Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

This is valuable to hear. I'm often close to 80%, sometimes more, but still RPE 1-2, conversational pace, feeling truly easy and am fresh every day. However, my HR hasn't changed at all since I started NSM in the summer and I don't feel like I've got much fitter. TTs are patchy and poorly executed but also don't indicate much improvement. Could it come down to the easy runs? It seems crazy to think it could. Food for thought.

I don't really agree with the 70% max HR hard cap for NSM as a rule. For pros running 100+ miles a week and doing 2 x double-threshold + X-factor, I think it makes sense. I think for hobby joggers running 3 x single-threshold, it isn't a one size fits all, and there is a case for some to increase it. For me, and I'm sure others, my form deteriorates at really slow paces, so capping at 70% causes more harm than good - I proved this to myself for a year. Allowing myself the freedom to go up to 75% recently has made running feel more natural and actually reduced the fatigue that I carry into my next sub-T session. I went from 9:00 min/mi at 64% max HR two months ago to 7:30 min/mi at 73% max HR this week, and I feel significantly better.

Looks like Paul Luttrell has bone stress in his pelvis according to his strava.

Running below 70% may feel clunky but at some point your aerobic system "catches up" with your mechanics.

You do your own thing but remember that running at 7:30 per mile and 75% max HR in the long term will have a bigger impact on fatigue but give basically no additional benefits to running at 65% max HR and 9 mins per mile.

This method is about stacking weeks and months and even years of 3 subT sessions on top of each other and that is why the easy runs need to be slower than you'd think.

Tbh this was me. I was running 75% of MHR on easy days and felt fine. Didn't get injured. But then stagnated, started to feel quite tired and workouts were not becoming hard, but the paces in them didn't increase. I wasn't complaining, because overall I was much faster.

However, there were some excellent posts about KI and how he was clearly running his easy days too hard and this was probably the route of no more progression and probably feeling cooked. I sort of brushed it off and came back to "this easy being that easy doesn't apply to me".

Couple of weeks later re-read some of these excellent posts and decided I would commit to 65% MHR as a goal on my easy runs, but definitely 70% on the hard cap.

It didn't feel easy to run that slow, but then the paces became easier and faster, at the slower effort. But, the main thing was I felt amazing. I was fresh for every session and actually my legs did the work and i was able to really comfortably do just about every workout near the top end of almost brushing LTHR by the last rep and the absolute top end of the new pace bands sirpoc's book.

Then I had another big, big breakthrough in fitness. Obviously you cannot say for sure, but I feel it's probably because I'm getting the max from the workouts and the easy runs have just become filler, rather than the easy runs being part of the stress of the week and the workouts were OK to do, but, becoming a drain after about 7-8 months of plain sailing previously.

This isn't to tell anyone how they must do it, but just to share my experiences. But I thought i was special, in that I could get away with this. This was on around 5.5-6 hour a week volume. The other good thing is I have been able to increase volume as well, much easier now.

I do think if you are only doing 3-4 hours a week, you are probably right you don't need to worry about what elites are doing, or even 7 days a week hobby joggers. But, if you are running every day (which I think is also very doable following NSM) I do think over time, easy really has to be really easy.

This is an excellent post. Thank you. I have been suspecting I have been running my easy days too hard. You have laid out the pattern of where I am headed.

I actually just finished the book which made me think as well. I don't think I realised how good the book was (haven't seen many reviews or promotion?) and some of the things in there all piece together and lay out the rationale of why, not just giving you paces, hard caps with no thought. I suspect this is a big mistake I made, I simply put my paces into the outdated lactrace and off i went, without understanding anything really about what is going on. To be honest, that did serve me OK for a bit, but now I think I can say I fully understand what is going on, from bottom to top.

I'm probably way late to this, but for those who haven't read the book, it's so much more than just plug and play like some of the online posts calculator and guides you find about NSM.

If your form deteriorates at a certain pace, that's a separate issue. Lots of people runs E around 9:00 min/mile (which would be around 5:37 min/km) and slower.

Great post. This is, or was, me as well. At a guess I think I probably got away with easy/moderate runs and progressed for 6 months. After that, I encountered most of what you mention. Slowing down even more, was even harder. But worth it. Before NSM easy to me was around 80% MHR. Then I brought it down to 74-76% range, echoing other people that metrics didn't apply to me, if it felt reasonably easy that would do.

But now having set on the hard cap rule of 70%, which I'm generally quite a bit under, it's all back on track to the point which it's felt easier than ever before and like yourself, my workout paces are ever increasing. This is the important thing as far scales your race paces and makes them faster.

You can cheat feel and RPE and not be honest with yourself. But the HR monitor doesn't lie. It can give you a data point and value of what true easy is. It's the one thing I wish I had listened to early. Fwiw I'm a sub 17 guy now (16:54) on NSM , lifetime PBs and I'm going around at 9-:9:30/mile on easy days.

What a post! This is the one that does it for me. You said it became a problem after 7-8 months of plain sailing 5.5-6 hours a week. I also just had 8 months of plain sailing on 5.5-6.5 hours a week and then completely out of the blue a minor injury. But maybe it wasn't really out of the blue. My ST paces had increased a bit and although still easily doable it felt close to LT2 much of the time, even going over now and then, while easy runs were 75-80%. Still felt good and fresh but was doubting my progress, and then the injury. I'm committing to 70% now.

This post exemplifes the thread - people helping people. Thanks mate.

