Why do the Brojos insist on a hard/easy policy? The best kenyans run hard or at least moderate 5-6 days a week. It seems most of the US pros run hard/moderate 5-6 days a week as well. Guys like Solinsky almost always hammmer. What gives?
Why do the Brojos insist on a hard/easy policy? The best kenyans run hard or at least moderate 5-6 days a week. It seems most of the US pros run hard/moderate 5-6 days a week as well. Guys like Solinsky almost always hammmer. What gives?
i'm pretty sure you're completely wrong. they insist on hard/easy because that is how the body adapts and improves from training stimulus. hard/easy is the most effective way to improve.
There is an enormous difference between going
8:00-7:00-6:30-6:00-6:00-6:00-6:00-6:00-5:30-5:00
and
6:12-6:12-6:12-6:12-6:12-6:12-6:12-6:12-6:12-6:12
Please elaborate. I feel there is some wisdom hiding in your post, but I need more light to see it.
Solinsky doesn´t "hammer". It only seems like that because his easy pace is your race pace.
well if you read one of their articles on "why I sucked in college" you would understand.
The hard/easy is what worked out for them.
An "outlier" like Jim Ryun ran hard most days of the week with his easy day partly due to traveling to the meet. Same deal with Prefontaine as Dellinger says he could go hard 3 days straight, have a recovery day and be ready to go another 3 days.
It all depends on how much god-given talent/ability you have, not to mention age (and PED's).
Through trial and error you figure out how many quality days you can handle and how many recovery days you need. For "non super talents," one quality day followed by one recovery day works best in general.
How much 'easy' you need depends on how hard the 'hard' is. In endurance development - mid to late base phases in most systems - there are a couple of extremes.
Some people (Marius Bakken, Kenyans, marathon types) like to find a good, 'comfortably hard' level of effort and do it most days. This is usually a tempo run (HM pace for elites) which does not tire you out much the next day.
Other people - especially Westerners with jobs/studies who can meet up with a group a couple of times a week, or middle distance types who need to train at anaerobic speeds - prefer to have a couple of distinct quality sessions, after which you will definitely be tired. If these are really hard - stopping when you can only do another rep or two - then you might need 2 easy days. If they are a bit more controlled, you might need one easy day.
All points in between work too, as long as you get the balance of effort and recovery right so that your body can actually grow back stronger between sessions.
Prefontaine - Hard/Hard/Easy
Kenny Moore - Hard/Easy/Easy
Both Oregon grads, both got 4th in their events in '72.
I can tell you for an absolute fact that the only way I was able to get my times under 2:20 for a marathon and under 30 for 10km was to have a policy of going 8:00 per mile (or slower) on the easy days. This allowed me to train much harder and faster on the hard days.
I never run 2 hard days in a row. If you can consistently get 2 or 3 really good workouts in per week, you WILL improve, guaranteed.
What I'm reading, which is also what I feel like to be the truth, is that there are many ways to be great.
It just bothers me when everyone says "Wejo ran 28 minutes by running 8:00 miles". He got good by running 100+ mile weeks of "junk miles" which worked for him, great. But most of the greats run "comfortable hard" on "easy days" which is really a misnomer. Most great runners don't go that "easy" on "easy runs".
If you're measuring hard and easy against what those terms mean for the overall running population, that's true. But hard and easy are individual matters. Haikkola used to talk about how important easy days were to Viren but he'd add that Viren's easy days would kill a lot of runners.
madmaxbullshit wrote:
But most of the greats run "comfortable hard" on "easy days" which is really a misnomer. Most great runners don't go that "easy" on "easy runs".
If they're going for that option they don't call them 'easy' days.
You can do 'medium' 5 days in a row, then a Saturday race and Sunday long run. Or you can do 'hard - easy' or 'hard-easy-easy'.
Whichever way you do it, if you overtrain then you won't improve. Or, more usefully, if you aren't improving then you're overtraining.
classof89 wrote:
well if you read one of their articles on "why I sucked in college" you would understand.
The hard/easy is what worked out for them.
