I have run since 2014. I'm 44 now and on new years eve last year, I ran a 5k and a friend I usually beat crushed me. He had been doing NSM for 7 months previously and had finally started to see some serious improvement.
Fast forward to a hangover on New Year's Day last year and on the 2nd I decided this was it, I was going to jump into NSM.
I was averaging around 50-80km a week, already a red flag in retrospect of my boom and bust training, or lack of consistency. I loved intensity and the days I rarely missed were days like 12x400 at the track, 10x300 all out, hills, 7-8x800 with full rests. I usually mixed this with easy days, actually quite easy ,75% max HR and usually a threshold run or some quality work in the long run. I still always felt I needed every 3rd or 4th week as a down week and considered this "normal".
Anyway, my PBs sat at 17:56/37:20/1:24. I would guess anyone of my friends who didn't understand running, I may as well have been Kipchoge. To runners, I felt average and would get my ass kicked even in masters track races, regularly lapped.
I decided if I was going to do this, I was going to go the long haul. I had a bit of an argument with the track coach at my club, who called this idea 'idiotic' and I would definitely, without question, get worse. That, threw me off a bit as he is a good guy, respected and I was putting faith in my friend who had got faster, but also in this thread.
Anyway, fast forward to the 2nd of January, 2025 and I started. I stuck to everything, no strides, nothing outside what is framed as getting best bang for buck. 3x sub t and 4x easy (capped at 70% mhr no matter how slow and it was slow at first, usually 65% max, this helped enormously being able to run 7 days) with the long run included in that. I did this, virtually all year. I went from sporadic consistency to being able to manage at first 70km weeks consistently for the first few months, then 75km weeks. Now the later part of the year 85km weeks are the norm, with a few touching on 90km. This has meant I had evenly spread the load with some small progression in volume but the end result is a crazy yearly mileage PB.
The results? Jan - March. Nothing. Not a sign of a thing. In fact, I would say I might have gotten worse. That's up for debate, as I only raced once and it was about the same on a local 5k as the year before, but conditions were far superior to the year before and I ran around 18:15 which was one second slower than 12 months previously.
March- April. Workouts suddenly felt easier and I would guess this is where sirpoc suggests in the book, I've shifted my lactate curve right or starting to and I can run faster, for a lower metabolic cost - clear signs you are getting fitter.
April - June. Some more good signs, I ran 17:59 on a very hot day and not far off my PB which was a surprise, as this was significantly faster than the previous year in much worse conditions. The same with a 10k, I ran 37:40 on a hot day.
July- August. Didn't do much. Holidays, hot. Just kept training. Times seemed to be coming down, even with the hotter weather.
September - October. This is where stuff got crazy. Big half, out of nowhere I ran 1:19. I knew after km 2 I was going to pb, just by how much. Two weeks later I ran 17:12 for a huge 5k pb.
November - December. Went to Battersea and ran 16:44, then again and ran 16:23. Also in between these, ran a 34:01 10k and a 1:15:13 Half. Had a very race heavy end of the year, cashing in on what for me and having plugged away for so long with no real progress in years, are quite frankly mind blowing gains.
Conclusions really are consistency is key. There's a graph in the book that I think explains it well. I reached the point where the consistency outran any intensity or specificity hard efforts gained, which have their downsides in that as time goes on, these become a drain that means you have to sacrifice some consistency. For us hobby joggers, consistency wins almost every time, it seems and this framework provides that alongside low hanging easy gains.
What next? Well the coach at our track thinks I'm lying first and foremost, hilariously like the early days of this thread which I went back and read, in which claims of secret speedwork were rife! He also thinks now is the time to add intensity.
Personally, I think he's mad. The trajectory of progress seems to be continuing and I think it would be stupid, in fact downright crazy to not just let this whole thing play out and see where I end up. I think the issue with speedwork is this: you can add it in, have results you might have had anyway and convince yourself that you then need more of it, because you become tunnel visioned on that the intensity was the key. Then you end up back at square one before you started all this.
