anyone out there who has gotten to speak in detail with any of the coaches, athletes, and/or scientific advisors to the Norwegian athletes dominating endurance sports right now with their training approach focused around threshold training? I am curious to understand not so much what they are doing but what the rationale is behind why they are doing it and the physiological benefits to being so focused on threshold training most of the year and at very specific lactate levels.
There is no shortage of information about what they do and basic gist of it, most notably the article from Marius Bakken. It’s a super interesting approach that’s quite novel in many ways, and the results speak for themselves. If one ventures into the triathlon world, this approach has produced even greater results than what we see in the running world with the ingjebrightsens at the forefront and mass adoption of double threshold days becoming all the rage.
What seems to be missing though is a detailed physiological explanation for why this approach is producing such great results. Again, Bakken does a good job of describing the approach and giving an explanation to the rationale behind it but was hoping to hear from someone who can go one later deeper to explain the physiology behind it.
What is so special about training at 2.5-3.0 Mmol of lactate and doing a lot of volume of work at this intensity? This seems to run counter to the latest training fad before this one… Tinmans promotion of critical velocity training being superior to running at threshold. I’d always thought that you needed to train above your threshold for example in order to stimulate the vo2 max to improve aerobic capacity.
What else is going on besides getting better at clearing lactate when training at threshold? Does it improve aerobic capacity if you do a really large volume of it? Will it stimulate the fast twitch fibers to operate oxidatively like Tinman and others said was the big benefit to critical velocity training?
For those familiar with the polarized training model and Stephen seiler a work, he also seemed to say that training below the threshold is not quite intense enough to stimulate the adaptions one is looking to get from higher intensity work and also advocates primarily doing training around critical velocity. His work shows the best results for endurance athletes comes from working just above threshold so you’re stimulating the vo2 max but also not going so hard that you can’t accumulate a lot of work, ie doing workouts with total volumes in the 30-45 minute range.
Who out there can explain what’s going on under the hood and also maybe clear up what seems to be conflicting training approaches?