An "outlier" like Jim Ryun ran hard most days of the week with his easy day partly due to traveling to the meet. Same deal with Prefontaine as Dellinger says he could go hard 3 days straight, have a recovery day and be ready to go another 3 days.
It all depends on how much god-given talent/ability you have, not to mention age (and PED's).
Through trial and error you figure out how many quality days you can handle and how many recovery days you need. For "non super talents," one quality day followed by one recovery day works best in general.
I would say one major reason why the hard/easy model is used is because athletes improve under that system, and it reduces the risk for overtraining and injury. I won't get into specifics, but I trained under a hard/easy system and I found that it worked well for me. I had about a 20 sec 1500m improvement from hs grad to college grad
For the athletes that can handle it, the Prefontaine or Ryun training methods will yield great success, and probably greater success than hard/easy model. The issue is that in a team setting, for every athlete there is that can survive it, there will probably be a half-dozen or more that won't be able to handle it. You cant have a good team if they don't make it to the starting line.
Hard/Easy should be individualized to each person. Knowing whether they are FT/ST can also have an impact into type of training regimen - see Cabral on differences between Mamede and Lopes under their coach (Pereira). The longer distance guys (10k-Mar) who require higher mileage (some could get away with less but faster) are more likely to need easier days (slower) to get in the volume, than a middle-distance guy (like Cram) who is doing less aerobic running but can train faster (relatively). This also depends upon the intensity and volume of the specific sessions also being undertaken.
There was a quote from Kenny Moore about his hard/easy/easy system. It went along the lines of, "There are some men, Clarke, Lindgren, Mills, who have the annoying ability to train hard day after day and get nothing but good results. I'm not blessed with that kind of ability, nor are the majority of distance bugs..."
Thats a really good point and since the Brojos are marketing towards the majority of runners it makes sense to support an idealogy that should work for that majority.
"Hard" training actually causes damage, making you weaker and slower.
You get faster and stronger during recovery, thanks to supercompensation.
How that works is individual.
madmaxbullshit wrote:
Why do the Brojos insist on a hard/easy policy? The best kenyans run hard or at least moderate 5-6 days a week.
A misnomer. Someone on a 10 day cycle (as opposed to a 14 day working-person's cycle) runs hard-easy-easy not hard-moderate-moderate. In reality they are really running hard only twice in the 5 day cycle, and getting about 24-36 hours between non-easy runs. Their time between runs is very recovery oriented. Someone on a 14 day cycle is doing 8-10 runs every 7 instead of every 5.
In any case nearly all the best runners of any nationality have pace variation. That's a simple principal that many ignore. No one can hammer it all the time. Those that try get stuck in a limited range of paces. It's also true that to race fast you need to train fast. If you're trying to hammer all the time you'll be stuck in a limited pace range and not be able to be fast when you need to. Rest up and and save it for when it counts, and that "when it counts" is that solid tempo, interval, or race where you have the energy to break out and learn where that next notch is.
I hit submit a bit early and forgot to mention that I can't think off the top of my head of a single major coach domestic or foreign that doesn't have some element of hard/easy in their training. I'd be happy to stand corrected but I can't remember a single elite program that's not doing some variation of that.
eurodonkey wrote:
How much 'easy' you need depends on how hard the 'hard' is. In endurance development - mid to late base phases in most systems - there are a couple of extremes.
Some people (Marius Bakken, Kenyans, marathon types) like to find a good, 'comfortably hard' level of effort and do it most days. This is usually a tempo run (HM pace for elites) which does not tire you out much the next day.
Other people - especially Westerners with jobs/studies who can meet up with a group a couple of times a week, or middle distance types who need to train at anaerobic speeds - prefer to have a couple of distinct quality sessions, after which you will definitely be tired. If these are really hard - stopping when you can only do another rep or two - then you might need 2 easy days. If they are a bit more controlled, you might need one easy day.
All points in between work too, as long as you get the balance of effort and recovery right so that your body can actually grow back stronger between sessions.
I think you need to go back and read what you wrote. Do you really want to have said that "elites" run 4:39 pace for 10 mile runs and "do it most days"?
You DO realize that "elites" run 10 mile runs regularly right?