Anyway I know this is a long one. But I hope it helps some people as other testimonials did to me. So felt the need to post up my own year , to the day! I've never felt fitter, I've never felt less burned out and I've never had such good results that I finally might not even be lapped in the masters race this year! Lol.
Happy new year guys and girls.
Yes, a long one post )
Just a long testimony of a runner didn't have a clue how to proper train and include vo2 workouts before NSM. The level you have reached now could have been fixed many years ago. But better late than never.
Just a long testimony of a runner didn't have a clue how to proper train and include vo2 workouts before NSM. The level you have reached now could have been fixed many years ago. But better late than never.
Big congrats to you!
Jan. Couldn't disagree more. I was coached by someone hugely respected, who insisted that intensity was the key for me to progress in my pursuit of a faster 5k. He has had much more success than you, over the years with college level, national level runners and also hobby joggers. No matter what this coach did, I didn't progress. Until NSM. I absolutely implemented everything he said go do, for a long period of time. Still nothing.
NSM opened the door to me simply because of it's consistency. So I can't totally believe the testimonial you are replying to and we've seen so many on here, Strava or Reddit it's not a question of if this works, despite neglecting intensity, it's more of a question why. It probably just does come down to the simplicity of total volume and consistency out running any fancy specificity or complex training coaches try and feed you.
Well, it's not a question if this NSM works good after quite long time or not. It's more a question of what runners did before NSM.
Can you describe what your hugely respected coach gave you ?
Jan. Couldn't disagree more. I was coached by someone hugely respected, who insisted that intensity was the key for me to progress in my pursuit of a faster 5k. He has had much more success than you, over the years with college level, national level runners and also hobby joggers. No matter what this coach did, I didn't progress. Until NSM. I absolutely implemented everything he said go do, for a long period of time. Still nothing.
NSM opened the door to me simply because of it's consistency. So I can't totally believe the testimonial you are replying to and we've seen so many on here, Strava or Reddit it's not a question of if this works, despite neglecting intensity, it's more of a question why. It probably just does come down to the simplicity of total volume and consistency out running any fancy specificity or complex training coaches try and feed you.
Well, it's not a question if this NSM works good after quite long time or not. It's more a question of what runners did before NSM.
Can you describe what your hugely respected coach gave you ?
A snickers instead of a mars bar, Jan. It was only downhill from there...
Thanks for the update, that's great progress. I've had a similar trajectory after starting beginning of 2025, although with a few hiccups along the way. Any hints at how to follow you on Strava? always interested to follow along others at a similar fitness and training load.
I've seen sirpoc mention several times that load is the primary driver of gains. I'm trying to make sure I'm thinking about this the right way and wondering if anyone has any advice for someone approaching the "upper limit" of this method at 8 hours.
I've been doing the vanilla 3x10, 5x6, 10x3 on about 7-7.5 hours for about a year. I started with a pretty good base from Pfitz style training, so I more or less was able to keep my training time the same, just reorganized. I find I can improve my paces by at least a few seconds a month while maintaining the same HR, so I think I'm still well on the growth curve. If I just keep training this way and chipping away a few seconds a month, in theory my load won't change because of how rTSS is calculatesd and I'm sure I'll eventually plateau. Using the example plans in the book as a guide, I was thinking of doing a slow build over the next 6-9 months up to 4x10 and 6x6 (pit stops along the way at 3x11, 3x12, and 6x5.5). This would give me continued load increases by increasing the time, while I'd also likely continue to get the few seconds a month improvement I would have gotten even without the load. Is this how other people understand the concept of increasing load? Anything I might be missing in this plan?
I've seen sirpoc mention several times that load is the primary driver of gains. I'm trying to make sure I'm thinking about this the right way and wondering if anyone has any advice for someone approaching the "upper limit" of this method at 8 hours.
