Serious Training Thread - Tinman Haters, what is his system missing?

Kicker wrote:

I don't get why there's so much hostility around this though.

This has been stated a few times in this thread but I'd re-iterate. The source of hostility is not the training but Tinman's personality. He's active on this board along with a few of his loyal adepts and they all sing the same tune – that Tinman training is the best and the most innovative system and all the other coaches are like clueless children compared to the great Tom Schwartz. This lack of respect for colleagues and competitors leads to people trying to pick Tinman's system apart.

His approach is probably one of the better currently popular ones among sub-elites but it's of course not perfect as none are. So when a discussion starts, people hurry up to highlight all the flaws because see paragraph above.

Something that has been mentioned here is the group's relative consistency in the half marathon, which I think raises two interesting points.

1) Not every 14min 5k guy can run a 62 minute half marathon. Many athletes break that barrier by virtue of having the leg speed necessary to run a 4 flat mile. 4:30s just feel so much easier when you are wired that way. A 62 minute half marathon is THIRTEEN 4:44 miles in a row. The skillset is just so different, and unless you have freakish range I think it is unreasonable to say that any distance oriented 4:05 miler "should" be able to do that.

2) The half marathon is actually a super easy distance to coach. Very little specific work is really required for most of us. A good base, consistently over distance long runs, basic progression of timed intervals, mile and k repeats + some 10 mile tempos at or near pace should probably do it for ya. Anecdotally, I'm a couple years out of college and I can train for some decent halfs (not 62 min level by any means but I would say you gotta know a bit about what you're doing to go under 65) without much more thought most days than waking up 2h before I'd like to, and just doin' it.

The problem with TME is that guys like Drew Hunter are training to run world class 1500s and 5000s with what is ultimately a better funded approach to almost the same loosey goosey training schedule used by me, a real estate agent. They are more talented so the same work leads to greater fitness, but their track performances leave me wondering:

Where is the speed? - world class distance runners, as compared to solid distance runners, have a few things that separate them but the main factors are their turnover rate and their closing speed. The last 200 of the USATF 5000 was run in ~25sec by Chelimo and Lomong. The last 100 was just under 12 seconds. Drew Hunter couldn't even stay in the picture on that close, going from "right there" at -400 to a distant 5th by the race's end. Looking at his training, it's not hard to see why. For one, his rep count is really low. Speed isn't ingrained enough in his legs and muscle memory. Rarely maxing out in practice will make that a shock too.

My main criticism of Tinman himself is that for all this, his runners are often hurt and perform inconsistently.

shootpost wrote:

lzlevee wrote:

What do you think causes the high frequency of injury? Too many hills hard when tired?

While we have a mostly seriosu training thread I would love answer on this.

We all agree his training lacks intensity and volume. But why is everyone injured?

Is it because we actually know their daily whereas people like bowerman are completely closed door? Is it lack of physio/strength/recovery resources like say a oregon project has (this doesn't make sense though because plenty of guys chasing the dream don't have that and are fine). Do they not do the bad things? Too fast on easy days? Addidas shoes sucks?

I genuinely don't get the disconnect.

I think for one they have a culture of 'keep the ball rolling' which foolishly translates into 'train/push through niggles until they get really bad' as they all egg eachother on, especially at the age/maturity that they're at

Also load management can be an issue. I know it's not uncommon across elites, but very frequently you'll see them doing CV work after a race. Theres a difference between Galen doing post race 400's (shorter reps) and drawn out CV workouts after a max effort race.

I'm also concerned by the lack of specificity in the training plan for each individual athlete. Tinman doesnt live w them and has numerous other responsibilities. He's not as much a team coach as he is a trusted friend giving advice. How targeted are the training plans? He's not there to see and observe them in sessions. Why are all athletes (apart from sometimes Reed) doing the same workout together every week?

I also wonder if they're disciplined enough with session pacing when the coach isnt there. One of their last sessions uploads were something like 1200's where straight off the bat Drew and Syd were taking some of the newbs WAY under the prescribed pacing. It's cool for confidence but when repeated without a coach reeling you back in, you'll continue to overwork your sessions and body until you break down.

