Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

I hear some people say "you should be good enough to complete 1 or 2 more reps at the end", but IMO this seems to be overcooking it. Back when I ran VO2max workouts regularly I would get to the end and still be confident I could knock out 1 or 2 more reps if my life depended on it, and those were done at a 8-9/10 effort. With NSA you should have WAY more in the tank at the end, enough to repeat the entire workout if a gun was at your head IMO.

I actually just read the book. Fantastic btw.

But in that, sirpoc says you can just look at load through the lens of logging minutes and hours a week. Especially if you train the same way, on repeat, essentially that provides the most simplified version of your load increasing, or not. You could easily follow the whole thing, without something like intervals.icu, although I do find it useful at times. So there's two sides.

I asked sirpoc about 3 months ago on Strava, what his CTL was. He said he didn't know and had to look it up. Once you get into it you probably just are in a routine and you aren't even looking at the numbers.

I dunno, maybe? My perception is with a 9/10 workout, I might even blow the last rep of a vo2 max workout if I went again for one more rep. But that's just me. 3x10 though, i could definitely do two more but that's me done for a few days, a third, I'm probably in the sh*t for 4-5 days, a bit like the recovery from a half.

People's perception of what they can then handle on top of the workout , but in theory, is likely pretty wide. I think just about everyone seems to be agreeing on 4-6/10 though with RPE?

Depends. I'm a numbers person so I'm motivated by some of the stats. But around 2002 when I was in the best shape of my life & doing Hadd training all I/we used was a Polar watch with HR chest monitor. Basically a stop watch that could record manual splits with avg HR for each, & total avg HR. We'd log min & HR in to a computer (or notebook) ourselves to track data if we wanted. I still think Polar sells those combos so you could look into something like that to track HR during a run easier.

I didn't have much of an idea of the pace I was running unless I ran on a track or until I'd go out after dark & spray paint mile markers on a road using my beat up 1991 Nissan Sentra odometer which I'm sure wasn't very accurate.

I don't think cadence matters. Knowing pace causes anxiety for some. Some mornings I wake up & my easy pace after evening workout is much slower going by HR, which I worry about, which only causes my HR to go up more, but at the end it doesn't matter. People nitpicking over 69% vs 71% easy runs isn't going to do us any good. Just run.

Jan definitely needs to write the book and it would be fitting to have the forward written by Antonio Cabral who was another self proclaimed coaching expert who wrote a lot on these boards...

Good to hear. Wasn't sure if I was missing something beneficial. Ironically I work in the tech industry and am a data science type. The Polar sounds worth checking out e.g. for a Friel test.

The 4-6 RPE for the sub-T reps seems low to me.

Let’s take a 20min 5km runner. Lactratce suggests that for a 20min 5k runner, LTHR is around 4:15/km and thus the Sub-T rep range therefore 4:15-4:30.

Easy runs are around 6:30/km.

There’s no perspective from which reps at 4:15-4:30 are just a 4 or 5 out of 10, for someone whose race pace is 4:00 flat. That is a high effort pace.

The RPE is closer to 6-8 for most of the Sub-T work, maybe even a 9 for the shorter reps if opting to push past T towards the end, à la Bakken.

Even though the point of the singles method is to not double the workouts in a day, my rule is I should be able to double back and run the whole workout again later in the day if my life depended on it, and not be afraid of the odds of success. Went 18:49 to 17:39 in a year, and from there to 17:01 in another 6 months. Was a 15:40 guy on the track in college, took most of my 30s off, currently 38 years old running only 30 mpw. Pretty happy with NSM.

Sorry to burst ykur bubble lol. By now I really just laugh out loud by this.

imagine making that comparison seriously like youre making a point

and then also imagine ignoring the fact that Coe and Bakken were in contact and shared notes

but we cant keep up with the paradigm of criticism from the trolls: is this too easy or too hard? is it too simple or too complicated?

or should ppl just cut the check and ship to to M Fitzgerald, esq for trying to slap his name on yet another thing he had nothing to do with?

funny how pimpled Coggan had that angle many many posts ago

and frequently spared and belittled Bakken for his approach

Have you run any of these workouts? Genuine question.

In your example, the 15-30 seconds per km is a HUGE difference. huge. To belabor the point slightly, that is at least well over a minute over a full 5k. I hope we can agree that a difference of 1:15-2:30 over a 5k represents a pretty substantial gap.

Additionally, we are only holding the faster end of this range for 3 minutes at a time, and the slower end for 10. Sure, if we were holding it for 20-30 minutes it would get pretty hard. But instead we're resting and resetting HR and lactate to some extent between reps, so for most it should indeed fall in that RPE 4-6 range. Obviously this isn't universal, some have reported these paces being a little aggressive and should be backing off by a few seconds accordingly.

Well, I can't say I belittle the work of runners have improved by this tweak of the Norwegian double thresholds . I'm happy for you! 🙏🖐😃🧙‍♂️ But I'm convinced these guys had very poor training and didn't have a clue how to perfectly train with a mix of VO2max and LT 2 in their weeks before they jumped on the NSM. And the 'Godfather' had already a very high endurance engine from subelite cycling and some critics pointed out that he sometimes ran maxVO2 and LT2 thresholds as well when suposed to run subthresholds.

