Maffetone says <2 hr would've happened long ago if not for Big Shoe

uknowlessthanudidyesterday wrote:

Maffetone is somewhat of a legend that not many in todays world know of.

He was one of the first big thinkers when heart rate monitors came out. Advised Mark Allen who you all wouldn't know and a few others. Not sure about the sub 2 hour stuff but his book was good back in the day.

Genuine question. Has Maffetone coached or advised any other well known runners apart from Mark Allen?

He writes some interesting things but his 180 minus age for HR training does not make sense to me. People have very different maximal heart rates and this may be affected by their training. In my twenties for example my MHR was 180 at best. I have never seen Maffetone address how to address these differences. The only way know your max heart rate is to do some sort of maximal test or race wearing a HRM not through a formula.

Old Walker wrote:

Search "HADD Training Theory" for a better explanation of the ideas that Maffetone has made his money from.

Oh no, not the Hadd BS again. That has been thoroughly debunked once and for all.

anything else wrote:

[quote]uknowlessthanudidyesterday wrote:

He writes some interesting things but his 180 minus age for HR training does not make sense to me. People have very different maximal heart rates and this may be affected by their training. In my twenties for example my MHR was 180 at best. I have never seen Maffetone address how to address these differences.

I have. In fact, he says that he does not use the 180 formula for any athletes he coaches. The 180 formula is just a starting point if you don't have any other information.

MAF=Flake wrote:

mcguck wrote:

I have the "HADD Training Theory" well written but the same as Maffetone, they used guys who had an extreme amount of talent. You never hear about either one taking a mediocre runner and making him into an elite with their method. Elites don't use either HADD or MAF when they train, most are more Lydiard based. High volume 80/20 also similar to Friel, who uses lactate threshold values. I am more apt to believe and follow actual science backed training then pseudo science.

MAF's big success story is Mark Allen, whose main event was much longer than a marathon in duration and who never got near even 2:20 in a marathon. If you want the results Allen under MAF you better do the massive volume he did.

MAF requires massive volume and Allen could only hold the MAF heart rate for one mile after that he had to slow down because of cardiac drift. It wasn't like Allen could run an entire marathon at MAF pace and heart rate.

Maffetone's emphasis on big easy miles is ok, and obviously nothing we don't already know from Lydiard. But the masses are dumb, so they need to be preached the same stuff over and over. That's just life.

The 180 formula is questionable. Where it gets ridiculous though is where his cult of fatties in their forties are convinced that a high fat diet is needed for optimum performance. He has no credibility unless he's coaching ELITES to new sub 2:10 PR's on high fat. Not going to happen.

The barefoot runner claim falls under the same sensationalist garbage as his HFLC BS.

Live to run wrote:

The barefoot runner claim falls under the same sensationalist garbage as his HFLC BS.

In a previous

Live to run wrote:

Maffetone's emphasis on big easy miles is ok, and obviously nothing we don't already know from Lydiard. But the masses are dumb, so they need to be preached the same stuff over and over. That's just life.

The 180 formula is questionable. Where it gets ridiculous though is where his cult of fatties in their forties are convinced that a high fat diet is needed for optimum performance. He has no credibility unless he's coaching ELITES to new sub 2:10 PR's on high fat. Not going to happen.

The barefoot runner claim falls under the same sensationalist garbage as his HFLC BS.

WELL SAID!!!

Live to run wrote:

The barefoot runner claim falls under the same sensationalist garbage as his HFLC BS.

That's one of his keys to running a sub 2 marathon:

"The best way to conserve glycogen is to use a better form of energy for a two-hour effort: fat."

mcguck wrote:

MAF=Flake wrote:

MAF's big success story is Mark Allen, whose main event was much longer than a marathon in duration and who never got near even 2:20 in a marathon. If you want the results Allen under MAF you better do the massive volume he did.

MAF requires massive volume and Allen could only hold the MAF heart rate for one mile after that he had to slow down because of cardiac drift. It wasn't like Allen could run an entire marathon at MAF pace and heart rate.

Judging by your responses on this thread I would be interested to see what would happen were you to train using Maffetone's 180 formula for 4-5 months then race a marathon? My prediction would be a PR for sure....

hahariiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight wrote:

Judging by your responses on this thread I would be interested to see what would happen were you to train using Maffetone's 180 formula for 4-5 months then race a marathon? My prediction would be a PR for sure....

I trained at MAF for months on end with zero results even at higher mileage. I then switched over to 80/20 training and PR'd every thing I ran. MAF is a JOKE!

Anyone know if any elite runners used a high fat/low carb diet and continued to run elite times?

