Long Recoveries from Jack Daniels

His stated goal is to get the best adaptation bang for your physical stress buck.

For Daniels, the goal is to be near your max heart rate for as long as possible during vo2max intervals. If you use an active rest approach (jogging between intervals), you can get your heart rate back up near your max heart rate within 60-90 seconds after you start the interval. If you cut the rest down to 90 seconds, you might cut 30 seconds off of the amount of time needed to get back up to max heart rate (I’m estimating here).

I think Daniels’ take, which I agree with, is that the extra 30 or so seconds per interval at max heart rate isn’t worth the extra stress on your body requires to get those 30 seconds.

Personally, I don’t think I could do 5 x 1000 at 5k pace with :90 rest. If I did, it would be a really hard effort and I’d be dreading the workout all day before the workout. There just isn’t enough bang for your buck, even if you could do the workout, from a Daniels perspective.

Thanks, that's a great response. This particular workout was in the 1500m - 2mi section, where the 5K-10K section has a 400m recovery, which is probably about 2:20-2:30 for me, depending on how easy I take it. So perhaps also he's going for a bit more speed for the shorter distance.

By the way, I usually do active recovery about a minute slower than my easy pace. Does that seem too conservative?

I don’t think it’s too conservative. Active recovery serves two purposes: to Lee your heart rate elevated and to engage your running muscles so that waste products that result from the use of lactic acid as an energy source can clear.

Even walking would serve the purpose of assisting in waste product clearance. So that leaves the heart rate issue. There may be some small benefit from going a bit quicker, but I don’t think it’s material. For whatever it’s worth, I’d estimate my recovery pace between intervals is 40-60 seconds per mile slower than easy pace. I’m a bit older and I live in a warm and humid climate, so often, when workouts get challenging, I convert to walking instead of running. It clears waste products, and while it doesn’t do much to keep your heart rate up, at 47 and doing a workout on a 90 degree day with a 70+ degree dew point, getting my heart rate up quickly is. It an issue.

Greetings again Smoove. Just curious, how do you respond so fast to anything Daniels related? It's like your on cue every time. Do you just CTRL + F and look for threads?

"waste products that result from the use of lactic acid?"

Your body uses glucose/glycogen as a primary energy source. Lactate is the byproduct of breaking down glucose/gylcogen as energy. What we commonly understand as lactate threshold is the point at which your body can't clear lactic acid fast enough resulting in a rapid accumulation of lactic acid.

Your body can "clear" lactic acid by reprocessing it through your liver and recycling as usable energy. This is something that needs to be trained separately.

I knew we’d meet again Former Sub 14:00!

I have to admit, I’m addicted to my phone and LRC is one of my preferred time wasters.

Also, I had plantar fascia release surgery last week, so I’m immobile and especially bored and thus even more active on LRC than usual.

I figure that I know the Daniels stuff as well as most, so why not add value where I can? So I usually click on all Daniels threads to see if I can add value.

My understanding is that when we process lactic acid as a fuel, one of the by products is hydrogen ions, which leads to changes in your blood PH, which causes fatigue.

This is why I refer to clearing waste products and not to clearing lactic acid.

If that current understanding is wrong, it is still close enough to capture the right concept, as relevant from a Daniels training perspective (which is what the OP is asking about).

Jeez, I thought this thread was gonna be about hangovers.

Smoove wrote:

My understanding is that when we process lactic acid as a fuel, one of the by products is hydrogen ions, which leads to changes in your blood PH, which causes fatigue.

This is why I refer to clearing waste products and not to clearing lactic acid.

If that current understanding is wrong, it is still close enough to capture the right concept, as relevant from a Daniels training perspective (which is what the OP is asking about).

This isn't quite accurate. Some elite athletes are insanely efficient at recycling lactic acid as energy and thus, can be said to have insanely high lactate tolerance and simply don't "accumulate" lactic acid like us mere mortals.

What we "perceive" as "fatigue" is actually a combination of a lot of different factors at play - damage and stress to muscle fibers, energy deprivation (i.e., depletion of glycogen), accumulation of lactic acid.

What primarily keeps us mere mortals from running 3:40 minute miles and 12:30 5Ks and 2:00 marathons is our inability to update enough oxygen (combined with limitations in our heart's ability to pump enough blood) that our bodies burn carbohydrates, releasing lactate acid into our system that we're just not good enough at recycling, so we run out of usable energy fairly quickly after this point.

So these types of really hard interval training are meant to do a lot of things, one of which is to increase our energy efficiencies and our efficiency in recycling lactic acid. You do this by trying to maximize "time in zone", i.e., the time you spend at or near your lactate threshold. Hence, active recovery and/or short rest, so you don't let your body recover too much. And when we say recover, we're not talking about lowering your heart rate...that's just the physiological expression of what we are targetting, which happens to be a decrease in your blood lactate levels. So in intervals, we want to try and keep our blood lactate levels to be as high to the "threshold" as possible, which is around 4.0 mmol/l.

One of the hallmarks of a Daniels approach, and one of the things that he is most criticized for, is that he works different systems discretely to effectuate adaptations with respect to three limiting factors in race performance - vo2max, lactate threshold. and running economy.

