Shock Workouts...

I think it can be applied to just about anything. the body will adapt to a load over a course of time so every now and then a change needs to be made. adequate rest after your "shock' workout is a must though.

There is an interesting article by Frank Horwill on what he calls "crash training". Crash training consists of increasing your volume and doing inerval work everyday for a set number of days (no more than 5). After that you take it really easy (like completely off or running for around half an hour) for the same number of days to recover. He claims that the awesome British milers of the early 80's would crash train on weekends. Back in the day Oregon was famous for prescribing high intensity workouts that would "callous" the runner, these workouts were done sparingly. The idea is to expose your body to a high instensity training load and fully recovering so that it "super-compensates" and you will be able to race faster. I know it works for weight lifters, I don't know about it's application to runners. Once I graduate college I would like to experiment with it to see if it works but right now I do what my coach says.

I have found shock therepy very effective

Instead of "shocking" yourself why don't you try to increase your base mileage for a few consectutive weeks. My guess is that you don't run near 100 mpw. Why don't you try getting there first before worrying about "shock" training. If you have been consistently running that many miles why not move to 110, then 120, your body will feel pretty "shocked" at first, and the chance of injury will be lessened.

Let's not make assumptions. First off, I'm a college runner who's at about 85 mpw as part of a program. Second, I'm not asking so that I can do this, I'm asking out of physiological curiosity. Just fishing for people who HAVE done it and who know about it.

i haven't done this as a running workout, but i've had great success with it in weight training. my workout buddies and i called it "death day," and we would do it before traveling, hiking, or something else that would keep us out of the gym for a few days. we would basically do a full day's workout, then repeat, then do "strip sets" on bench, curls, tri's, and squats until we reached complete failure at a predetermined weight. this workout, combined with a few days to a week of non-lifting, was a great way to escape the plauteau. i think the "flourspar" workout the kenyans do would fit in this category - it's a 21km climb on a brutal hill. guys approach it with the same mentality we took into death day, and i think they do the rest thing afterwards.

i believe John Walker used to do a shock workout of something like 30 X 400 at some hardly believable pace. A doctor would check lactate levels by drawing blood from his ear lobe to determine when to quit. I believe this was the beginning of his peaking phase and followed by rest for a few days. Can anyone elaborate?

I know a former college team mate who is now an elite who will do 2 hard days back to back to get this effect. Make sure that day one is a workout that you have "mastered", that will not kill you for day two. ie: Day one tempo run or longer/slower intervals that you always nail, followed by day two speed or whatever you will need to rest/recover from. You could argue that instead of doing a workout that you have already mastered you should be increasing it's intensity in some way. However, my friend thinks that it pre-loads his system so that the day 2 "money" workout achieves a harder stimulus without setting time goals for the 2nd day that are way above what he can do.

My girlfriend loves The Shocker. Sometimes when I feel our relationship has reached a plateau, I'll sneak the shocker into our hookup. She usualy needs a couple days of rest following.

daniels formula, im not sure if it is in the book, but he uses it had regular back to back workouts

Our high school XC teams used a system where after a strong base building during the summer months, the 1st week of practice consisted of difficult threshold or interval workouts every day with a few miles of recovery jogging each evening. I think it made us stronger both physically and mentally.

Don't miss the point on this. It is not just a back to back hard days. Chronic weeks with tempo followed by interval day is not shock training. It is usually a great increase in the density of intensity days for a 7-14 period. It happens when plateaus occur. It is used much more with elites because their gains are harder to come by. It does not occur right before the big meet and does require backing off after. Plateaus for h.s. and college athletes usually just require an unloading phase to allow restoration.

Emil Zatopek used to due crash or shock training to reach a new level of race fitness. He would up his quantity of intervals with jogs between for about 14 days and then recover for a week. He said that he was race ready then. Remember though the Zatopek did not hammer the 400s, 200s or 100s as people thought he did. Occasionally he ran a rep faster, but most of them wer at 5k-10k stretched over about 30km. Another shocker was Herb Elliot. He crashed or shocked every weekend at Portsea, runing both higher intensity and high volume (60 miles total for the weekend). Steve Ovett would do shock training on the weekends as coach Harry Wilson had him do Herb Elliot type workouts with sand hill reps to exhaustion and lot of distance too. Jim Ryun, under coach Timmons, would do shock training doing a bunch of intervals and distance in about a 3 day period. Steve Scott did similar training in the early days under Len Miller. John Ngugi would shock train during Kenyan training camp, upping his mileage along with intensity a lot over what he had done the rest of the year. He literally would improve by several minutes for the 12km race distance. A couple of times he was not in the top 50 at the Kenyan trials, but was invited to train at the camp anyway and shocked or crashed his way into shape enough to win the World XC meet. Joan Benoit would shock her body into endurance shape before marathon racing by doing a solid 20 miler every 4 days. There are many more.

ShockTastic wrote:

My girlfriend loves The Shocker. Sometimes when I feel our relationship has reached a plateau, I'll sneak the shocker into our hookup. She usualy needs a couple days of rest following.

i knew someone would say this!!!!!

great stuff

I'm wondering how the body of someone not like walker or ovett might handle this though. Lets say 3 days,70 miles,a tempo workout and an interval session. It seems a little risky to me plus you have to take it easy for a few days after all. The cons outweight the pros IMO but if those guys did it there must be something to it.

[quote]wow wrote:

It seems a little risky to me plus you have to take it easy for a few days after all. quote]

That could be the key! Most great ones, well, non-American great ones, were not and are not afraid to rest. In fact, there is a history of middle-distance runners popping a big one after being forced to rest due to injury or illness. Ovett comes to mind immediately.

bump

I would think a workout with heavier weights would correlate to maybe a super high-quality running session(s). This may mean great interval splits with full recovery, or possibly making only a 4-day run week, but making those training runs when you are raring to go and at unbelievably great paces.

Just speculating.

Renato Canova speaks to this issue in his thread "Training" (on this website). It may be a little hard to decipher, given that he's not writing in his native language, but the point is clear. Hope this adds to the conversation

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I often use a type of training called "SPECIFIC or SPECIAL BLOCK", consisting in one tough training in the morning and in the afternoon, in order to put in crisis your body for exhalting the SUPERCOMPENSATION. If the managment of this training is correct (is very important to recovery well after, and to be fresh before), normally the athletes have a good improvement in their shape, in short time.

An example of this type of training (that can have different typologies, and different targets), made with ORNELLA FERRARA (bronze medal in '95 WCH), is the following (16th of July 1995) :

Morning : 15 min easy run + 24 km at 3'36"6 average per km

Afternoon : 15 min easy run + 24 km at 3'34"2 p/km

In that day, Ornella ran about 54 km, among them 48 about 95-98% of Marathon Pace.