OK, so I've read the running part of the Bakken book ... The last third is general advice about health, nourishment, motivation, injury and so on.

The book is both a light read and yet at the same time does not feel too superficial. Sirpoc put in a lot of detail with long tables etc ... Bakken lines on the principles but does not flesh out a lot.

Anyways compared to MSN, here is what I noted:

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1. He does recommend a weekly xfactor session

2. He likes his doubles even for mid runners doing 4-6 hours a week, tho for them he limits it to running doubles once every 14 days.

3. He recommends periodization. His aim is to peak twice a year .. once in spring and once in autumn.

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With regards to the xfactor session he does stress that it is optimal. If you're injury prone or just feeling cooked then just do a subt instead. Also mentions that he has know plenty of runners that improved for 2-3 years on only subt sessions.

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He does discuss the benefits of a non-periodized or "flat" training plan and gives examples of how to train flat.

On page 115 he furthermore mentions that there currently is a popular flat training method funnily enough inspired by the "unknown" brother of Jakob Ingebrigtsen Kristoffer and refined by Englishman James Copeland.

He describes it as a simplified version of the Norwegian Method that his book is about. He recommends it as it's a very safe way to train, while still giving great gains. Especially suited for hobbyjoggers!

He then spends a page on how you might structure a week of MSN and ends saying that over time when improvement slows you can experiment by adding in xfactor sessions.

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PS. With regards to the "I can't slow at 70% heartrate" crowd that suddenly showed up here. He does indeed consider 70% as a hard cap.

He has a rule of thumb tho which is: It's easy if you can breathe thru your nose.

I've looked at pace vs HR before for easy runs and while there's an obvious correlation (R2=0.43) it's not that strong and the spread is quite wide. I'd look at it and think yeah, pace is obviously affecting HR but clearly lots of other things must be as well - probably heat, humidity, stress, sleep, etc. Also, the pace that matched 70% based on the fit seemed unrealistically slow, so I ignored it.

However, I'd only used individual day values before. I just did it with 20 day averages and the correlation really pops out (R2=0.79). You'd expect it to, but it's still striking, Also, the pace that matches 70% is within 5 seconds of the book's pace for what I believe is my 5K fitness. And it's 20-30s/km slower than I've been doing easy runs up to now. That does it for me, 70% from now on.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exercise at higher intensity (for the same duration/distance) will ALWAYS lead to greater adaptations than exercise at a lower intensity. To claim otherwise is simply nonsensical.

So how are you going to put that plan into action, given the weak correlation of HR with intensity on a day-to-day basis? Won't you end up running too fast on some days and unnecessarily slow on others, even the longer term average works out?

I do or aim for most of my easy runs at or below 70% but I do ask myself - - What's the point of even running if you're going below 70%? Active recovery? Might as well just cross train on EZ days (probably why so many are doing the bike or elliptical these days), or even just take the day off, or go for a walk.

Someone posted a study on here 2-3 months ago about the lack of benefits or any benefit below 70%. 75% it said you start to get a benefit or more of a benefit at least. Also 75% is still easy running in a lot of programs. Not sure what it is about that extra 5% that people are afraid of. I truly doubt you'll feel a difference if you're honest. I've done easy runs at both for extended periods of time. I've done 90 min long runs with friends at 75% & the increase in load on ICU compared to say 68-69% is definitely significant so you get a nice bump in fitness.

I also think those of us in hilly areas are probably fine to go above 70% avg since we're already going as slow as possible & the difference in speed between 70 to say 75% is very marginal. I live on the bottom of a hill & within first 75 meters my HR is already well above 70%. No, I'm not walking up every hill. I'd be walking half the run & would need double the time to get an EZ run in. Treadmill, track are about the only flat surfaces. But when I go downhill my HR is way below 70% so it kinda evens out. But HR gets thrown out the window a lot of runs.

Can't you still use the calculator, but just go slightly slower than what it recommends (by time) for all workouts?

While I follow the 70% “rule” and it works for me, I think it’s reasonable that some people might go over that and still be able to recover and adapt. We are all an experiment of one. And, using hard rules when it comes to HR makes the assumption that we all know our true max heart rates. Using max HR as a “strict”guide has pitfalls. That being said, using 70% as a guideline and factoring in RPE and your own anecdotal evidence is the prudent approach in my opinion.

Some of this is just plain wrong. You’re saying there is a lack of benefit to running under 70% of max HR and you’d be better off not running at all? I think the 70% rule is a big part of why so many people improve on this method. It’s something hobby joggers struggle with the most, IMO. So many people were running their easy days way too fast. I know a couple of people who got back into running after an extended break. They complained about getting injured, they’re too old, they can’t run more than 30-35 miles per week. Lo and behold when they started running below 70% on easy days, closer to 65-67%, they could run more and weren’t getting injured any more. Even at that lower mileage, I think the 70% rule holds true. Can some people get away with running faster on easy days? Sure. But that’s not most people.

When it comes to paces for easy runs Sirpoc's aren't really that slow. It looks like about 70% of his threshold on average assuming threshold is slightly slower than his 10k racing pace.
Those at 65% were often labeled as "very easy" but there are many above 70% as well (recent example is the one done on January 26th at 4:23/km).

This 70-74% of threshold speed is also something Jakob Ingebrigsten has been doing at least according to the information I have found about his paces on easy days.

For 40min 10k runner, for whom 10k race speed is likely very close to their threshold, 70% of that would be around 5:43/km speed.