I'm not knowledgable enough (nor are alot of posters here) in the fine details of Tinman's training to comment on the structure of the plans themselves, but I think the issues in injury stem more from the culture in the team and the disjointed set up "with" the coach.

feel free to disagree

I would agree that it's good to work multiple systems, also keeping athlete's familiarity with various paces and to not too far surpass the point of positive returns in a session, before you just start working yourself into the ground for the day.

A lot of athletes will do very long [single distance rep] sessions with no variance in pace and then you will pass the point of positive returns and just start unnecessarily start overtaxing that system. There was a thread about/by Tinman on here before about this but I cant remember the quote (something about a certain amount of minutes in each system before the session becomes pointless for making any further gains)

That being said if you move from a heavy tempo session into loads of speed reps and over do the speed work on tired legs............

I used the multi-paced workout approach with high school kids and it forced them to stay relaxed on the longer reps before letting loose on the shorter, faster reps. However, they were only doing six sessions per week. Everyone is in a development stage. If they were doing 12 sessions a week and were more advanced, the workout structure would change because you have the ability to focus more intensely on certain energy systems/paces in one session. I'm not a Tinman hater - his work has been very helpful. His responses to topics in his old message board were tremendous, especially when kids were in trouble/peaking issues.

However, when I looked at a few of the Tinman guys volume on Strava I was surprised. The NAU and BYU guys appear to be doing much higher volume. I didn't track the entire season for multiple Tinman guys, but that was my observation from a cursory glance. Maybe the guy who puts out the training logs for college teams has one for the Tinman Elite.

It is interesting to compare TME to a program like NAU. Mike Smith has taken kids of similar talent levels and over four years gotten similar or even better results. Day, Beamish, Grijalva, Baxter, Trouard, etc. these kids are younger than many of the TME. Aside from the injury prone Beamish they’ve all been pretty healthy.

Results.

I think we have to agree at some level that there is some jealousy when we talk about Tinman. He was a message bum just like most of us and now is in charge of a well known running group.

That being said I personally see a couple glaring issues with some of the Tinman training.

1. I think this live or die by CV training stuff is just way too overhyped. Just seems like a knock off of Daniels V-Dot training in that “This” pace is the Magic one that will lead to fitness.

From a basic level training we can say that you have Fundamental training (Training to train) and specific training. Everything in between is leaning more towards one way or the other. CV is just some type of random training value that Tinman “feels” is the best.

2. It seems that Tinman has a one size fit all approach. He has a set of principles and ideas for training and this is basically what everyone follows. This approach can work well for large groups of people which is where Tinman does seem to have success. We can’t deny that Tinman has taken some HS kids or Sub elites and gotten them to run very well.

But when we look at athletes at the highest levels there are workouts and training blocks that are very different then compared to a one size fits all approach. As other people have mentioned there are “Special Blocks” (Two a day workouts), very hard and challenging long runs and long blocks of high mileage that can be seen in other elite’s training blocks.

3. Beyond that specific training stuff I just find it odd that when you look at the Tinman videos that Tinman IS NOT THERE. I understand he shows up sometime but I don’t know how the group expects to be elite with your head coach not being there.

4. At some point if we are going to consider or accept Tinman as a very elite coach he is going to have to have an athlete produce a significant result (Sub 3:34 1500, Sub 13:10 5k, Sub 27:40 10k, Sub 1:01 Half or sub 2:11 marathon). Now that is easy for me to say sitting here on a message board but I think that is what we are all waiting for before we deem Tinman as a “elite coach”.

There are just too many coaches out there who produce much better results and receive nowhere near the attention that Tinman does. So at a minimum I think we should want Tinman and his athletes to live up to that.

I think Working Stiff hit the nail on the head.

Tinman is a good coach. He gets a lot of press for "CV", but if you look at the top training groups, they are all focusing on endurance/strength work using similar paces - slightly slower than thresold up to 10k pace is bread and butter for everyone. Maybe 10 years ago more people were doing hard VO2 max repeats more commonly, but now it seems all the top coaches have moved away from that (at least for most of the year).

