What is the logic behind ladder or "step down" workouts?

Mainly I think it's psychological which is important. It would be pretty damn monotonous on your brain to do 4-8 1600's every single week and 3 times 1000 and a swing day of 200-400's. Training is a balance and you can't always wipe yourself out simulating racing conditions every workout.

It takes time. Otherwise every workout designed would be to go out faster than race pace and see if you could hold that together. Does not work.

One benefit to coming back down the ladder or adding some short intervals after a long set is simply to get a little more work out of tired legs. If 8x1000 is your workout, adding 4x200 at the end squeezes a little more out of you.

Questioning guy wrote:

My question is this: What's the logic behind these types of workouts? Is it of mental or physical benefit to do a long bout at race pace early on in a workout, then do shorter bouts later? Or vice versa? The main argument I've read for "normal" interval workouts like I did in college is that the difficulty ramps up in a predictable fashion--this isn't the case when you switch up the distance or the speed. Also, is changing the speed during a workout beneficial? Most these workouts get faster at the end, is this to practice speeding up at the end of a race? When should you use basic intervals (x by y at z) and when should you use a more complex structure?

A race is rarely predictable or run at an even pace. Training is supposed to prepare you for racing.Complex workouts are generally run more frequently when you approach your most important race.

We used to do ladders and pyramids, but the paces changed during the various intervals. I always thought this was to get prepared for surges in races. We seemed to do it more in XC than track for some reason.

The idea of a ladder workout has puzzled me as well. It doesn't fit a particular realm of intensity you are trying to stress.

I guess the good thing about this workout is the muscle confusion brought on by running many different paces in a workout.

For simplicity sake, I prefer not to do ladders. 8 x 1,000 @ 4k pace for example.

i figued it allowed you to maintain the same level of intensity throughout the work out.

If you cant maintain "mile effort" for 5x1000, but by stepping the distance down the intensity remains the same as the distance gets shorter.

just a theory.

I'm not a coach, but I've always assumed the thinking is to be able to change paces easily so your legs don't get locked into a particular pace. That way in races, you can respond to surges or speed up or slow down to do what you need to do tactically because your body isn't prone to getting locked into a particular pace.

If you are changing paces then you need to change the distance of the intervals so you aren't running too long an interval at something around your race pace.

And like someone else said, more variety just makes things more interesting and easier psychologically.

its to work on changes of pace that may happen during the later stages of a race to allow you to go with it, sometimes they can even used to help you with surges, but mostly its to learn how to kick faster and when more tired and to handle that surge right before the kick.

So do people mostly agree that the closer you approach "championship" type races, the more complex/structured/varied your workouts should be? And in the doldrums of the off-season you should have more basic, consistent workouts of the same reps at the same speed?

Peter Snell said they are a way for coaches to justify their existence.

They allow the body to handle accelerations during a race. They also a way of I incorporating two different zones of training into one workout or interval. The more you are adapted to these variations the more competitive you will become. A great example is the time trial runner vs championship runner.

HRE wrote:

Peter Snell said they are a way for coaches to justify their existence.

I remember reading a possibly-apocryphal story where Peter Snell was doing repeats on a track, and someone came up to Arthur Lydiard and asked him "how many repeats is he doing?" and Lydiard said "until he gets tired." The person then asked, "how fast"? Lydiard said "not sure, I'm not timing them." "Well how far is each one?" he responded. Lydiard said "well I'm not sure. Once around the loop." His point being, you just do repeats until you get tired, and that's it.

But reading more modern stuff, it seems like that philosophy has been more or less abandoned. "A dozen or so hard quarters" has given way to more complex and rigidly structured workouts. Whether this is good or bad, I'm not sure. It's more precise, that's for sure.

If the speed of each run is the same, then it's to squeeze more training out of tired legs.

If the speed increases, then muscle fibers are recruited that would otherwise not be recruited.

Helps grow accumstomed to picking up the pace at end of race. Like an easy progression tempo.

For the purpose of handling surges, I think that throwing one hard repeat into the middle of the workout is better than doing a pyramid. This is what my coach used to have us do. On occasion during a longer repeat workout, he'd just tell us to run a hard 400. After the hard 400, we'd have to finish out the workout while trying to stay on pace. So we might run a hard 400 between the 3rd and 4th repeat of a 5X1000 workout and then we'd have to run the last two 1000s on pace.

I think that this makes more sense than doing a pyramid. If you do something like 1600, 800, 400, 200, you're never getting back to running at race pace after the faster repeats. Seems to me that the entire point of training to handle a surge is to prepare yourself to get back on pace after running faster than pace. For the purpose of handling surges, it doesn't much matter that you can throw down a blazing 200 half way through the race if you can't finish off the race after the surge.

For the purpose of training your kick, it's probably better to run a few hard 400s and/or 200s immediately following a race pace workout. No reason to step down sequentially to the shorter repeats. Just finish your 5X1000 or whatever you're doing and run some fast 200s.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't see much of a point in running pyramid workouts.

I think Renato answered this recently in a recent thread, I think. Might look in the Imane Merga thread or his comments on 2011 Worlds. Thought it was a way to get athletes used to fast paces after building up a lot of lactate and fatigue from the earlier longer reps in the sequence. Plus it likely allows them to slows up ( haven't looked at the paces he assigns for the reps) and the decrease in rep length keeps the workout from becoming a race in and of itself as just 3,000m repeats, at the pace they are running, every week or even 10 days would likely be too much

I think there are three good reasons to do do these work outs.

1) Psychological it does break up the monotony but also there is something gratifying about climbing to the "top of the mountain" as intervals get longer and harder and then speeding down it when the intervals get shorter and faster.

2) A great race simulation can be achieved if you do the work out right. If you think about a race there is usually a fast opening distance (400m, 800m, even a mile or more for some races) where you are going faster than race pace to get position and because of the adrenaline etc. Then in the middle of the race there is a grind it out get through the distance and stay on pace phase. Then at the end of the race you start to pick up the pace and finally you kick as hard as you can in the last part of the race to finish. A good ladder can really mimic this process well if done correctly with careful attention to pace and rest etc.

3) Pace, one of the most important thing a runner can learn in an interval session is how a certain pace feels. Doing repeats at one distance is a great way to get a feeling for what a certain pace is say repeat 400's where you are going to be trying to click off the exact same pace each time. However a ladder work out gives you the ability to really test your pace gauging abilities by throwing in different distances. If you can accurately judge your pace on different distances you have an even better chance of feeling how fast you are going at any point in a race.

The story is not apochryphal but it's slightly different. It was Richard Tayler doing the reps and they were 400s on a track. But the reps were untimed and the number undetermined.

Simply stated, a "ladder" workout increases distance while maintaining pace to improve strength and stamina, a "step down" workout increases pace while decreasing distance to build speed, a "pyramid" workout if done properly can combine the two. All are designed to improve your overall race times and not necessarily a specific point (such as your finish) in a race.