Some guys before in the thread asked the critics for a better method on low mileage giving faster and sustained improvement and now I have partly given it here with the Dancan System of mine. It's absolutely impossible to reach one's optimum best possible running results without faster training paces than subthresholds 3 times per week. That's a fact, and I can say with 100% sureness for every runner has improved with this NSA method I had improved every one of them atleast as fast in shorter time. Yes, I know , you will downvote me because I say against the majority here, but there are only a few here with my longtime experience of running testing out myself in practise the most famous methods in history as a national elite runner and now last 10 years successful coaching ( really successful even if some stalkers here want to twist that claim) .I'm as I say happy for the guys have improved with the NSM , but you should never believe this is the the very best low mileage method ever....

Coach J.S , Swedish pro online running coach . 🇸🇪🧙‍♂️🇸🇪

i meant Antonio Cabral

You get a few upvotes, as we know from previous threads you log into multiple accounts. The best, being the one when you forgot and replied to yourself , in the thread you said you were training to win the world masters. At least one of the other critics in the thread is you, the use of ;-) and such is a dead giveaway. It's sad. It's pathetic. It's all a little odd and luckily those who have been here long enough know what a true head case you are.

The reason you will receive down votes is this. You have proven again and again you are a liar, a fraud and almost all the people you say you have coached, have either said they have never heard of you, or the ones that do exist, get worse. They get worse as you are obsessed with short term gains, which makes you a terrible coach. Awful in face. You claimed, at one point to coach a girl who was posting unbelievable workouts, who turned out was a recently graduated male college kid. You then brush off these things and pretend they never happen, or gaslight others into spinning it into your own narrative. Poor Jan.

The other reason you will receive downvotes, is no matter what you say, this thread has proven a fantastic example of community long term feedback, testimonials and thousands (yes really likely that many) of people have reported fantastic progress, on absolutely no vo2 work or any kind of intensity you are obsessed with, whatsoever. You casually just ignore that, and from your multiple accounts make out again from these various logins, that but it's everyone else's fault for not understanding the power of your vo2 workouts and they are magic. Yet you won't share the details of them, conveniently enough or ever actually give us an example of over let's say 6 months, how you would train an athlete.

Those are the facts. If you want to change that narrative, this thread has proven time and time again, absolutely anyone can communicate their ideas and if they work with attached ideas and evidence, anyone can get people to test them. The truth is, your system may as well be a cut and paste from a 90s manual, where you trade off volume, for days off and intensity.

It. Doesn't. Work. No matter how much evidence and real world experience gets out in front of you, the vast majority of folks will be better off and probably improve more just focusing on what this thread has identified as the barrier to the problems hobby joggers encounter. That is not more intensity.

The sheer irony here, is sirpoc himself absolutely promises nobody anything and no miracles, yet you continue to pollute the running community with make belief "magic" fantasy and at times staggering lies that have caught you out time and time again. You are almost certainly a sociopath, possibly worse. Of course you have absolutely no self awareness of this, which is all the classic signs.

I don't know if you have done these workouts, but if you are running 30 mins of reps at 4:15 pace (even the fastest end of your example) in 3 min chunks as a 20 min 5k runner and your RPE is 8 or even 9 as you suggest, something is drastically wrong. Like really wrong.

I started using this training I was quite old fashioned. Maybe not a stop watch but I didn't really make use. Last 6 months as a maths guy I thought why not delve a bit deeper. The PMC is very, very useful. Sure there are flaws with it, but it works surprisingly well if you do the same workouts most of the time and the calculations are pretty good in and around thresholds for load. I would say the PMC has really helped me make decisions about tapering and also when you maybe tag on some extra load after a period of consolidation. A lot of it is intuitive anyway, but it's nice almost as a second opinion.

I'm pretty old and stuck in my ways so if I find it useful, it probably is a good advert for maybe making use of some of the more basic metrics.

Jan, of all the threads you could get and get involved in and call yourself a "pro running coach" and looking for poor, gullible clients. This is like literally, the last place you should be fishing. Honestly dude, you actually aren't a bad conman and grifter. But know you audience. This isn't it my dude.

have you checked the strava of your godfather? When he runs 10 x 3 mins (1k), there are 3-4 of them being faster than 3:00 pace, and 6-7 of them faster than 3:08 pace, all off 1 min rest. That's definitely higher than 4-6 RPE because he knows it isn't hard enough. Again, he isn't really doing what he preaches. He's a fraud! Sorry, guys, there's no shortcuts or easy way when it comes to running. You have to find the perfect balance between training hard and recovering well which isn't NSA, as it has you train like a pu__y.

You're only wasting your time training this way. Just look at this guy on reddit (can't post link, but keyword is "honest 6 months review of NSA", despite all the "sub-t" running 1 hour every day and losing 20 pounds in the process, he PR-ed by 2 SECONDS in a frigging 10k, lmao

Again, I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything, I'm just trying to save you guys from all the hassle. WAKE UP, SIRPOC IS A FRAUD!