I've been doing the vanilla 3x10, 5x6, 10x3 on about 7-7.5 hours for about a year. I started with a pretty good base from Pfitz style training, so I more or less was able to keep my training time the same, just reorganized. I find I can improve my paces by at least a few seconds a month while maintaining the same HR, so I think I'm still well on the growth curve. If I just keep training this way and chipping away a few seconds a month, in theory my load won't change because of how rTSS is calculatesd and I'm sure I'll eventually plateau. Using the example plans in the book as a guide, I was thinking of doing a slow build over the next 6-9 months up to 4x10 and 6x6 (pit stops along the way at 3x11, 3x12, and 6x5.5). This would give me continued load increases by increasing the time, while I'd also likely continue to get the few seconds a month improvement I would have gotten even without the load. Is this how other people understand the concept of increasing load? Anything I might be missing in this plan?
I probably subscribe to load being the primary driver. But not the only one. There are also probably small things that are happening (further improving economy for example, even for a experienced runner due to sheer consistency) that shift things on, even if you don't increase load. But, ultimately the reason sirpoc himself probably got faster, is the graph shown with load versus 5k time.
It might look like he's done the same thing over and over, but actually he hasn't. He's increased volume, just so slowly it's almost imperceptible to the naked eye because the whole process has just taken so long.
Even now, he's using cycling and a percentage of the load that brings, to further increase (or try to) his gains in running.
For myself, I feel like I'm just a more efficient, better runner on quite a few levels even outside of measurable load. So these small things also add up to small gains. Just not a huge amount of even being quantifiable.
Hi this is kind of a weird question, but what would be a good way to get someone to prescribe how much load of NSA to run based on training history?
For context I ran in high school and ran 2:05 in the 800, 4:45 in the mile, 10:15 in the 2 mile, and 17:10 in xc. I'm struggling with this myself because I would do pretty egregious boom and bust cycles where the booms were maybe outside of the scope of NSA while probably being too much. I thought about hiring a coach but I don't know if I could find one that wouldn't give me race specific work, since I've always responded horribly to that, or would look into my training enough, since it was super inconsistent and hard to forecast future training off of.
Throughout high school I had like 4 different coaches (1 for cross country, then 3 different track coaches for all 4 of my years) and they wouldn't really coach during the winter or summer, and didn't coach that much during the season, so I ended up doing the stupidest training ever oftentimes. Pretty much in a 4 year period I did like 10 or so different training programs that didn't fit together very well.
I think I am exactly the type of runner that stands to benefit a lot from this type of training, but I keep messing stuff up and overtraining myself and having to start over. Or I'll start off too slow in my build and feel like I'm going to slow then I'll do something stupid. I'm not doing well trying to this on my own. I keep fixating on small details, like strength training, shoes, and speed reserve. I'm losing the forest for the trees. Please let me know where I can get help. Sorry for the essay.
TLDR: Please help me find a way to find a way to run an appropriate load. My training history is convoluted and don't have the self regulation skills to make good decisions. I think I can get pretty fast.
This post was edited 1 minute after it was posted.
I should also add that unless I'm sure that a plan will work I struggle to follow it, including plans I've made. I keep making plans then deciding a few weeks in that something is wrong with it, which is usually objectively true, and then I'll switch to something else. I tried doing default NSA (1 hour easy runs and 90 minutes sub T) but I think it jumped into it too quickly because my paces got like 20-30 seconds per mile worse and then I got really sick.
Hi this is kind of a weird question, but what would be a good way to get someone to prescribe how much load of NSA to run based on training history?
For context I ran in high school and ran 2:05 in the 800, 4:45 in the mile, 10:15 in the 2 mile, and 17:10 in xc. I'm struggling with this myself because I would do pretty egregious boom and bust cycles where the booms were maybe outside of the scope of NSA while probably being too much. I thought about hiring a coach but I don't know if I could find one that wouldn't give me race specific work, since I've always responded horribly to that, or would look into my training enough, since it was super inconsistent and hard to forecast future training off of.
