Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

Maybe Sirpoc should write a "middle distance" short block,like he did with the marathon block.

Experimenting with a sprinkle of 200-400m or some kind of rithm change parkrun (?) aiming to use all that is neccesary for a good 1500-3000m.

Bakken proposed on strava the short sharpening block,always watching to not bite into good balance. So just a few workouts faster then LT,and always cutting back if one feel it as overreaching. Of course he precisely watched it with lactate meter,so for us mortals it is not so simple.

Maybe Sipoc should see what changed Steve back then when he somehow achieved the sprint finish at the end.

(see YT
One of the most courageous things you will ever see on a running track ! Steve Jones 10,000m)

I would definitly use the 70% max hart rate rule for easy days. Make a hugr difference overall

I think “ruthless” is a great word to use for this method. This is not just an easier approach because the easy runs are really easy and the sessions are only Sub-T. El Classico/vanilla can be unforgiving when you are prioritising a session almost every other day…forever. This is not a method for your ego as you should feel like you could do every run further and faster.

Intervals.ICU has helped me a lot to understand the balance that is needed for this to work. If I hit my next session hard, it would take a few runs to get the balance back and the overall training load would have suffered. So I don’t.

In that case my recommendation would be to ingest everything Bakken has written. He is advocating a strong sub-t base and also has specific recommendations on transitioning to a more classic track season. One of his few regrets in hindsight seems to be omitting the weight room in sub-t phase. Of course looking at it from elite pov.

I've actually done this. I posted about it on Strava a while back. For me, it made no difference.

In fact, I was about the same in middle distance as if I hadn't bothered, but got worse at the longer stuff.

On 6 hours a week, the aerobic gains outweighed for me, about anything else you can do specificity wise. Even with Bakken's intervals, I did feel sharp, but there were compromises in other areas, that it didn't make up for the shorter sessions meaning having to dump 3 full sessions a week. In the book sirpoc talks about diminishing returns. This is where pros are. I suspect, if I had reached this point I would have reacted better to this.

It's explained well in the book. Sirpoc also basically goes onto say, this will be limited for anyone at the sharp end of competition, but once you reach that point, put his book down and go and read Bakken's website (let's not forget Bakken wrote the foreword here and he clearly approves).

Also, sirpoc has done enough experimening. The onus is not on him at this point. He's already done more for hobby joggers than anyone else I care to remember, especially for those who don't won't or who can't afford coaching etc. it has opened up better training to more peoole. Besides, he clearly sees the value in more sub threshold, but with cross training. When you look at his 4x3km yesterday and how far he's slowly come since just doing cycling and elliptical in the summer, it's hard to argue with that.

I agree with John, ruthless is a good word, I also find this clinical. But that makes sense. It's designed and laid out in the way we have come to understand it by a man who isn't in love with running, running lore or has any attachment to running programs of the past. It's written by someone who saw a huge hobby jogger training problem and the only thing he cared about was fixing it for himself. It just happens to clearly applies to a hugely broad percentage of the running population.

It's simple, but is built on a balancing act using a lot of the tools from the book. I think that is why ultimately so many people have struggled to fit what they consider the best parts from other systems, or what pros do. It just isn't designed to absorb anything outside of what it was designed for. Which is fine, to me, I don't see the problem. You wouldn't go round telling Canova with his elite athletes that he has had huge success with "change this"

So I don't understand the obsession with people wanting to move away from the fundamentals here, almost like they are offended by it. So strange.

Great post. I'll put myself in the category of probably not understanding what NSM is, initially. It took me a long time to get my head around the sub t x3 means you have no choice but to make compromises elsewhere.

The big thing for me is understanding the aerobic gains, can make you outrun a classic approach over time. Clearly, that's true, but it probably took me time to wrap my head around it. I'm just so used to thinking one race ahead rather than thinking two or three ahead in the medium to long term, which was pretty alien to me.

Once I got outside of that habit, it all fell into place. Sure, I could sharpen now for a mile race I have in 3 weeks and maybe pick up a fraction here or there. Or I can just keep going with subthreshold right up to the race, and everything I do in-between will mean I will outrun my next race max potential even if I had done some specificity, a couple races down the line without changing anything. That was the lightbulb moment for me.

