For those who are not total endurance geeks, you may not be familiar with the name Jan Olbrecht since he is a coach and physiologist working with swimmers. That being said, hopefully there are many on these boards who are way more knowledgable and have a far better understanding of his ideas and principles outlined in "Science of Winning" than myself.
From my own reading of Olbrecht and what I glean from the Norwegians, it seems like they are implementing similar ideas. Olbrecht really threw my own understanding for a loop when he explained the concepts of aerobic capacity and aerobic power (will focus on the aerobic system for now). Just to keep it simple, my understanding is that he defines improving aerobic capacity as essentially improving vo2max and aerobic power as ability to utilize a greater percentage of your vo2 max for longer durations.
His revolutionary idea for the layman was that these two abilities are zero sum. If one increases, there is a direct trade off as the other decreases. As you train to improve your ability to sustain a greater portion of your vo2max (aerobic power), you are doing so at a cost of reducing your vo2 max (aerobic capacity). Furthermore, he explains that the workouts we would traditionally associate with being "vo2 max workouts" like say, 10 x 800m, are actually aerobic power workouts and REDUCE Aerobic Capacity as a trade off.
This all has to do with lactate levels and some of it goes above my head, but I think at a high level, it seems like the big ideas of Olbrecht are similar to the Norwegians. Essentially, to train to maximize your aerobic capacity, you actually want to do a lot of work UNDER the lactate threshold and keep lactate levels low for most of the training cycle.
Has anyone more informed had similar conclusions and is this a similar training philosophy or am I way off base here? Bottom line is that I think the Norwegians have come to a much greater understanding of sound endurance training as results speak for themselves in running and triathlon...