Throughout high school I had like 4 different coaches (1 for cross country, then 3 different track coaches for all 4 of my years) and they wouldn't really coach during the winter or summer, and didn't coach that much during the season, so I ended up doing the stupidest training ever oftentimes. Pretty much in a 4 year period I did like 10 or so different training programs that didn't fit together very well.
I think I am exactly the type of runner that stands to benefit a lot from this type of training, but I keep messing stuff up and overtraining myself and having to start over. Or I'll start off too slow in my build and feel like I'm going to slow then I'll do something stupid. I'm not doing well trying to this on my own. I keep fixating on small details, like strength training, shoes, and speed reserve. I'm losing the forest for the trees. Please let me know where I can get help. Sorry for the essay.
TLDR: Please help me find a way to find a way to run an appropriate load. My training history is convoluted and don't have the self regulation skills to make good decisions. I think I can get pretty fast.
You sound like an extreme version of myself. I've been down a lot of the roads you are describing.
The best advice I, or anyone can give you, is buy the book. It is as compelling case you will read for buying into the method, a fantastic guide and right up there with one of the best running books written, but also will give you the reality check that there are:
1. no miracles in training
2. To commit to this you are going to have to stop thinking in wanting to see instant returns. But if you are in it for the long term, the rewards are there.
Read the post also from the guy today, his year report. He spent 2 months with not a lot going on. It wasn't until 8-9 months in his running life dramatically improved. This is the position you put yourself in with NSM, but with gold at the end of the rainbow with patience.
You will hear a lot of people promise short term gains, miracle fixes. Many combinations of that. If you can't get your head around that not being your best bet, but seeing up to a year into the future as the big pay off, then all due respect but don't bother with NSM as it'll just frustrate the hell out of you. Find a coach who will batter you and you might come out of a short cycle smelling of roses, or you won't.
I probably subscribe to load being the primary driver. But not the only one. There are also probably small things that are happening (further improving economy for example, even for a experienced runner due to sheer consistency) that shift things on, even if you don't increase load. But, ultimately the reason sirpoc himself probably got faster, is the graph shown with load versus 5k time.
It might look like he's done the same thing over and over, but actually he hasn't. He's increased volume, just so slowly it's almost imperceptible to the naked eye because the whole process has just taken so long.
Even now, he's using cycling and a percentage of the load that brings, to further increase (or try to) his gains in running.
For myself, I feel like I'm just a more efficient, better runner on quite a few levels even outside of measurable load. So these small things also add up to small gains. Just not a huge amount of even being quantifiable.
.
Agree. Load is by far the biggest piece of the puzzle, but there's probably a few other benefits as you describe that you also get from NSM, even for someone who isn't seeing a direct increase in load. Economy is an interesting one, as I also feel like running good mechanics for 90 mins a week has really helped with that and I feel smoother. I don't know if others feel this is a thing but rings true to me.
But overall, I've found over time, the more I drip feed the volume, the faster I've gotten, so it's certainly fair to say load is the primary or dominant driver.
I've seen sirpoc mention several times that load is the primary driver of gains. I'm trying to make sure I'm thinking about this the right way and wondering if anyone has any advice for someone approaching the "upper limit" of this method at 8 hours.
I've been doing the vanilla 3x10, 5x6, 10x3 on about 7-7.5 hours for about a year. I started with a pretty good base from Pfitz style training, so I more or less was able to keep my training time the same, just reorganized. I find I can improve my paces by at least a few seconds a month while maintaining the same HR, so I think I'm still well on the growth curve. If I just keep training this way and chipping away a few seconds a month, in theory my load won't change because of how rTSS is calculatesd and I'm sure I'll eventually plateau. Using the example plans in the book as a guide, I was thinking of doing a slow build over the next 6-9 months up to 4x10 and 6x6 (pit stops along the way at 3x11, 3x12, and 6x5.5). This would give me continued load increases by increasing the time, while I'd also likely continue to get the few seconds a month improvement I would have gotten even without the load. Is this how other people understand the concept of increasing load? Anything I might be missing in this plan?
