Why not do intervals to fatigue like we do for some weight training exercises?

Acute fatigue syndrome wrote:

Is this a disaster? If so, why is it beneficial for other types of training?

Yes. It isn't.

Im no physiologist but I think its because we are trying to stress a different system than those folks lifting weights.

Sprinters do a variation of what you describe. Their works outs might be 3x300 all out with a long long rest. They ARE maximizing the muscle during that burst.

Distance runners can do some true sprinter workouts but mostly we are trying to develop the aerobic system.

I hope thats right.

You would be flirting with injury and you would severely impact your hormonal balance (adrenals, test., cortisol, etc).

You are comparing soliciting a growth response in muscle to training an energy system and have a double-digit iq.

Acute fatigue syndrome wrote:

Is this a disaster? If so, why is it beneficial for other types of training?

Generally a disaster as you're thinking of it.

Most sprint style workouts actually do this quite regularly, Any true acceleration work (20-50m reps), top speed work (40-80m reps), or speed endurance work (60-120m reps), when done properly are going to be halted as soon as performance declines as it means either the muscles, or more likely the CNS is fatigued to 'failure'.

Special Endurance I, (120-250m)II (200-500m) and/or Lactate Tolerance workouts are also similarly going to be done til just before failure, and more rarely to the point of failure, but the frequency you do these workouts in a season should be quite low.

Moving up to 1500 race pace and slower work, the total strain put on the body is simply to high to push to the point of true failure, and the recovery times it would take after the fact make simply not worth it. Would you consider it worth it to get out that 9th rep in repeat 400s if it meant you couldn't get a quality workout in for 4-5 days afterwards, compared to stopping before failure and getting your next quality work in 2-3 days later like normal? The tempo example is even crazier, since for an average or above level male collegiate runner you'd be asking them to race a Half Marathon, as practice. How well do you think recovering from that fits into a normal training week?

The main point is that going to true failure is only really 'safe' in training elements that target very specific things. Doing squats, or pushups to failure is ok because the only thing you're bringing to failure are specific portions of the musculoskeletal system, and maybe your CNS, and each can recover in a couple of days, generally. Once you start bringing more and more systems of the body to failure (Cardiovascular system, energy storage systems, energy production systems, etc) recovery times balloon, to the point of ruining the supercompensation curve.

Right now we're actually on the tail end of a yearly period that exemplifies whats wrong with exercising in unsafe ways past the point of failure: meathead strength and conditioning coaches putting football players through off-season workout programs that send them to the hospital with exertional rhabdomyolysis.

I don't think it would be smart to do intervals to failure but I have used a progression run to failure that that got me in great shape for mile to 5k races.

I call it the stress test workout.

Start at an easy pace on the treadmill. Increase the pace .5 mph every minute. After 3 miles, increase the pace every 30 seconds. Keep doing this until you can't go any longer.

This workout really isn't that hard to recover from. I would do it on a wednesday and race on saturday. The reason it is easy to recover from is that you are only running hard the last mile and the workout is short in duration. It also prepares you mentally for the end of the race. I would do this workout every couple weeks.

A variation when training for a shorter mile race would to be at some point increase the pace every 15 seconds. The result of doing this would be your pace at the end is faster but the duration is shorter.

I believe what the OP describes is not actually training “to exhaustion.”

I have coached athletes using occasional workouts as the OP described. We might do 300m reps at goal 1st lap of 800m pace with 2:30 rest. When they fall off pace, we stop. How many they complete informs my confidence in their ability to hit the pace in a race.

This is different than running until you physically can no longer run.

Acute fatigue syndrome wrote:

It’s common to do push ups, pull ups, dead lifts, bench press, etc. “to fatigue “.

Is it common? I've never seen a structured program that did any of those. "To failure" was basicly the same as "race pace"

Ex. Do 75% of max pull up reps. Do 125% of max pull up reps with 50lb assist

Do 10 miles at marathon race pace.

I would say the opposite. Runners with training structure race more than lifter with training structure check their max's.

A workout only stimulates improvement to the degree that it is intense, i.e. hard. Both weight training and running workouts are of limited benefit if not taken to fatigue.

Acute fatigue syndrome wrote:

It’s common to do push ups, pull ups, dead lifts, bench press, etc. “to fatigue “.

