Question about double threshold workouts. Over the last couple of months we have seen more and more coaches talk about doing double threshold workouts, one continuous session in the AM and reps in the PM....
Would you get the same benefit if you did a workout on Monday consisting of mileage with a continuous threshold effort incorporated into it? Followed by reps the next day?
Just curious
No
Some programs do block sessions like this on back-to-back days, but it's a slightly different training rationale than blocking double sessions on the same day. The sessions are also often different in a complementary way.
What's the context of the athlete using this hypothetical scheme (current ability, current training, training history, etc) and the underlying goal of the back-to-back session? Trying to take any of these more extreme workout approaches without a good understanding of the underlying principles that make them work just leads to dumb training.
Something to keep in mind is that in addition to managing overall training on a weekly basis, we need enough blocks of time within each week (easy/recovery days) where our body can sufficiently chill out and make the adaptations to the stress of the harder days. I think a large part of this is sympathetic vs parasympathetic nervous system activity. On a hard training day, we ramp up into a sympathetic state to be more ready to do that hard training. To make changes after hard training we need to chill out into a parasympathetic state.
Bakken found that by blocking the threshold on big double days instead of spreading threshold more evenly throughout the week he made better use of what I believe he called the "receptive period", which is that ramped-up state where the body is ready to do hard work, while maintaining enough days that are truly easy enough for the body to relax and adapt well. Doing too many days of hard stuff can leave you in a chronically stressed state and will lead to less adaptation.
For non-professional athletes, I'd be even more concerned about maintaining sufficient easy time throughout the week because we tend to have a lot of non-running things adding to our total stress load making it harder to get into that chill-out state. For this reason, I'd generally be anti-back-to-back workout days unless someone has a very stable, training-friendly lifestyle AND has exhausted easier options of increasing training load.
Honestly, read Marius Bakken's full blog post. He's the guy who came up with the Norwegian double threshold model.
The more people that copy it, the more that seems to get lost in translation. It's like a game of Chinese Whispers! Just get the information right from the source. I'll link his blog post below. Be warned though, it's long! But well worth the read over a few sittings.