I probably subscribe to load being the primary driver. But not the only one. There are also probably small things that are happening (further improving economy for example, even for a experienced runner due to sheer consistency) that shift things on, even if you don't increase load. But, ultimately the reason sirpoc himself probably got faster, is the graph shown with load versus 5k time.
It might look like he's done the same thing over and over, but actually he hasn't. He's increased volume, just so slowly it's almost imperceptible to the naked eye because the whole process has just taken so long.
Even now, he's using cycling and a percentage of the load that brings, to further increase (or try to) his gains in running.
For myself, I feel like I'm just a more efficient, better runner on quite a few levels even outside of measurable load. So these small things also add up to small gains. Just not a huge amount of even being quantifiable.
.
As somebody who doesn’t fully understand how training understand load works, the thing that confuses me is that Sirpoc did the exact same week for like 1.5 years. 60 mins MWF, 3 x 2 miles on Tuesday, 6 x mile on Thursday, 10 x 1k on Saturday, 90 mins on Sunday. The pace got faster for everything, so his mileage went up but the actual time spent training remand at 7.5 hours per week for that 1.5 years. Is the load increasing because pace is the proxy for load? Then once pace plateaued, load pleated as well, and race performance subsequently plateaued as well. The other piece I don’t get with this is when to increase load? He mentioned going months without seeing any improvements, but then made a jump again, despite changing nothing.
I've seen sirpoc mention several times that load is the primary driver of gains. I'm trying to make sure I'm thinking about this the right way and wondering if anyone has any advice for someone approaching the "upper limit" of this method at 8 hours.
I've been doing the vanilla 3x10, 5x6, 10x3 on about 7-7.5 hours for about a year. I started with a pretty good base from Pfitz style training, so I more or less was able to keep my training time the same, just reorganized. I find I can improve my paces by at least a few seconds a month while maintaining the same HR, so I think I'm still well on the growth curve. If I just keep training this way and chipping away a few seconds a month, in theory my load won't change because of how rTSS is calculatesd and I'm sure I'll eventually plateau. Using the example plans in the book as a guide, I was thinking of doing a slow build over the next 6-9 months up to 4x10 and 6x6 (pit stops along the way at 3x11, 3x12, and 6x5.5). This would give me continued load increases by increasing the time, while I'd also likely continue to get the few seconds a month improvement I would have gotten even without the load. Is this how other people understand the concept of increasing load? Anything I might be missing in this plan?
I probably subscribe to load being the primary driver. But not the only one. There are also probably small things that are happening (further improving economy for example, even for a experienced runner due to sheer consistency) that shift things on, even if you don't increase load. But, ultimately the reason sirpoc himself probably got faster, is the graph shown with load versus 5k time.
It might look like he's done the same thing over and over, but actually he hasn't. He's increased volume, just so slowly it's almost imperceptible to the naked eye because the whole process has just taken so long.
Even now, he's using cycling and a percentage of the load that brings, to further increase (or try to) his gains in running.
For myself, I feel like I'm just a more efficient, better runner on quite a few levels even outside of measurable load. So these small things also add up to small gains. Just not a huge amount of even being quantifiable.
.
Speaking for myself, not for sirpoc: increasing Load/rTSS isn't the primary driver. The training is the primary driver.
If someone is training 7.5 hours a week:
3 easy runs of 60mins each
3 workouts of 30min subt intervals, 60mins total
1 easy long run of 90mins
And that Load/rTSS is yielding improvements for that athlete over the previous 6 months... then adding 15mins of easy running and 3-6 more mins of subt per week isn't necessary to continue to see improvements for the next 6 months.
They've already discovered what an effective load is for them. rTSS can remain constant and adaptations will continue to occur until the ceiling is hit for that Load. Then you have to change your training, increase Load, or be content with your progression ending. That is the situation elites find themselves in. Do they dare push mileage and/or intensity even higher or do they already feel capped? How can they change their training, without increasing Load, to yield a better performance? Or have they already hit their lifetime PR's?
