Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

Thank you, that's really helpful :)

My reps are not too far off yours. My 3 min reps are usually around 3.36-3.38, 2ks around 3.46 and 10 min reps around 3.48. I have a 10 mile hilly race this weekend and did a 10k on New Years Day (was windy) where I ran 36.13. I also have a flat 10k next weekend so will see how that goes. Good luck with your training.

I challenge your claim. NSM is proving nothing ! It only gives a clear hint so, so, many hobbyjoggers didn't have a clue how to train optimal for relatively small volume and still stay out of injuries or overtraining symptoms before they took on NSM.

This is Jan Stensson, scammer, horrible coach and pathological liar ☝

One of his former "pupil"( no hobbyjogger) is now doing NSM ;-)

To my opinion many people made the mistake of slavishly following Daniels's plan.They didn't know how to pick the raisins from the cake.

Could you please share some of those cheap aero gains insights, I've got my forst tri relay coming up in a few months too.

Allright! Do you prefer running distance-based or time-based repetitions? And if you have a preference, why so? Good luck with the 10-miler and the 10k next weekend, let us know how it goes!

I dont mind either to be honest. I only do 2 SUBT sessions a week but generally always do the 10 x 3 mins and then alternate the other one with the longer reps. My twin sister has been doing the same training as me and we always do our weekend session together, she just ran a half marathon last weekend in 76.44 (2 min 31 PB from last year) so the training is really working. She also ran the 10k on New Years Day in 35.18.

I would initially replace one weekly run workout with a bike workout if you regularly do 3 workouts, but you do you.

As for workout design, on the bike I have had most success by progressing interval time and holding intensity constant. So one begins with eg. 2x20min (short recovery) and adds time gradually (say 5min per week per session) until they accumulate about 60min / session (time constraints permitting; in your case I assumed this as you mentioned 3x20). Once there, bump up power slightly and begin again from the beginning.

Come to think of it, a similar progression might work in running sweetspot sessions too, if one wants to venture beyond accumulated 30min in plain vanilla.

appreciate you as always, please post more. Nice to see kind people and good. mature responses on LRC.

Even walking is a good way to maintain fitness between blocks. I do that but have to be careful not to let too much time elapse before starting a running block.

I also like your idea of walk breaks for the NSM intervals, rather than light jogging or standing rest. I'll experiment with my rest breaks too.

A beginner question about transitioning from all easy running into gradually adding 3 workouts. Would it be better to add the workouts one by one or add all three simultaneously, but with reduced duration, so the spike in load is not too great. Does it even matter?

There's no right or wrong answer, but I can tell you what worked for me. I started with 2 workouts with 24 minutes of sub-t for a couple of weeks, then 3 workouts of 24 minutes. Then I added 1 minute per session each week thereafter (so 3 workouts of 25 minutes, 26...) until I reached 30 minutes.

I think the above works well if you're coming from just easy running. If someone is coming from a different program that involved intensity, then it's probably easier to start with 3 sessions from the get-go.

Has anyone been using DFA A1 as a metric to keep an eye that you're staying sub threshold in workouts? DFA (detrended fluctuation analysis) Alpha 1 is a HRV based aerobic and anaerobic threshold estimation method. Basically it works on the premise that your heart rate is a series of patterns and repeated sub patterns. But as you approach LT2 the sub patterns become more chaotic as your aerobic system becomes increasingly taxed. The good thing about it is that you don't actually need to know your threshold heart rate / state. This data point will tell you exactly that. For example 0.75 is your LT1 and 0.50 is your LT2.

> 1.0: Low-intensity, easy, or resting state; high parasympathetic activity.
0.75 - 1.0: Moderate intensity; approaching the aerobic threshold.
0.5 - 0.75: Zone 2 to Zone 3 transition; aerobic threshold (LT1) is typically at 0.75.
< 0.5: High intensity (Zone 3); anaerobic threshold (LT2) and above

In terms of NSM you'd want to keep subT reps between 0.75 - 0.60 for the most part, with your last rep ideally approaching 0.55.

The reason I bring it up, is because I had previously derived my subT paces from lactrace.com - based on a recent 5k time. Never really knew what my threshold hr was, I never had a decent monitor, just the Garmin wrist watch. Turns out the reps from lactrace are much too fast for me, and I'd been using the conservative end of the ranges given. While the reps felt good, and felt like a 6/10 effort, over time I was functionally over-reaching, crippling my nervous system, I ended up with sciatica over Christmas. I thought this was due to bad form, but having since gotten a Polar H10, and looking at my data in Runalyze, specifically DFA A1 - I could see straight away that my subT reps were beyond threshold. I'm not yet sure whether they were far beyond, or just a tad over, and things had just accumulated over a number of weeks. I'll spend the next while reducing pace, sticking to what I now believe to be my hr threshold and monitoring DFA A1 to see how close I get to 0.50 during reps.

