US sports at the absolute elite, might struggle as they move their way down the professional ladder. On the flip side, someone in UK football for example, might be the coach to get you out of the lower reaches who understands what it takes, but then you need someone who can coach higher level players when you get there.
If I was an elite, I'd probably want the experience of Magness or that calibre coaching me. As I'm a hobby jogger, I would pick sirpoc. If I ever cross that threshold from hobby jogger to elite (which i won't), I might move from one to another. This is just coaching. It would be silly to think elite coaches can scale down their work for hobby joggers, yet that seems to have been to normal up to a point. Personally I think that's why this method is so valuable, as it provides the foundations of training from the bottom up, that you rarely see in these copy and paste plans. Btw, I'm not saying that's everyone, there's a few coaches in this thread who see and understand the value of all this.
So basically, you are saying I'm Neil Warnock?
I get your point though, I think. I wouldn't dream of coaching elite athletes, I wouldn't know where to start. But, I think I know enough about training to help the majority of hobby joggers. Because everything I have done was to solve the problems I found myself in and I didn't really care about running logic.
I stick by though, that up until a certain point, the composition of training itself isn't that important. The job of any "coach" for a hobby jogger would be getting the balance between load and recover correct. Subthreshold is probably just the most sensible and least time intrusive way of doing it.
I do kind of understand what you mean, because with Grandma's guy (who I have worked quite closely with and is going to be far beyond my talents) I probably will run out of stuff to help, if he can get to the level I think he can. That last bit will be the difference, and that's something either the knowledge from an elite coach to pass on, or working with an elite coach only can help with.
But the flip side of that, is NSM got him to the point he can even think about totally maximising his talent to elite levels and that took patience, discipline and time.
There's no real right or wrong here, just about delivering training in a way that makes sense for the situation. I do think though, for most of us, the cautious and long term approach, is likely the most logical starting point.
Hi, I've been training with the Sirpoc method for about 3 months, around 8 hours a week with 3 days of rest. I had to stop for a week due to the flu. How do you get back into training? Thanks.
If it was actually the flu, I would start with a few easy runs and aim for maybe 50% of volume first week back. Second week, I would aim for 70-80% and try a to two workout. If all good, back to normal by week 3.
If it was just a common cold, I would probably try my regular schedule but with slightly lower paces for a week, then back to normal.
Hi, I've been training with the Sirpoc method for about 3 months, around 8 hours a week with 3 days of rest. I had to stop for a week due to the flu. How do you get back into training? Thanks.
Put on running shoes. Place one foot in front of the other. Multiple times in a row.
...It would be silly to think elite coaches can scale down their work for hobby joggers, yet that seems to have been to normal up to a point ...
A real good coach, who understands the basic training principles, needs to be able to scale down for lower tier athletes. Otherwise he/she is not a good coach, and never was, simple as that.
A real good coach, who understands the basic training principles, needs to be able to scale down for lower tier athletes. Otherwise he/she is not a good coach, and never was, simple as that.
Unfortunately, this is a lot of coaches. Or influencers these days. Guys copying Jakob on less hours, no recovery time. None of it makes sense. I hear people all the time say "my coach has me running doubles". Dude, you are on 6 hours a week , you're coach is an idiot. I wish this wasn't so prevelant, but it is. I think maybe this is why this thread has hit home so much. It's looked to solve the problem of hobby jogging.
Agreed. It's how much volume can you stack while recovering. It's the same concept as progressing in weightlifting. You have to progressively overload your system consistently. Key word: Consistently.
The "magic" to this method is it's ability to make a generally aerobically underdeveloped, injury prone population consistent at a high volume relative to their training history. You start to introduce variation in stimuli, you have more degrees of freedom in your training, which increases the risk of SOMETHING going wrong and an injury popping up. The LACK of variability is what allows for consistency. Once you get to the point of diminishing returns after a few years, perhaps its worth it to see where else you can squeeze some performance out of your legs besides endless sub-threshold.
Agreed. It's how much volume can you stack while recovering. It's the same concept as progressing in weightlifting. You have to progressively overload your system consistently. Key word: Consistently.
The "magic" to this method is it's ability to make a generally aerobically underdeveloped, injury prone population consistent at a high volume relative to their training history. You start to introduce variation in stimuli, you have more degrees of freedom in your training, which increases the risk of SOMETHING going wrong and an injury popping up. The LACK of variability is what allows for consistency. Once you get to the point of diminishing returns after a few years, perhaps its worth it to see where else you can squeeze some performance out of your legs besides endless sub-threshold.
Good to see there are some coaches who really understand what is going on here and will hopefully use it for their clients benefit. It's so easy for a coach to want to "prove" themselves by prescribing the hero workouts, or intensity very early into a build. Whereas doing that for the general hobby jogger population it's doing them a disservice.
Ok stupid question. I get all this 60, 90 min pace etc. But, I just can't get my head around this if I am only running 30 mins a week, at hour pace, in 3 min blocks and that's the fastest workout I've done all week....... How am I meant to run a 5k?
I see sirpoc yesterday. Something like 3:20/km for around 3 mins reps (I even understand he's likely adjusted that for the conditions he's run in, so it's slower). But then he can run a 5k in 15 flat.
Even though all the evidence is there. I'm struggling with it. This isn't a troll I just don't understand how this can be possible and think surely this has to be sub optimal?
To be fair, I know you aren't trolling as I have had this conversation with many people in my running club, in real life, who are asking me how it's possible even at my age I'm making huge improvements without anything near 5k pace and then I turn up and am over a minute or so faster than 12+ months previously. Which at my age, is a huge improvement considering I've been slowing for about a decade now.
The fact is, specificity is really what you aluding to and it's clearly, in my view, overrated.
The book does a fantastic way of explaining why this works and how we get fit. I hope people are reading it all and taking it in. The impact of load is the primary driver of fitness gains. All you are doing when you get fitter is shifting your lactate curve to the right. By becoming better at around these slower paces, you inadvertently make yourself faster also further up the curve, so everything has shifted. Really, that's all getting fit is.
Of course, some specificity is nice. But, when do you actually need it? Especially just training like this you can hop into just about any distance and probably be on par, should you pace correctly (which as others have said, we now have the gold standard to use from the book). Nobody is saying don't do some specificity, for example if all you care about is a 5k.
I hope that makes sense, in some way. Again, this is where sirpoc has a headstart to get his head around it. He's used his cycling example. He's riding 3-4, sometimes 5 times a week sweet spot which is well under threshold power and then he's jumping into 10 mile time trials (around 20 mins) and finding it no problem to then ride at 105% of FTP, even though he's only trained for months on end at ~90% FTP. He figured , why on earth would this not apply to running? And seems to have ended up being correct.
This reminds me of MAF principles in terms of doing this for a long time, training at a given HR and sticking to it. (Granted MAF was dumb because of the weird calcs "take off X for this" and not realistic). But the overall principle of sticking to a HR and then getting fitter over time is similar to NSM in that load would increase, etc. over time.
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