I don't understand what you mean? Why would a pro running be doing NSM when they are, you know, a pro runner? That's kind of a really weird way to look at it. Nothing here is designed for elite runners optimisation in mind. In fact, that is probably where a lot of people are going wrong. They can't remove what pro runners do, from their brain. 90% of people who can't wrap their heads around this seem to have that idea locked in.

This is essentially though an elongated version of a pro base phase, but taking into account the recovery cost etc that hobby jogging life demands. There's just no sharpening etc. because, well, you don't need to. Others have pointed out better than me, the value in that sort of thing comes either if you really, really only care about one particular race or if you have harvested all the easy gains. The spoiler for you here, is that is years (at least as long as the thread has lived) for some of the early adopters and even sirpoc himself, who is still just spamming Subthreshold and seemingly still improving according to the feedback here.

Feel free to come up with a better approach for hobby joggers. Because that is all this thread cares about. But you are one of a large number of people who has come with the same point of view and honestly, the biggest success across the board is just still people spamming Subthreshold whilst taking advantage of all of the other small details from the now fantastic book. Add my name to the list of people who would happily jump on another program, if it provided greater long term benefits.

And me.

This is probably fair, in the spirit of keeping things simple. I went into it exactly the same as my mentality from cycling, in that I have a certain amount of time to spend training, and what is the hardest (spoiler, it's still reasonably hard, well it's certainly not easy) intensity I can run, 3 times a week, to generate the greatest load, supplement it with easy running and do it all over again over X amount of time. Subthreshold is just the tool to solve that equation, just like sweet spot cycling, and the outcome is consistency and slowly absorbing more and more load.

The one hill I'll still probably die on, is (especially) for non elites the impact of load itself, is always going to be the prominent driver of your gains over the long term. Once you get to diminishing returns for Subthreshold (or however you train) as someone pointed out we covered in the book, things then take on a more complex picture. I guess the big question is, when does that happen? I think that will depend person to person rather than an arbitratory cut off point, but I know I'm not there, yet. But this is where coaches for elite runners especially, really earn their money. Most of them have completed a base far greater even that what people are doing here, then the coaches are scrambling around for the last 1-2% that'll make the difference at the truly elite level.

There are obviously small adaptations you can make, nothing is set in stone. But it's probably fair to say there isn't much wiggle room if you want to really run this to its full potential at hobby level. But that's the whole point, really. But if someone does come up with something better, I'm on it and will join the new club. I'm certainly not precious about this training. If nothing else, it would be nice to do something different. But, with performance goals in mind, it's still likely the best path for me. Probably a large percentage of us as well.

But that also doesn't mean it's the only way to train. Some people might have shorter term goals in mind, where probably a coach or other training programs might get you there.

My biggest issue with this method is my running club thinks I'm mad, giving up track nights for Subthreshold solo and running around in Chinese trainers.

But, I ran a 17:22 on Christmas day parkrun, having never broken 18 before and they are suddenly very curious lol

Does anyone have links to the Dynafish Xiaonian and Do Win PB Pros in uk 12? I have a sneaking suspicion they simply don't make them in larger sizes.

Also, anyone pulled the tirgger on the Li Ning Feidian 6 range? Our guy HUI seems to love the 6 elite.

I get that people don’t want to read a 500 page thread but when they jump in and give the same argument that has been repeated over and over on this thread, people will respond accordingly. I’m sure a lot of people Google “Norwegian Method” a find this thread.I am assuming that’s what 500 page shortcut did. I wish we could have a post tagged to the first page that is something like “warning: this is not for the truly elite. It’s for hobby joggers .” That being said, we may see some people run mid to low 14 minute 5ks in 2026, so the method can get you pretty darn far. But honestly, unless you’re, idk sub-13:10? Close to 27 minutes? Pretty close to 60 minutes in the half? That’s what is world class these days. A U.S. based running with PBs of 13:20/27:45 is an also ran these days. It’s wild how much things have changed the last decade or so. I know people around 14 mins for 5k that could benefit/learn a lot from this thread. Talent can mask bad training. But in general, if you’re already that fast, you probably don’t need to be in this thread.

Dynafish only goes up to EU 45 in both shoes. The PB Pro only goes up to EU 44 (the product page on Taobao says to size down one size, but EU 44 is out of stock anyway). Do-Win generally goes up to EU 45 in their other "premium" shoes (Speedster, PB, Hexagonal). I'm a US 11.5 in every Western brand, and EU 45 is working for me with most Chinese brands, except Li-Ning (EU 46).