As I had previously been dealing with it sciatica over Christmas, I eased off on the running to recover. I was just slowly starting to build back up, introducing workouts over the last few weeks.

The link below is Monday night workout (screenshot from Runalyze). It's the first workout I'd done since getting my hands on the Polar H10 hrm, 8 x 1000m. As you can see above, I was really going over threshold, spending most of the last reps at 0.30. My heart rate during these reps stayed at 155-160bpm, this told me things were ok. But after the last few workouts leading up to the above, I had a bit of a flair up of sciatica once again. So I think this data point DFA A1 has the potential to be more useful than just looking at heart rate.

prnt.sc

Screenshot

Captured with Lightshot

Open link

The link below is a VERY easy run last night, 8km, avg hr of 125bpm, hill at the start and end of run, average dfa a1 of 1.23.

prnt.sc

Screenshot

Captured with Lightshot

Open link

DFA A1 just seems like another tool to help simplify things, which is why I thought it worth mentioning here. It seems like it could be the next best thing to a lactate meter. If you're not sure on your paces or hr zones, it will still tell you when you're over doing it.

Because this training already involves a very patient approach to accumulating load, this has been my approach to adding workouts to all easy running:

1. After a 10K race in early October that I did off sporadic training, I spent 4 weeks doing all easy running, looking to build from running every other day to every day.

2. In week 5, I began introducing sub-threshold "workouts" every three days, starting at ~ 16 mins/week total. (At first these didn't feel at all like workouts, as I was often just running a single interval. I just wanted my body to adjust to the mechanical demands of running faster than my extremely slow easy pace.)

3. In week 6, I increased to 26 mins of total "workout" time.

4. After this, I finally "graduated" to running both 7 days a week and doing 3 sub-threshold workouts/week. Here are my weekly totals of time spent at sub-threshold for the past 9 weeks:

Week 7: 36 mins

Week 8: 45 mins

Week 9: 54 mins

Week 10: 60 mins

Week 11: 62 mins

Week 12: 66 mins

Week 13: 68 mins

Week 14: 69 mins

Week 15: 70 mins

I've already seen a huge jump in my fitness, even at such low volume. I'm in my mid-40s, and have been injury prone before (including getting hurt this past summer when I took my first, much-less-patient stab at NSM).

I honestly didn't believe my body would allow me to run every day, but I haven't missed a day in 9 weeks. I feel much more fresh than when I used to hammer three runs a week and take rest days in between. Part of this I attribute to spreading the workout load over 3 sessions/week instead of 2. It's super easy to play around with the number & length of the intervals in your workouts to increase your volume gradually. Once I hit 60 mins per week at sub-threshold, I noticed that the workouts began to feel much more substantial (in a satisfying way), and so I plan to take a similarly patient approach while building up to 90 mins a week over the coming months. Missing time due to injury pretty much defeats the whole purpose of this method.

One final note is that so far I'm not doing a long run, as I'm not currently interested in racing anything longer than a 10K. I think spreading the easy run load out evenly over 4 days/week has helped limit my fatigue and lessened the possibility of injuries. It just really feels like a reset to go out and run 45 mins genuinely easy, and is so at odds with the many years of running I've done before this.

Very grateful to Sirpoc and others for sharing their insight on this occasionally useful thread! Add me to the growing list of middle-aged runners who suddenly see the possibility of running PRs again after all these years.

I've been using DFA for years and use it regularly to spot check intensities. I also use PolarH10 and compared many lactate tests to DFA A1 with good correlation. I use more individualized boundaries (e.g. 0.8 as first threshold), but it doesn't make a huge difference.

I found that my easy runs per Jack Daniels, and most other calcs had me running too hard.

It's a useful data point, in my opinion.

First of all thank you for the detailed reply. I feel like this can be done in many ways, but its nice to hear how others tackled the problem. If I understand correctly you basically went straight into all 3 workouts, but reduced their volume so the progression is very gradual. I was thinking of doing the same, so its cool to hear you successfully did just that.

Yes, that's what I did. I wanted to know that I could do a very diluted version of NSM before scaling it up at a sustainable rate.

On my previous attempt over the summer, I was doing 2 workouts per week, but started out at 22-24 mins per workout without building up enough of a base first. My reward for that approach was a case of shin splints, which I hadn't had in decades.

I felt really foolish, as it was clear in retrospect that I was trying to do too much too soon, given my fitness level at the time. Honestly, the reality check of having to take 5 weeks off due to the aforementioned shin splints really helped me zoom out and look at the big picture here. It's so easy to get greedy when none of the workouts feel particularly hard.

so youre telling me im the only one turning the volume off and closed captioning on?

right lol