Threshold running vs. 80/20-Polarized training

Well thats my point, the evidence is clear. They look at training logs of olympic skiers etc... and they train polarized. Virtually every scientific article post 2000 has backed this up. Im not taking sides. I just find it weird we ignore the evidence. Observational evidence not withstanding.

There is no evidence of what you try to prove! Many ways lead to Rome!! )))

All of the best athletes in the country and the world are doing threshold and tempo training. It works.

Do both, at the right time.

The amazing and spectacular findings from the studies you cite has more to do with low intensity than it does high intensity. All successful athletes train hard, at various intensities.

Very successful athletes back that purposeful practice up with A LOT of supportive training. Call it what you want (easy, regen, recovery, junk).

The idea is that you need to find that right low intensity for you (not too low) but also not too high as to take away from your other trainings.

BTW the ingebritsons do "sessions". Americans call them threshold sessions, because they are obsessed with threshold. Actually half of them are 2.5mmol lactate and half are 3.5 mmol. They realize that going too hard is hard to recover from and burns you out. Go really hard, but do it more sparingly.

They don't actually do any 4mmol lactate threshold training.

The difference between threshold and polarized for elite runners is pretty small.

Athlete A does a threshold workout: 6x1 mile at HM pace with 60s rest

Athlete B does a polarized workout: 5x1 mile at 10k pace with 120s rest

Those aren't radically different workouts but we give them different names. Or maybe the same name depending on if you are using vo2max%, heart rate, perceived effort, Lactate,... to measure effort. The idea that slower threshold paces (i.e. say slower than marathon to when you hit that easy run level) being a bit low value has been out for at least 25 years now. Daniels talked about it in his books and it predates him.

People recommend a lot of threshold work these days because it is tolerable. If you are doing a 8 week study doing things like 4x4mins at 5k pace 2x/week gets awesome results and crushes threshold efforts of like 2x30mins of threshold running (break it up however you want). Problem is that few people can do those 4x4 sessions for 24 weeks or 48 weeks without breaking down. So the general approach is you do a ton of tempo work with some faster stuff sprinkled in and then as you approach racing season you crank up the intensity.

People don’t realize that lactate turnpoint 1 occurs at a steady (not easy) pace. 80/20 does not mean that 80% of your running is easy but that 80% is below LT 1

Cross Country skiers do workouts around threshold and seldom go very hard, but they do a lot of it. In addition they have lots of easy long to build and develop. Be aware that comparing skiers over time is hard since they compete in allways changing conditions,as opposed to running with standard distances and surfaces.

parkerjohn wrote:

People don’t realize that lactate turnpoint 1 occurs at a steady (not easy) pace. 80/20 does not mean that 80% of your running is easy but that 80% is below LT 1

One issue is that the 80/20 assumes that LT1 is identical to VT1, and is identical to max fat burning intensity, and these all equate to 75% of max HR. For most runners, these are different intensities. Most runners following 80/20 will keep the 80% easy at about 75% of max HR, which will be well below LT1. The 20% will be above 90% of max HR. So there will be confusion about where to fit in threshold runs?

80/20 doesn't work unless you are doing high mileage like 60+ mpw.

People at my club don't realise this.

cute_superspreader wrote:

80/20 doesn't work unless you are doing high mileage like 60+ mpw.

People at my club don't realise this.

Do you mean that runners on low mileage don't have a big enough aerobic base to support high intensity anaerobic work?

Alfie wrote:

cute_superspreader wrote:

80/20 doesn't work unless you are doing high mileage like 60+ mpw.

People at my club don't realise this.

Do you mean that runners on low mileage don't have a big enough aerobic base to support high intensity anaerobic work?

Nobody though is suggesting doing a lot of high intensity anaerobic work. The question is what you should do for your quality aerobic work and to some extent how hard your easy days should be.

A lot commons down to how abused the term threshold and tempo are. A "traditional" break down for a 30 min 10k guy would be along the lines of

easy running 6-7 min pace

Threshold pace 5:00

Interval pace 4:40

The polarized crowd really isn't against doing threshold runs at 5:00 pace. What they are opposed to doing is steady state runs at like 5:30 pace.

There are some programs that do push more of a steady state running approach (i.e. Ron Clarke for example basically did an hour hard every night with a run in the morning. Lydiards 3/4 efforts for an hour are probably in this zone ) that have been very successful.

At low volumes (think high schoolers running 35mpw) you can sort of get away with running a lot in that sort of grey zone. You do 1-2 races/week and a bunch of 5 mile runs at 5k pace+1. The low mileage (and being young) lets you get away with running sort of fast every day. There is a solid argument that those kids would be better off working on upping the mileage to 50 AND one of the key ways of doing that is instead of running a 5k pace+1 mile (i.e. your 18 min kid running 7 min miles on his easy day) to slow down to 5k+2 mins (i.e. going out and running 8 min miles).

I would also hesitate to extrapolite too much from XC, swimmers and cyclist to runners. The lack of impact stress seems to make going much harder a lot more tolerable.

Hmm interesting. What I dont "get" is the hard core research refers specifically to polarized training as specifically working around threshold, NOT in it! I found that surprising, as i have learned the same way as all of you. The research specifies running below 75% ish (or LT1 as some of you pointed out) for a big chunk, which is not surprising. But the other end is surprising...the polarized nature is working above 90% on the other end. So, below 75%, and above 90% for the purposes of these research articles (and in a ratio of 80/20 for the 80/20 crowd). Thats solidly getting up to HIIT/VO2 maxish pace not threshold pace? They actually refer to it as "zone 1 and 3" training, splitting up HR zones by 3 not 5.

