Jacob Ingebrigsten training

You run 40 miles a week. Come back and write this when you can handle 100mpw every week all year round, then this will be answered properly

They'd just tell you to run hills. And to never exert yourself too much in workouts. But work harder than anyone else all year, every year, so you don't end up exerting yourself too much in any given one day cause that's how you get hurt.

I am not looking to copy his training. I just want to understand his training principles.

To sum up the core philosophy of his training program in a sentence... I'd say it's consistency of high volume, controlled intensity leads to long term improvement.

A lot of your specific questions we don't have the answers to, unfortunately. Most elite runners won't reveal all of that to the public, while they're actively competing at least.

thanks for the info.

You're asking the wrong questions to understand the training principles. How they structure a season is irrelevant to your situation.

What you are asking about are the outcomes of training principles that have been applied within a context of specific genetics, training volume, training history, competition schedule, lifestyle, and resources, but your context is different in all of these aspects so the outcome of the same underlying principles would look completely different.

Read Marius Bakken's blog.
He lays out pretty well the thinking behind his development of this training scheme. If you have a decent understanding of training fundamentals and exercise physiology this should allow you to develop your own training scheme using the same principles.

mariusbakken.com

The Norwegian model of lactate threshold training and lactate controlled approach to training. A look at some of the concepts, history, and keys to improvement. I wrote most of the articles found…

Link:www.mariusbakken.com/the-norwegian-mod...

Listen to the episodes of the Conversations About Running podcast from Narve Nordas, Simen Halle, and Victor Smangs, along with the recent Sweat Elite episode with Victor and his coach. These conversations are interesting because they provide insight into a range of levels from world-class to very good recreational athletes executing this system. Victor is the most interesting -basically a normal dude who just jumped into this training a few years back, had the innate talent/durability to handle it, ran fairly well, but then had to make some adjustments to get his recent breakthrough.

The core principle of this system is that the most important thing for distance running performance is the AnT/LT2/MLSS/Critical Speed/whatever you want to call it, and so most of the other training principles center around finding the most effective way to raise this physiological characteristic. Bakken presents an argument that the most effective way to do this is by strictly controlling individual sessions which allows for a greater workload over time. In general, the idea is to keep pretty much all aspects of training controlled, simple, and repetitive.

I think the biggest misunderstanding of this training is that double threshold is a main principle itself when in reality it's just the outcome of basic training principles taken to an extreme level. At 40-50mi/week you have a lot of basic work to do before your training can or should look too much like the Bakken Norwegian system.

thanks for the info. I have already read Marius Bakken's blog and I will be sure to listen to the podcast. The point of this post was to understand his periodization. I want to understand how he changes his training to fit the needs of competition.

Again, it's the wrong question. I'm not saying this just to be dismissive, I had this same curiosity and wasted a lot of time before I realized I was looking for the wrong things.

To explain:

1. They are dealing with fundamentally different performance constraints and demands than us normal runners. You at 40-50mi/week have different aspects of physiology limiting your performance than the elite athlete who's been running 100+mi/week for many years. The seasoned high-volume athlete has likely maxed out (at least in a practical sense) things like mitochondria volume, capillary density, stroke volume, etc, while for a lower-volume recreational athlete, these "basic" things are often the chief limiters of performance. Their needs of competition are fundamentally different than ours so whatever changes they make for that aren't all that relevant to us.
2. The details about their periodization and comp-phase work are pretty limited. Trying to piece together that picture we're likely to get it wrong, and even more likely to get it wrong trying to reverse engineer the principles out of that incomplete picture. You're diving into an unnecessarily difficult problem to solve and solving it doesn't get you much actionable insight.

The reason Bakken's blog is the best resource to understand this stuff is because we get to see his thinking behind it all. His older posts (not just the new summary) have a lot of great wisdom in them too. Though the one big thing I think he somewhat glosses over is WHY volume matters so much, and relates to the difference in basic physiological constraints between elite and recreational runners. Regardless, we can use his same methods of experimentation to figure out training for ourselves. How he developed this is much more important than the specific training scheme he came up with.

From what I can tell the secret is probably that there is no secret, and that many of us have probably been overcomplicating/overdoing periodization schemes and comp-phase work. Maybe that's part of the purpose behind the program, constantly work on aspects of speed with the sprints and X-element, build super high threshold fitness, all while keeping fatigue fairly well managed so that a huge change in training isn't necessary -just scale back the volume and threshold slightly, shift the X-element towards something a little more race specific work, and race into shape if necessary.

Race-specific work by it's nature is going to be very hard and very simple, so it's more about the capacities that we bring into that point in the season rather than the race work itself.

You're at a level right now where getting better is very simple, no need to overcomplicate it.