Would it be useful to do intervals at a certain pace until you can’t acieve that pace anymore, rather than doing a set number of intervals.

For example, instead of doing 8 repeat quarters at 65 with 2 minute rest, one would do 65sec quarters with 2 minute rest until you can’t run 65 sec (or faster than 68).

Also, could this apply to tempo runs? Pick a pace and run the pace until you can’t, rather than running a predetermined number of miles.

Is this a disaster? If so, why is it beneficial for other types of training?

You've got it backwards. Real weight trainers - olympic lifters, powerlifters, athletes from other sports using strength training - do not push to fatigue. First of all, technique is paramount; second, even with perfect technique, their sets are calculated to have 50 - 70 % of the reps they could do; or their single reps rarely go over 90 % of 1RM.

Bodybuilders and casual gym goers are the hobbyjoggers of strength training and do not count.

Endurance training (including less important races used as a training) instead gets you to the maximum at times, when you can't push that last interval till the end.

Actually, Lydiard suggests doing just that. Instead of a set session, say 16x400, he says you should just do the fast runs until your body tells you that you have "hit the wall", take it easy for 48 hours and come back and do it all again. The classic fartlek sessions work on the same principle, Cerutty also worked on the same sort of idea.

I fap to failure everyday. Never felt better!

A variation when training for a shorter mile race...

I find it interesting that you have mile races of different lengths.

cheers.

No idea if it is beneficial or not, but I do repeat 30-second all-out hill sprints up a very steep trail. Walk down, sprint up, repeat until I am barely moving at full effort. Once a week during 5K training.

I had the opportunity to go to a summer running camp in which Arthur Lydiard was the guest lecturer. He told me that he often didn't time the intervals of his quality runners (Olympians, Commonwealth champs). He also didn't count them. And if it was around a field he didn't measure it as he could figure what the approximate distance was. He didn't time the rest interval either. When his athletes were ready to go they went. When they felt that they had done enough they stopped. The point was to build the anaerobic system. This came after the aerobic training which was followed by hill running. After the interval period in which there were time trials scheduled focusing on negative splits came the sharpening phase which pointed to the peak period of racing.

An interval is the rest period between hard efforts. You're literally asking why we don't rest to fatigue.

Same as regards weightlifting: because if you could do considerably more than the predetermined number of intervals/repetitions, you need to speed up/increase weight. As simple as that.

isn't this how Emil Zátopek trained?

Seemed to work for him.

One major difference is that the limiting factor in distance running is pain. You don't actually reach true failure because your brain will make it hurt so much that you stop before you put yourself in danger. With weightlifting, there is no pain, so you literally can reach your limit. This is both a practical difference (you know what true failure is in one context and you don't in another) and a physiological one (pain signals danger, which logically suggests that trying to run to failure is more dangerous than trying to lift to failure).

There are analogous ways to train when running, though. The traditional method is the coach watching you and just telling you, "you're done." You may be physically capable of hauling your butt around the track at the necessary speed, but your coach has observed a form breakdown. You could use a heart rate monitor as well and decide that anytime your HR doesn't get under a certain number during your recovery, or anytime it crosses a certain threshold (say 95% of MHR), then the workout is over.

I've actually found that Garmin's "Running Dynamics" can be really useful for in a similar way. For those of you who don't know, Running Dynamics are a proprietary bunch of measurements that Garmin records from either a heart rate strap with an accelerometer or a little pod that goes on your shorts. It records vertical oscillation, ground contact time, left/right balance, maybe some other stuff. At first I thought it was all pretty pointless because it's not really clear what's a "good" reading, and it doesn't give you any actionable training data. What I eventually discovered, though, was that if I looked at the data for my really hard interval workouts, there was often a point in my last or second-to-last rep where all the Running Dynamics data suddenly changed, even if the pace stayed constant. I believe that data pinpoints a breakdown in form, where the muscles that normally move me forward are exhausted, and my body is forced to invent new ways to move in order to maintain the same speed. That's basically running to failure. The downside is that it's hard to view that data in realtime. While you can have it display on the watch, it's hard to look at your watch when you're at that point, so it mostly becomes useful for after-the-fact analysis. Still, it's nice to know that you have some objective way of marking down a particular workout as truly brutal.