500 page short cut wrote:
why would it dilute ALL advantages? When I hear maximalist statements like this I need to hear some basis for them otherwise it sounds a bit like people a little too committed to defending their chosen philosophy. Not trying to be snarky either, you might indeed be right.
I've had my best success in the past mixing and matching from various programs based on how athletes respond and recovery. The key is understanding the total workload tax, recovery response etc of each athlete to various methods.
If this was truly the cutting edge then every pro would be doing it or losing , but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I think there are definitely ways to benefit from advancements in training philosophy and incorporate them to modify ones approach w/o replacing an entire approach that has worked. I'm not coming to this because I haven't had success with other approaches. I'm trying to use new understandings to improve approaches that are already working.
I'm not sure why there seems to be an insistence on all or nothing approach. It's highly unlikely that NSM is the end of the evolution of training theory. It's going to be replaced eventually with something that works better. And that will probably require using what is good about the Norwegian method in conjunction with something else. Advancement takes experimentation.
If this thread is dedicated to only adopting NSM w/o question, I apologize. Please direct me to the one where it is allowed to be discussed.
In defense of the of the NSM evangelists, that maximalist statement is ostensibly true given the constraints and assumptions that NSM operates within. The all or nothing approach is less a philosophical encumbrance and more just how the math works out if you are trying to squeeze the most aerobic stimulus into 5-8hrs /week of training. If you are operating within a sufficiently different context than that of NSM then the same maximization will not be true for you.
I'm not an evangelist, I have yet to train myself or coach any athletes with a pure NSM approach, yet I can still understand and appreciate whats going on here.
I think the key thing to understand here is that this is explicitly not cutting edge nor trying to be. Rather it's a ruthless and clever prioritization of some basic time-tested fundamentals. The novel realization is that the basics can take a runner further that we sometimes think, that perhaps we should worry less about about the cutting edge and more about the qualities of the base material. Well tempered steel will defeat a sharp yet brittle un-tempered blade.
Pretty much every successful pro is doing NSM in the sense that they are doing a lot of chill threshold work and a lot of very chill easy running, they just do additional stuff on top of that. Instead of scaling down the whole pro program to a hobbyjogger level NSM represents an extraction of the aspects that are most relevant to the hobbyjogger.
Treat NSM as another proof of concept that different things can work -not a strict mandate but an invitation to think differently. To your point that advancement takes experimentation, simple and repetitive training provides an excellent foundation for effective experimentation. It eliminates variables so you can actually test and see what works in a very methodical way.