Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

old_skool50 wrote:

colder and wiser wrote:

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.

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.

colder and wiser wrote:

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.

John Whelan wrote:

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.

The Magic Coach J.S wrote:

old_skool50 wrote:

Not sure about this. He hadn't raced a 5k in almost half a year, turns up to the national masters 5k champs here in the UK, runs in a tactical race, and then drops everyone with a 2:50 last km.

I've had similar experiences. If you improve your pace at subthreshold, you are just pushing up your top speed at 5k pace similarly. Sure, as others have said sharpening is great if you have one specific race in mind, but not really needed if your only goal is just to keep progressing and stacking the sessions week after week and progress long term.

The misconception so many makes here according to how I look upon it with maxVO2 is that you think it can only be used with success if used as just sharpening. It can also be used as. ' potent load' or ' the never ending story' frequently ( weekly) year around , but you got to keep the reps relatively short 200- 600m your body can take it without raised injury or overdoing risk .If we look at world topclass runners as Jakob Ingebrigtsen and my countryman Andreas Almgren they keep up this maxVO2 work year round by. ' simulate ' VO2 workouts during their building season with 20 x 200m hillreps.What hobbyjoggers often forget is that they can 'copy' this on much less mileage ( half or less) than these world top runners and still reach their absolute highest possible capacity. I assure you the extra run per day most of the elite do is not the main explanation why they run so fast. And as I always ' preach' there are many, many world top runners on amazingly low volume in history that back up what I say. Happy new year to you all and good luck 2026! 🖐🧙‍♂️🖐