DISCUSSION does anaerobic training destroys aerobic talent?

not much

If you train sensibly for the 400m for a few years, it's not going to hinder your long term aerobic performance, it'll only delay it some. Plus, there may be some benefit in giving your body more experience at faster paces.

That said, you must be careful. Anaerobic workouts can impact your aerobic ability by altering the ph in your blood, which can mess with your mitochondria. If you do too much VERY high volume anaerobic work without enough recovery you'll burn out. The real trouble happens when middle distance runners in HS/college do intense intervals, then too intense red-line fast long "recovery" runs never allowing time to recover. This eventually even messes with your hormone production, which in some cases has destroyed people's running careers for life.

Even though it may seem intense, most smart 400 meter runners don't train enough to get the same kind of long term permanent damage that can happen to distance runners.

what about coe and his 4 - 5paces each and every week?

Or i read that those rats in holzniky's test could run 10 minutes ad ay at 3 km pace and still improve.Since rats muscle are build quite like human i can think that there needs to be a good definition of what workouts we are talking about here?

Btw i have a friend who runs verry alike the lkast approach and he still improved while people sayd here he'd fail.Actually he's a 15 minute 5km runner now doeing 4 to 5 sessions at 3 - 10 km pace it aint really a pace he works with heart rate.But he works over thresshold.

My question then is what pace is dangerous to workout at most.all paces over vo2max except the sprints?

Coe did 7-8 paces each week once you counted the slower work. As he got better then much of his track work was actually aerobic. At his best, When he was running 27s for 200 he would have been running well below threshold and the session would have been improving his aerobic performance not detracting from it.

be sensible wrote:

That said, you must be careful. Anaerobic workouts can impact your aerobic ability by altering the ph in your blood, which can mess with your mitochondria. If you do too much VERY high volume anaerobic work without enough recovery you'll burn out.

YOU ARE AN IDIOT.

been there wrote:

be sensible wrote:

That said, you must be careful. Anaerobic workouts can impact your aerobic ability by altering the ph in your blood, which can mess with your mitochondria. If you do too much VERY high volume anaerobic work without enough recovery you'll burn out.

YOU ARE AN IDIOT.

Can't you be a bit more instructive as to why s/he is an idiot? Lydiard himself talked about anaerobic work altering blood ph. I must be an idiot too, because that made sense to me....

Your body is very good at adapting. Any negative affects will be short term in relation to your lifespan.

Lots of slow stuff

and a good mixture of variable speed.

Have I been missing something ?

Glen wrote:

At his best, When he was running 27s for 200 he would have been running well below threshold

Sorry. No one is running "well below threshold" at 54 second per 400 pace.

Actually, Coe doing 20 by 200m in 27 with say a minute rest, would be at about lactic threshold intensity (read more of an aerobic stimulus). His 5-pace training program involved even slower speeds. The trick in training at such relative high velocities is the manipulation of your rest interval. If he did his 200s with a 20-30sec rest he'd probably be in trouble at 27 sec pace because lactic acid would start to accumulate quickly (read anaerobic). Also, a workout like 10 by 100m at 12 sec ea. with a 300m jog is a very fast speed workout...but its alactic, so you're not getting the very much lactic acid and therefore you aren't going to lower your ph too much and compromise earlier gains in aerobic development.

the main thing is that 400m training builds muscle mass that is not good for longer races. Most people struggle to lose this mass and therefroe have a hard time moving up in distance

be nice wrote:

Can't you be a bit more instructive as to why s/he is an idiot? Lydiard himself talked about anaerobic work altering blood ph. I must be an idiot too, because that made sense to me....

How does lowering blood ph reduce aerobic capacity?

What evidence is there that it does so?

Most sprinters (the good ones) train along the same lines as good distance runners. If you look at the logs of Mo Greene or Michael Johnson, you'll see that 75-80% of all their running is moderate-to-easy running.

scepticus wrote:

How does lowering blood ph reduce aerobic capacity?

What evidence is there that it does so?