The real difference between Tinman and other coaches is the "3 layer workouts". The bread and butter workout "7 x 3min CV + 7 x 30 sec hills + 7 x 15-20 sec speed" is unique. Some coaches will tack on some speed/strides at the end, but very few will do it like that. Coaches like Jerry S and Gjert will have strength and speed workouts separate.

I think Tinman is a good coach, and I've tried his type of schedule before (to be clear, not coached by Tinman). Doing workouts like the 7/7/7 is definitely a change from more "typical" training. My experience was that the workouts were somewhat enjoyable, and overall not "hard". But they did put the body under a lot of mechanical stress. I ended up feeling nagging foot injuries frequently when doing workouts like that.

The workouts do not have the same metabolic stress as something like 8-10 x 1 mile, but they can bang you up. For an elite, you can end up with more than 14 miles in a single workout, with 14 out of 21 reps at mile pace or faster (I know they are short). All the fast stuff comes after you've been on your feet for 10+ miles. While it can feel relatively relaxed and won't lead to the same kind of glycogen depletion as a classic threshold/marathon pace workout, I believe it puts your bones/joints/tendons/muscles under a lot of stress.

People complaining about the lack of "speed". Sure, the 5 x 60m with full rest isn't there. But they do a lot of work year round at mile pace and faster. I think most of the Tinman guys find that they do way more speed/hills than they did with previous coaches.

People complaining about the lack of mileage have a fair point. I think elite men should be able to be north of 100 miles per week regularly. I think it goes back to the hidden musculoskeletal stress of Tinman's typical workouts. They run their easy days appropriately easy - high mileage should be attainable.

I could recover from anything in HS. Maybe that is why young runners seem to do so well and not get injured under Tinman. The older I've gotten, the less forgiving my body has been on work faster than threshold effort.

Putting it this way...in tinman’s own running pace calculator (which is actually pretty good I’ll give him that) for a 13:30 runner their CV pace is 2:53-2:49 per K. Which his calculator aligns 15k-10k pace.

I have no issue with athletes doing work faster than threshold pace in the “base phase” or whichever term you prefer. In my eyes, even something like 1500-3000 paced reps have a place 18-24 weeks out to sustain those aspects of your training so that in your next cycle, the improvement comes much quicker.

The issue isn’t “tinman does cv instead of threshold” the issue is the lack of periodization from season to season. All the best athletes in the world follow a similar structure. Whatever philosophy you follow it looks something along the lines of

rest period, building volume phase with some intensity, building intensity phase maintaining volume, max volume and intensity you can sustain without injury, taper, repeat.

Of course there is some variation, but I think most people would agree that’s how the 99 percent does it. But tinman instead goes something like

Very short rest period, building phase, sharpening, taper, repeat.

Out of the top 99 indoor 1500 times. Only FIVE were set outside of February, and all five of those were set in early March. This is because these athletes get really sharp, from amazing times the late winter, recover and do they same thing in late summer/early fall. Tinman is completely missing these peaks and valleys and instead is trying to reach some idealistic linear or logarithmic improvement which is simply impossible

Dr. Pepper wrote:

Maybe the guy who puts out the training logs for college teams has one for the Tinman Elite.

4 Tinman Elite Logs in there with a bunch of others

Thank you

As with most Tinman bashing threads, even with a concerted effort it has been hard to keep the haters focused on substantive critique.

To those saying there isn't enough top-end speedwork - do you feel the same about the Ingebrigtsen's system? If not, why?

Who sprints 25 seconds at the end of a hard race? Not even Bekele or g Gebreselassie.

And no-one improves their 200 to 22-23 unless they are very young and very fast.

You don't know anything about Tinman training anyway. Stop pretending you do.