The good news is that 7-8 hours or so, which is reasonable for most people, can have quite a high ceiling and yield satisfying results for a hobby jogger.
The book is great because it explains how to start from nothing and then safely increase load, all the way up to a very respectable level. You SHOULD increase load as much as you safely can, as the book describes, if you have time for it. Just stay in the gray. But once you reach your endpoint of load progression, you can still see improvements for years. Which I think should have been emphasized more, unless I'm forgetting a line that says exactly that.
The deceiving thing about "Load" on intervals.icu or "rTSS" on TrainingPeaks is that it's removing your fitness gains from the equation. But if you are running faster and faster then you do actually have the 'progressive overload' needed for long-term athletic improvements. It just won't be reflected in Load or rTSS because your threshold pace is in the denominator of those equations. When your threshold pace improves, you have to run faster just to keep Load/rTSS from decreasing!
Arguably Load/rTSS eventually ought to decrease! LTHR increases as you get fitter, making "threshold pace" more and more intense, which makes it more and more difficult to maintain the same volume of it. The mechanical demands go up and up as you run faster and faster. Easy pace as a percent of threshold pace should arguably go down as its purpose shifts from contributing to adaptations to simply maintaining them, allowing easy days to be closer to pure recovery than general volume. These are just the quirks of measuring load in terms of threshold pace.
This post was edited 1 minute after it was posted.
As somebody who doesn’t fully understand how training understand load works, the thing that confuses me is that Sirpoc did the exact same week for like 1.5 years. 60 mins MWF, 3 x 2 miles on Tuesday, 6 x mile on Thursday, 10 x 1k on Saturday, 90 mins on Sunday. The pace got faster for everything, so his mileage went up but the actual time spent training remand at 7.5 hours per week for that 1.5 years. Is the load increasing because pace is the proxy for load? Then once pace plateaued, load pleated as well, and race performance subsequently plateaued as well. The other piece I don’t get with this is when to increase load? He mentioned going months without seeing any improvements, but then made a jump again, despite changing nothing.
You are missing things like going from 50 min runs to 55 then 60 min runs or 3x3k to 4x3k once a week. Or 90 mins long run to slowly 110. This is ultimately how you increase ramp rate incredibly slowly and thinking about drip feeding it is probably the easiest way as someone else described. Also the build up to the marathon where sporadically you make a few things longer, the odd medium long run. You only have to look at how time training has just slowly crept up. A lot of that is easy running, if you go back to the early days the split was a lot more aggressive. Now it's probably 80% or more easy. But it's all "more".
Also, as someone who has also trained like this, the increase in load/volume (you can see it either way) is so small, you aren't going to suddenly jump in fitness at every incremental point you see a number on a screen increase. So you can easily go a while without seeing those gains. But over time you will likely see a positive outcome to that drip feed, and at some point down the line where you end up finally seeing the result of more being more, and a faster race.
I also agree the running economy thing in itself is interesting. You are spending a lot of time running really good, steady form where you rarely get sloppy on super tired legs and up to 90+ minutes of it a week. I think there is probably something to that.
TLDR: 99% of the time, lactate testing is a waste of time.
99.9% in the hands of amateurs.
So what is your solution exactly? Are you suggesting that runners do ~60min races multiple times per year to find their threshold?
Why do you need to formally test your threshold so frequently? What's wrong with just getting on with the training and letting the chips fall where they may?
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.
except if you suggest doing 'additional stuff' in this thread you get downvoted 50 to 1 and told "your NOT doing it right!"
I appreciate the approach and responses and am glad people are having success, but all the signs in this thread voting clearly point to cultish adherence to dogma so I'll look elsewhere for more science-based balanced feedback.
Not in your post, but to the thread attitude in general. Definitely some head in sand, fingers in ears 'hear no-evil' attitude present here that isn't conducive to real discourse. I appreciate the thoughtful responses but I realize now what I'm dealing with in this thread..cult mentality. No questioning allowed. Never question the One Tru Way. No thanks lol