It just surprised me that the evidence (on paper) vey much recommends staying out of that 75-90% zone ( not completely, but clearly to de-emphasize it), which is opposite of my learning from the past 20 years. Remember they are comparing this method specifically to a comparitor group utilizing more threshold. I know threshold would never be the majority of your training. But im surprised again to see these papers having such a predilection for above 90% rather than 80-90% on the order of about 4x as much training above 90 compared to threshold. Although still with the majority under VT1. Clear as mud?

Here is a good link:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16430681/

If you want the upshot:

Discussion:

The key finding of this study is that well‐trained junior cross‐country skiers, training in a manner consistent with the intensity distribution recommended for highly successful international cross‐country skiers, adopt a polarized model of intensity distribution. About 75% of their training sessions are performed with essentially the entire session below the first ventilatory threshold (≤2.0 mM blood lactate). In 5–10% of training sessions, major portions of the training are performed between VT1 and VT2. The remaining 15–20% of training sessions are performed as interval bouts, with substantial periods of work above VT2.

Other articles have supported these findings.

I'll preface by saying that my understanding of the scientific side of running is far from comprehensive but I have a good enough grasp to make my own assumptions. For the most part, I agree with what you're saying. People in the distance community have over emphasized the importance of tempo efforts (75-90%) especially their place in the competitive season but another poster mentioned that no one can actually maintain, or begin with heavy/all out bouts such as 90%+ without a base. When youre training during october/november and may/june (even earlier in some cases), youre training to race. But before that, in your offseasons, youre training to train i.e. getting yourself in good enough shape to actually reap the benefits of a high octane training schedule. So yes imo coaches should essentially do away with HM+ effort type of workouts except for as a sort of active recovery in down weeks, but thats only in the competition months and after a solid foundation has been set.

Remember when we are training we are doing it so we can not just do tomorrow session but the next few sessions.

It you have had years of experience of building your endurance you are working your top end speed, typically. Hence the high volume per week of vo2max workouts, but you can’t do this Continuously without burn out so you need to add slower pace.

The elites are running high end aerobic workout in high volume as they can, recover from the workouts, plus need to stimulus to stop regression.

Adding and hour or so of threshold as it’s just fun is icing on the cake plus does help.

Well takes my take, run the workouts which are to provide the biggest improvement as the best possible pace so I can continue the workouts next week.

The specific nature of the workouts and paces will vary if in pre base or competition

It would sort of be fun to see a graph off all the training with each workout as a dot. For distance runners (skiers might be able to get away with more intensity), I expect there to be a huge grouping down around 70% (i.e. the easy runs), a big grouping between 85-100% (all that HM->5k pace work), and then just a bit of the really hard stuff (1500m pace and faster).

Again there have been tons of studies (including ones on runners) where things like 4x4 min at 5k pace (or faster) give better training results than 30 mins of HM paced running. But they all run like 8 weeks. I don't think it is that controversial to say that the 8 weeks before a 3k or 5k race, you should be doing a lot of 5k type pace work. The question when you are looking at a 16 or 24 week training block if you can sustain that type of intensity. Most peoples experience is nope, you need to back off. Maybe we would be better off doing say 12x400 at 5k pace with decent rests (say 90s-2:00) and that would give a better stimulus than a tempo run while being much easier to tolerate than 4min+ runs. I am not sure science can really answer that yet.

Some one needs to pay Joshua Cheptegei to record every run he does for a year so we can see what elite athletes are really doing:)

Ok all of this is great. But do you realize how many Kenyan elites are going to have the myostatin deficiency disorder? Meaning having an overgrowth of muscles naturally.

So there would have to be different sets and values for Kenyan athletes and then a whole other set and values for NON myostatin deficient athletes.

What works for myostatin deficient athletes isn't always going to work for NON myostatin deficient athletes.

Myostatin deficient athletes are able to recover quicker therefore allowing more training volume.

That's just one benefit.

Jakob runs pretty well doing four threshold sessions per week.

I think I'll jump in here an not let some important points be overlooked. You say,

adsfdasfasfsafadfa wrote:

A lot commons down to how abused the term threshold and tempo are.

I don't disagree that these terms have different meanings for different folks. However, you claim,

adsfdasfasfsafadfa wrote:

...there have been tons of studies (including ones on runners) where things like 4x4 min at 5k pace (or faster) give better training results than 30 mins of HM paced running. But they all run like 8 weeks.

I'm familiar with 4x4min studies in the literature, and they are not at 5k pace. They are at 85-95% HRmax, or 90-95% HRmax. These paces are right around ones Lactate threshold! (A trained athlete's Lactate threshold is ~91-92% HRmax.)

I'm familiar with another study using 3.5min reps at 3200m pace, which is more intense than the 4x4min studies.

Based on my personal experience, there is a HUGE difference in depletion and recovery when banging out 4min or 3.5min reps at 90% HRmax versus at 95-98% HRmax.

adsfdasfasfsafadfa wrote:

Some one needs to pay Joshua Cheptegei to record every run he does for a year so we can see what elite athletes are really doing:)

close:

summary of a study of 85 elites, the original study is unfortunately behind a paywall. basically do a lot of easy running, tempos are good after building a base, and the big sexy 5k-10k pace workouts, not so much.