Workouts on consecutive days?

Depends on if you can recover or not. Our team never runs consecutive workouts. I would advice against it, but it's not like you will be screwed if you do. The thing is, you've got a while to get better, why rush the speed workouts when you can gradually improve?

Well they are not just speed workouts. our coach has us doing tempo or long interval one day and then a shorter interval workout the next day....Im not a huge fan of it I prefer having a day inbetween but i dont really have a choice. His theory behind it is so that we have an extra day to recover for a saturday race. Any other feedback why or why not this method is good is greatly appreciated.

Workouts on consecutive days? wrote:

Well they are not just speed workouts. our coach has us doing tempo or long interval one day and then a shorter interval workout the next day....Im not a huge fan of it I prefer having a day inbetween but i dont really have a choice. His theory behind it is so that we have an extra day to recover for a saturday race. Any other feedback why or why not this method is good is greatly appreciated.

I recall that Jack Daniels may suggest something like this in his book. In addition to the feedback your coach gave, another reason might be that this keeps you from overdoing the hard workouts, so that you can overdo it in the race.

Yes, you're right about Daniels suggesting this. He even says that's not ideal, but it does or can work. We're all slaves to the calendar & things happen that sometimes force two hard days in a row. (I like to say a medium-hard workout, then a hard workout. It could be a tempo run, then intervals.)

To the OP, I sounds like your coach knows what he's doing.

Working out two days in a row is not worth it - much better to just do one good workout than what will inevitably be two mediocre ones, or one good one followed by one shitty one. If your coach is worried about getting an extra day of rest, he should have you just do one workout that week. Workout Tuesday, race Saturday, long run Sunday - there's your three hard efforts for the week, you don't need any more.

To Daniel's Disciple, I don't think this coach knows what he's doing, but I guess we can't make that determination without looking at his full racing schedule.

Also, to the OP, any hint on where you are?

thanks for the replies.... I like my coach and do not want to cause a big fuss I just believe its not the best plan and would prefer either a day rest inbetween or just one workout per wk. a big reason why I want both responses positive and negative is because part of me wants to know my training beliefs are right and the other wants to be more confident in the training I am doing. As far as hints midwest d1 but thats all you are getting. Has anyone heard of succesful teams using this method?

if you're doing the threshold/tempo first then a vvo2 type workout the day after then that's fine. just don't cross threshold the day before.. shouldn't really need a recovery day after a threshold if you do it right

This is an interesting thread. It points out the difference of running for a coach now and having a coach when I ran 45+ years ago. We did not have instant access to training various systems so we questioned them less. I feel that you should stop thinking about it and do what the coach says. Doubting him is couterproductive. It will be at least a few years before you have the knowledge and experience to coach yourself. I have run with a couple of coaches who were among the best of their eras who had their runners do workouts on more than two consecutive days. Coach Mihaly Igloi's runners trained 13 times a week, every week. During hard training periods there were a number of hard workouts a week. I suggest that you stop worrying, relax and continue to learn and give the system a chance. Good luck!

I'm a good bit younger then Orville but I have to agree with him. There are a lot of different ways to get good but none of them work if your not fully invested in them. There are a lot of reasons to do workouts on back to back days. I would suggest asking him why he thinks it will help you. But really your young and you have a lot of time to find what works best for you. Give this a go, see how your body responds, learn from the experience. For what its worth I think running a tempo the day before intervals for college cross country is a pretty solid idea. I've never done it so I can't come down complete for or against it but I can see the potential for some good benefits.

I've done this with some athletes with pretty good results, but typically as a very tough workout (back to back 5k road races saturday-sunday at around 10k goal pace, for instance). There has been some research to suggest the benefit of back to back workouts is significant. Canova mentions this kind of superset in his book. I tend to shy away unless the athlete is really fit and increasing the intensity/duration of a single-session workout would start bordering on the absurd. I know several elite marathoners who do things of the sort to simulate a hard, long effort without leaving the marathon out there in training.

It could help you to think of these two back to back workouts as really one workout with a very long, but still incomplete in some ways, recovery between the two sessions.

Good luck.

Doing hard tempo run, or a long run, followed by a sprint workout is a good way to work the fast-twitch fibers. I would guess that if you tire everything else out on the first workout, then you can really kill the fast twitch fibers on the second.

Working different systems is a good idea. It would be bad to do anaerobic work on two consecutive days, since it can take the PH level of your blood quite a while to return to normal levels.

1 word. Recovery.

we have done sunday-long monday-tempo tuesday-workout before. it is definitely a stress on the body, but with a really easy wed and somewhat easy thur the body is fine by a workout/race on friday