Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

I just listened to the Inside Running podcast with Cam Myers from a few weeks ago. Bakken would lose his mode, from a muscle tone perspective, with Myers’ schedule. Monday easy + sprints, Tuesday workout, Wednesday easy + gym, Thursday double T, Friday easy/off + gym, Saturday workout, Sunday long run. Is Myers immune to all the muscle tone chat? Is it because he doubles most days? Or because he’s 19? Bakken is against even strides on easy days and has said that weight training raises muscle tone quite a bit. But Myers seems to be raising muscle tone constantly.

I do 2 x sub T sessions with 2 x easy run and 1 long run. My schedule looks like this:

Monday - rest

Tuesday - Sub T

Wednesday - easy

Thursday - easy

Friday - rest

Saturday - sub T

Sunday - Long

I'm looking at possibly replacing the easy run on a Thursday to a cross training (elliptical) session such as 3 x 10 to keep it low impact and also due to the fact that I had to have 5 days off running last week with a nerve issue in my calf so I figured it wouldn't do any harm to drop a run day and add in a session on the cross trainer. I will perhaps add in a few more miles on warm up/warm down on my session days so I don't lose out on too many miles but going to try it for the next few months and see how I go.

A couple of things I think are worth mentioning:

1. The increase in muscle tone from lifting can vary a lot.

The specific way you are designing and implementing a lifting session matters a ton.

On one extreme end:

-Reps to failure (even though the ideal distance to failure for strength is 3-5 reps)

-Differing exercises every 3-4 weeks,

-Lots of reps per set,

-Doing 1-2 really high volume lifting days,

-Really unstable exercises that are supposed to be more specific to running

-Periodizing lifting where you're only doing it half the year.

On the other end:

-5-7 reps from failure,

-Lower reps per set,

-Changing exercises when you stop improving (so likely after months rather than weeks)

-Aiming to get like 70% of the potential gains rather than 100%,

-Not being over concerned about lifts being hyper specific to running

-Spreading out lifting across more days if possible

Not going overkill with volume and realizing that quality is more important than quantity

-Lifting year round so your body can fully adjust.

If you're lifting is more like the second, the effect on muscle tone is going to be limited at most, whereas with the first you're going to feel terrible.

2. Sprints and strides can make some people feel better

An increase in muscle tone can be a good thing for some people. I personally will feel better after increasing my muscle tone from strides. I'm not that much of an outlier, this is pretty common in athletes whose best events are 800-3000. I feel best for a race by doing a bunch of really hard strides the day before and I'm really susceptible to over-tapering, which I think is related.

3. People generally overestimate how quickly they can adapt to something in the short term and underestimate the degree to which they can adapt to something in the long term

Well designed sprinting workouts designed to stimulate max speed are always low volume. It's common for people to see these workouts, want to see if they benefit from them, and then just copy them because it doesn't seem like that much work.

Like if someone saw that Cam Myers was doing 5 x 40m sprints twice a week, they might decide to start doing that workout, then when they copy that workout exactly, they get really sore, which is to be expected really. What if you had copied his threshold days, or even half of it, without any experience running.

If over an entire year you were to build to 200m of sprinting volume a week, starting at 10m, you'd be adding about 3.5 meters a week. It's unlikely that most people would so sore it ruins future Sub T sessions sprinting 10m once, then adding volume that slowly. I would bet a lot of money that people aren't doing that, which is strange, because most people know they can't jump straight into full double threshold with little running experience.

The podcast with FOD, Sirpoc and Bakken is now available on YouTube. However, it hasn't appeared on my podcast feed yet.

Surely part of this is just age? When I was 19 I could stay up all night drinking cheap cider and then go to work the next day feeling fine.

Now it would destroy me, not just the next day but for the whole week. You can get away with sub-optimal stuff for a long time when you're young, but eventually old father time comes knocking...