Maf this wrote:

Live to run wrote:

The barefoot runner claim falls under the same sensationalist garbage as his HFLC BS.

That's one of his keys to running a sub 2 marathon:

"The best way to conserve glycogen is to use a better form of energy for a two-hour effort: fat."

Yes. He's technically right. You see, this is the gray area here where he confuses people, and he's not completely discredited. Because the majority of people deal in black & white, they confuse fat-burining efficiency with a high fat diet. Maffetone cashes in on this confusion though, or is too ignorant himself to make the distinction.

There are 2 very DIFFERENT things that need distinguishing:

- You become a faster/more efficient runner by tapping into more of your fat stores.

- You need a high fat diet to tap into more of your fat store.

On the first account, he's right. Obviously elites are very tiny and thin, and their aerobic system has been conditioned to utilize their fat stores more so that they don't need to top up with sugar every 5 minutes.

However, you are still very efficient at burning fat on a high carb diet - you don't need to eat a lot of fat to use fat! You don't need to have this massive storage of fat to burn fat. Lol. Additionally, and more importantly, it is far more efficient for elites (or any runner) to consume sugar when they DO need an energy boost before or during in a race.

test2 wrote:

Anyone know if any elite runners used a high fat/low carb diet and continued to run elite times?

No, and that's exactly the problem. Sub-elites at best. No elites train high fat (and stay elite).

Tina Muir is a young marathon elite who bought into the whole high fat diet fad. She soon burnt out and denounced it. Half a year later she's retired from running altogether.

HADD was by all accounts a good coach and a great person, but he was also just wrong when it came to his most famous claims. He claimed that you didn't get aerobic development if you ran too fast (his squeezing the toothpaste metaphor). That's simply not true, as long as you're not running so fast that you are incapable of getting in the volume you need. Nor is it true that every aerobically developed runner can hold the heart rates he suggests without cardiac drift.

MAF is a complete quack who should be ignored. It's not a very good defense of him to point out that his 180-minus-age formula is "just a starting point," because it's a starting point that's very wrong for most people. Rules of thumb should usually be right. It shows that he just doesn't know what he's doing.

80/20 is a lot like MAF, in that the basic idea behind it is right (run a lot of volume at comfortable paces), but the specifics are a red flag. Simply put, 20% high intensity is actually way too much if you're doing high volume. Ten percent would be closer to the mark.

As for elites doing Lydiard, it's a bit closer to the mark in that Lydiard advocated pretty fast aerobic running. But Lydiard also advocated linear periodization (one clear phase followed by another), which has mostly been discarded outside of Japan. Top runners today do intervals all year. They modulate their workouts to avoid overtraining and burnout, but they're also better able to build on fitness from year to year, and to perform at a fairly high level during most of the year. Incidentally, Lydiard's athletes were typically not trying to have 15-year pro careers that required them to race around the globe 10-months per year.

I've heard him a bunch of times on the Endurance Planet podcast. Awhile back, they were totally shocked by a study that showed that elite endurance athletes burned an amazing amount of fat even though they were exercising at a high intensity and were eating fairly high carb.

highfatslowtimes wrote:

Tina Muir is a young marathon elite who bought into the whole high fat diet fad. She soon burnt out and denounced it. Half a year later she's retired from running altogether.

Is that the same Tina Muir who ran a 2:36 marathon PR last December or someone else?

Some points you make are ok, but you make a lot of generalized assumptions that are wrong.

That's half true. While it's too much of a claim to say that you get 0% aerobic development from running too fast, recent comprehensive studies by Stephen Seiler show that you get MORE actual aerobic benefit, from running the same mileage slower. Yes you can still make progress if you run too fast, but not as much as if you slow down.

This is the area that Maffetone is correctly championing.

Correct that Maffetone states that his 180 formula should be a generalized training guide (because he knows that it's questionable as a golden rule). But where do you get the idea that it's wrong for MOST people? It's not appropriate for a minority of people, but the majority would be ok to train this way.

Wrong. I doubt that you've read the specifics - if by 80/20 running you're talking about Matt Fitzgerald's book, it states MANY TIMES that the majority of people will still benefit aerobically if they train at 90% low intensity, and even 100% at low intensity.

It makes the case that the optimum polarization is around 75-85%. Read it, it's a good book!

This is a joke, right? Because the majority overtrain, it must be optimum. Commonality and optimization are 2 different concepts. Perhaps most US marathoners would be running 2:05 regularly instead of closer to 2:10 if they periodized more.

Thanks Live to Run for saving me a reply to that nonsense.