One of the urban legends of the exercise science world. Blood pH lowers for brief periods of time. As soon as anaerobic physical exertion ceasess, pH returns to normal. Blood pH is strickly governed by the body. If pH varies by as little as 0.1 pH point it is a serious condition known as acidosis - which rapidly leads to death.

There is no such word as "strickly". The word is "strictly". There is no such word as "ceasess". The word is "ceases".

Good content. Bad presentation.

Well as probably the only idiot around here who knows COe and Ovett well and has done the same training as them (and with Ovett), I think that you might ask me questions first and criticise me afterwards.

For an 800m runner who can run under 22 secs for 200m, 27 secs is not fast, nor is the rep long. It cannot be equated to a 54 sec 400m precisely because it is not one - it is only half the distance. The idea of running shorter reps like 200m with 200m jog is to run a huge amount of work at race pace whilst keeping the blood lactate low.The aim is to work white muscle aerobically at the fastest speed load that this can be achieved. When you are really fit then the pulse climbs quite slowly during the reps and also drops dramatically during the jogs. Coe developed his session out to 40x200m in 27/28 secs on a 7% incline hill with 200 jog back. You cannot do that session anaerobically.

As long as you keep free of lactate by controlled jogs then the session can be almost totally aerobic (ie less than 4mm of lactate. I know this from my own experience.

My critic is probably making the mistake of thinking what he, or others he knows, can do and applying that to a world class athlete.

To go 0onot the main point of discussion, then yes too much anaerobic training can destroy the cell system. It may take 5-7 years to take full effect and up to that time there may be good improvements in other areas of the body that mask the damage. The way back is to do fat burning runs at 140 or less until the cells are restructured. This needs to be acvcompanied by a diet high in natural foods and lots of water.

Glen

3 things

1) I agree with Glenn that one could a high volume of fast running and it would not necessarily be anaerobic work, because a) what we consider "fast", might not be that fast for the world class runner we are discussing, and b) if the rep is short, there is not enough time to jack the heart-rate up much, and therefore the lactic acid does not really occur/build up. Igloi's athletes trained this way most of the time, tons of short reps for high volumes. It may at times certainly been anerobic training, but there is no way the lionshare of the workots were. There is no way they could have maintained that intensity for such much volume. So really, their training was more aerobic than many likely realize.

2) trackhead, on paper, what you say might appear to occasionally be correct about Mo Greene and other sprinters , if you are couting every 10 minute mile pace step they might jog as a warm-up, but in reality, it is rather silly in my opinion to say that "Most sprinters (the good ones) train along the same lines as good distance runners." That's very misleading. You know (or should know) that they train very differently. A 100m runner has little reason to train his lactate management system, and no distance runner is training at the near-all-out sprint paces that sprinters regularly utilize. Are distance runners constantly working on their starts, or squatting for max lifts regularly? If sprinters and distance runners ARE training "along the same lines", then I think they are nuts since the events are so different. Don't try to turn Lydiard into the guru of sprint training too.

3) Glenn and others, you say that anaerobic training can destroy cell systems and hurt mitchondria, etc. Please cite the medical evidence of this. I am not syaing you are wrong, just saying: I hear such comments bandied about a lot without usually seeing scientific proof to back it up.

glenn at what point are we talking then about anaerobic training?

ANd when is to much to much for a general person?

is it everything above thresshold we are talking about or

(say aerobic capacity 5 x 1 km at 5 km pace with 1 minute 30 rest) or

is it more specific training like 10 x 400 30 seconds rest etc...

My mate trains aerobic capacity only 5 days a week and has steadily improved over the half year.I jumped in the boat this vacation early.So will we finally go down as well?

What about horwill's stuff?

Another intresting question i'd have is combination of sports say you do anaerobic training hard in one sport will it also kill the other sport?FOr example if you do two anaerobic rowing sessions 2 anaerobic running sessions and 2 anaerobic swimming sessions.Or is it only specific to the used muscle cells?

I hear

I'm pretty sure too much anaerobic work will start to destroy the benefits gained from aerobic conditioning. I believe this is discussed in Coe's "Better Training For Distance Runners."