Sprints the day before threshold and lifts on easy runs is really common among elites. I don't think you can just call it sub-optimal and say that he can only do it because he's 19

Bakken talks about Karston Warholm having very high tone but also high elasticity. perhaps Myers is in that category

The term "gym" might be a bit too undefined here? In Andreas Almgren's book, he writes about his own strength training. He does it 4 times a week of different types. He writes that if you do heavy strength training you should only do easy running the day after, which is identical to Bakken. But that's only one of his gym sessions each week that is like that. The other 3 gym sessions are much easier and some of them are also more focused on core than on the legs.

And on today's podcast with FOD/Sirpoc, Bakken says that it's possible to manipulate the easy days for people on the elite level (doesn't apply to 99% of runners), but it's very difficult. You need to measure it the whole year around, and other things. It's around the 13 minute mark.

M51 with two questions regarding two different kinds of progress:

(1) Once you're clearly seeing lower HRs at a given pace - say 2-4 beats lower on the 3x10 min reps - my understanding is that the legs can still take a while to fully adapt, compared to the heart/cardio side of things. Is there a "smart delay" to use before running reps 5-10 seconds faster (e.g., take two weeks at lower HRs to ensure legs fully "catch-up" and bake in gains?). Not sure how quickly to chase reduced effort into pace.

(2) So, supershoes. NSM has been great, but I tried some Nike vaporflies over the past six months, ended up with two low grade injuries. Maybe not the cause, but sure makes you think. I throw these shoes on, and I'm 10-15 seconds faster per mile at the same effort. Does running 10-15 seconds faster across the board all at once from shoes add mechanical strain and, therefore, one should take, for example, four weeks to phase them in? In contrast, I've heard of folks barely using their supershoe then just racing in them.

i usually try and do prehab day before sub t days. am doing holmich protocol for groin/adductor issues, plus single leg squats and bridges. did holmich after a sub t day this week and next day sore glutes and had some kinda nerve pain on my left leg whilst running. so no run today until my glutes feel better.

when i do prehab on my sub t days, i often find single leg exercises much more unstable. so prefer to do them day before.

This is exactly the sort of mad scientist sh*t that makes this thread great. Keep it coming!

100% your threshold hr will not be the same between running and cycling unless you’re really adapted to cycling

your almost 20 beats between running max and cycling max id assume at least that much difference in lthr between running and cycling as well

he loves to bring up all my failed experiments lol

How does that compare to the improvement you think you would’ve made without changing anything?

(1) I wait to see similar improvements across all ST sessions and then be honest about any other changes, such as improved weather. Improved fitness is not the only reason for HR to be lower, fatigue can also do it. But if HR is lower, you feel better and all other factors are similar, adjust the pace slightly but be prepared to go back if it is off.

(2) I’m not sure what you were doing sessions in before but if it was not a plated “super” foam, the load is likely to be different. Increased pace will increase the load on the body, the shoes could then put that load somewhere slightly different, such as less at the ankle and more further up the chain.

I always see training as bridging the gap between where you are and where you are heading, so controlled incremental changes generally work best. Training takes more patience than talent for most of us.

KI going for Copenhagen this week. Weather looks perfect. Training has been huge for this one, some absolutely massive weeks and really gone all in.

Finally time to put down a good performance? 2:28 for the kind of built he has had and the conditions seems about par?

Sub 2:30 almost guaranteed unless he blows up spectacularly.

I hope he does well. Sub 2:30 is minimum for time invested in this one. Something always seems to go wrong though. He's either very unlucky or just seems to moan and complain about something in every race.

His easy running actually seems easier now effort wise versus his workouts, HR much lower. Maybe that penny finally dropped. I've always found that aspect very odd of his training that he never really understand how much the easy running is almost the most important. Especially as they had access to Bakken.

Dude averaged a little over 8 hours, seems fairly normal for him. He casually ran a 1:15 HM as a training session though, yeah.

He has done a couple of ridiculously big weeks, 180km and a 140km week. He's definitely all in on this. I actually think he might run about 2:25. Copenhagen is decently fast and the weather looks perfect. Only downside is he is very poor at execution of races. Strangely so.