Regular&Standard wrote:

2. It seems that Tinman has a one size fit all approach. He has a set of principles and ideas for training and this is basically what everyone follows. This approach can work well for large groups of people which is where Tinman does seem to have success. We can’t deny that Tinman has taken some HS kids or Sub elites and gotten them to run very well.

But when we look at athletes at the highest levels there are workouts and training blocks that are very different then compared to a one size fits all approach. As other people have mentioned there are “Special Blocks” (Two a day workouts), very hard and challenging long runs and long blocks of high mileage that can be seen in other elite’s training blocks.

I would say this is my issue and impression with Tinman's approach (and really most training systems).

Reading through the literature he's put out, I get the impression that he doesn't individualize much. What I mean, is, his approach is similar to daniels' tables, where race times = some sort of training paces, regardless of anything else. Even hearing about the same workout over and over again makes me think that he just uses a canned approach.

(to be clear, zero disrespect intended to Dr. Daniels, who goes to great lengths to systematize ways to adjust training from the intensities he provides in his VDOT tables.)

Now, this works reasonably well for high school and the general population, but when you get to the elite level, you're not dealing with the general population, you're dealing with outliers.

Pretty sure coaches like Vigil tested their athletes in a lab quarterly and figured out their vVO2max pace, VLT, etc. I'd expect that of every elite coach to be honest. The best method of assigning training intensities that I've ever tried used blood lactate curves along with associated heart rate and speed data. Currently, I'm playing around with power data and using individual power duration curves to calculate workout intensities.

Any person that doesn't do more to individualize the training from general principles, to better suit the athlete, IMO, does not deserve to be called a coach.

So, to summarize my issues: #1) does not appear to adjust training to suit individual, #2) seems to use the same canned plans over and over again, no matter who he's working with.

Disclaimer: I don't follow what Tinman does on a daily basis. Just my impression from what he's written

I think some of the best observation is the lack of progression from one workout to the next. Doing the same workout over and over again does allow for it to feel easier, but the stress on the system is minimal.

Coaches like Mike Smith do similar workouts week to week, but there mostly are always progressing them slightly in someway unless that workout is in a "maintenance" phase and the priority is on developing another quality.

Also - Tom is at most all practices they have anymore. Not taking sides, but that's not a fair criticism.

coachT53 wrote:

Where is the speed? - world class distance runners, as compared to solid distance runners, have a few things that separate them but the main factors are their turnover rate and their closing speed. The last 200 of the USATF 5000 was run in ~25sec by Chelimo and Lomong. The last 100 was just under 12 seconds. Drew Hunter couldn't even stay in the picture on that close, going from "right there" at -400 to a distant 5th by the race's end. Looking at his training, it's not hard to see why.

Feel free to use another race to highlight the concept, but I think this one in particular isn't really fair because Drew had 3 fractures and a torn plantar in his foot at the end of that race. He was lucky he didn't have to walk to the finish line in the home stretch.

Kicker wrote:

coachT53 wrote:

Where is the speed? - world class distance runners, as compared to solid distance runners, have a few things that separate them but the main factors are their turnover rate and their closing speed. The last 200 of the USATF 5000 was run in ~25sec by Chelimo and Lomong. The last 100 was just under 12 seconds. Drew Hunter couldn't even stay in the picture on that close, going from "right there" at -400 to a distant 5th by the race's end. Looking at his training, it's not hard to see why.

Feel free to use another race to highlight the concept, but I think this one in particular isn't really fair because Drew had 3 fractures and a torn plantar in his foot at the end of that race. He was lucky he didn't have to walk to the finish line in the home stretch.

What about

where he was right with them at 1100m and then they put 3s on him over the 300m or so. Drew doesn't have a ton of races on record so it is hard to tell if things are patterns or just bad days. The 2018 1500m at USATF was a sorta borderline decent kick but those races where they crank up the last 800m are sort of hard to judge.

But to some extent he shouldn't be worried about his kick. He should be worried about running 13:00. Whats the point of a kick if you aren't in a place to use it? And if you can run 13:00, your kick will be good enough against 13:10 runners. For 5000m type events, the best way to get a better kick is to get better endurance....