I don't think a hobby jogger is ever going to run a 14 5k off no speedwork. Highly unlikely.

A bit like running a good marathon, I read the wiki on Reddit but to run a good marathon you absolutely have to do regular long runs at faster than easy pace.

I do think this is good for runners around the 20-25 minute range. Probably a big benefit. But even hobby guys running 16:x and winning masters races aren't training like this.

P.s nobody is going to read 500 pages that would be insane.

People keep using terms like "balance" and "maximize" in their responses, and that's something that needs to be taken seriously. There's no point in borrowing workouts from NSM - the bread and butter is just an incredibly basic moderate-to-uptempo rep with shortish rest intervals. The important part is how the whole system fits together, which is why I think a lot of the attempts to modify NSM have fared poorly.

Think of a marble balanced on the top of the hill. How big is the hilltop, or the area where the marble can roll around a bit without falling off? Not all that large, it seems. We don't know if NSM is at the exact pinnacle, but it seems to be fairly close. Could someone add a few moderate-effort strides to a standard week? Yeah, probably. Convert the last rep of a workout into shorter reps at a faster pace but still sub-T? Maybe. Tack on 4 x 200 at 800 pace? Uh, I don't know about that. The problem is less the cult mentality than the hard reality of the optimization problem, where fiddling around too much (in terms of fatigue vs training load and injury risk) sends the marble to the bottom of the hill.

I can think of some genuinely interesting things we've learned from this whole endeavor so far:

- Before NSM, life demands and weekly schedule were underestimated as factors in hobby jogger training. People recognized it as a reality to be regretted, not as a key factor to optimize for.

- Specificity doesn't matter as much as we thought it does.

- Physiology-agnostic building up of training load is more important than targeting zones or energy systems. Are we neglecting our vO2max or anaerobic capacity? Who cares, man, we're just piling on the load.

- Patiently stacking months and years of work beats even a perfectly periodized single training block. As much as we talk about NSM not being based on elite schedules, it's the first training approach I've seen that gets hobby joggers to think in the multi-year scale used by the real runners out there with their 4-year high school or college cycles or the pro build-ups to the next Olympics.

16:xx hobbyjogger here improving faster under NSA than I ever have with other training approaches. Was stuck at 17:30 for 6 months using Pfitz last year. Haven't done a single stride faster than 5k pace since starting (or 10k pace in training).

The cult mentality is a weird one thrown around. It's usually by people who haven't trained like this for a long period, who look at it on paper and think there must be a way to optimise it based on their own ideology.

The big thing for me, is that guys who have trained a lot of different ways, come back to this. Including for me, having had high level coaching and no results even close to NSM.

It's so simple, but never really occured to me that this could actually be not just be a short term base to train, but actually the opposite, it's the long term goal. The book really gives us a bit more to dive into and the knowledge to play around with ourselves to optimise it or tweak it to our own needs. It's been that good for some people, i think we are just excited and enthusiastic to share our experiences.

Take someone like cheetodust. He has 5x longer running than sirpoc at least, probably more. He is clearly a thoughtful and intelligent guy himself from his posting with a vast knowledge of training of the past. Yet he chooses to train like this and is having as good results I'm sure as he could ever imagine, in his mid 40s.

Sirpoc himself has seemingly spent years before this playing around with lots of different combinations of hobby training in cycling, before settling on this. So it's also not just like it's a random collection of stuff. As you say, it's balanced without much room to manoeuvre. That's be clever design, not some blind luck, that you could then easily take and improve on a whim.

Why this all seems to be the case, well maybe it just is as simple as however you quantify load, is basically the only important thing? Or at least the largest piece of the puzzle. That load, as long as you can absorb and recover from it based on outside life, will do the job. The more experiences I hear, the more I see, the more I'm willing to buy that as ultimately the reason for all this.

We are obviously way past the "will this work stage" , where it was essentially just sirpoc posting his own training. The problem now being, if someone does want to come up with a better hobby jogger combination, you are gonna need a huge body of work for a broad range of people to convince folk. That's also why we are at nearly 500 pages and 10k posts here alone.

These guys brainwash,they won't listen to your reason. We all know why fast runner doesn't train like this,very bad method ;-)

Always words,never evidence in all this longtime of thread ;-)

Some people,I think they get enjoyment out of pretend.very strange!