What you are describing above - trying to work right that the 4.0 mmol/l line - is part of the Daniels approach to training, but it isn't the aspect of a Daniels approach to training that the OP is asking about. The OP is asking about vo2max intervals, the goal of which is to increase vo2max. What you describe is an effort to improve lactate threshold. Daniels seeks to effectuate lactate threshold adaptations through continuous tempo runs (until the 3rd edition of his book, when he moved away from these altogether) or cruise intervals, which are run slower than vo2max pace (they are run at the pace at which he estimates you would be at that 4.0 mmol/l line) with less rest (1 minute for every 5 minutes of work at lactate threshold pace).

So far, I don't think we have actually disagreed at all (although I am not sure that we agree on the underlying science either), but I just don't think your comments are really framed in a Daniels context, which is what the OP is trying to understand.

More and more practical evidence points to a need for revalidation when it comes to the length of the reps in an interval at 5 k race pace to be 3-5 min to get the best bang for the bucks. My and Ingebrigtsen`s coaching are some of the practical evidence that shows it`s more important the total time in a workout being at 5 k race pace than just stay at close to maxVO2 reps between 3-5 min duration.Daniels found out very good paces , but not the best way of handle the intervals in length and recovery .

Smoove wrote:

So far, I don't think we have actually disagreed at all (although I am not sure that we agree on the underlying science either), but I just don't think your comments are really framed in a Daniels context, which is what the OP is trying to understand.

Yeah I'm not actually disagreeing with what you are saying, just clarifying a few things in terms of semantics / framework for how things are described.

I do disagree overall with the contention that there is such a thing as a "vo2max interval." Yeah yeah I know what we are referring to, and that specific intervals can boost your vo2max. But there have been enough studies that show that even long slow distance causes massive improvements in vo2max, and there is also a body of literature that shows that there is really no difference in the vo2max boost between short and long intervals.

So at least in my opinion, the only point of intervals should be to boost lactate threshold, energy efficiency, heart volume (stroke), strength and biomechanics, but that's a whole different discussion!

There is also a fair body of literature that suggests that intervals at your max heart of 3:00 to 5:00 in duration are the most effective at increasing vo2max. My sense is that, like with a lot of topics studied by science, there will be studies that lead to different conclusions and that over time, folks will tend to go with the conclusion that fits their world view better utnil consensus eventually coalesces around one conclusion or another. I mean, I still can't figure out whether or not stretching or icing are good for me!

Of course, whether or not increasing vo2max results in better race performances is also a topic of a fair bit of debate.

Good talk (except for you Jan - you're self-promoting again).

SUPERIOR COACH JS wrote:

More and more practical evidence points to a need for revalidation when it comes to the length of the reps in an interval at 5 k race pace to be 3-5 min to get the best bang for the bucks. My and Ingebrigtsen`s coaching are some of the practical evidence that shows it`s more important the total time in a workout being at 5 k race pace than just stay at close to maxVO2 reps between 3-5 min duration.Daniels found out very good paces , but not the best way of handle the intervals in length and recovery .

Dr. Stephen Seiler has done some very interesting studies on the efficacy of interval duration, which seems to indicate that you can achieve the same gains using a wide range of interval durations (5 to 16 minutes), and the key element in each workout was "time in zone" relative to intensity.

Smoove wrote:

There is also a fair body of literature that suggests that intervals at your max heart of 3:00 to 5:00 in duration are the most effective at increasing vo2max. My sense is that, like with a lot of topics studied by science, there will be studies that lead to different conclusions and that over time, folks will tend to go with the conclusion that fits their world view better utnil consensus eventually coalesces around one conclusion or another. I mean, I still can't figure out whether or not stretching or icing are good for me!

Of course, whether or not increasing vo2max results in better race performances is also a topic of a fair bit of debate.

Good talk (except for you Jan - you're self-promoting again).

I used to think this as well (shorter intervals are best!) but I read some stuff by Dr. Stephen Seiler who really blew my mind...not that it matters given that I'm done with competitive running now.

I can't recall the specific session, but he talks about the differences between 4×4 minutes, 4×8 minutes, and 4×16 minutes interval sets having studied hundreds of elite athletes (he also has published his findings). IIRC his daughter is an NCAA runner currently which is why he is so personally invested in this issue.

He also has a really interesting twitter feed.

Sorry for the multiple posts, but there was a recent study that showed that for elite marathoners, the most common denominators of success were: 1) long slow distance and 2) frequency of tempo runs. Says something about the "necessity" of intervals, at least for longer distances.

A couple of comments:

I think Daniels would agree with that study about elite marathoners. While his elite training plan for the marathon includes vo2max intervals throughout, his mainstream marathon plan focuses on vo2max intervals only during the period from 18 weeks out to 12 weeks out from the marathon, then moves to almost exclusively threshold pace workouts. The only workouts during that period that are not at threshold pace are at marathon pace, but even those are drawn out enough (12-15 miles) such that they would eventually serve the same purpose. He does this because he does not see vo2max as the primary limiting factor in marathon race performance.

Anecdotal support for your position that threshold pace is the thing people should focus on: how many stories have we all heard about people who set 5k/10k PRs as they approach the end of a marathon training cycle that focuses on threshold pace.

You and I seem to have the exact same perception of how this with "maxVO2 paced intervals" should best be transferred to an optimal training program.I agree in this you say that to boost maxVO2 should not be seen as isolated to the intervals at close to 5 k race pace, but more like a result of several factors that cooperates ,

SUPERIOR COACH JS wrote:

You and I seem to have the exact same perception of how this with "maxVO2 paced intervals" should best be transferred to an optimal training program.I agree in this you say that to boost maxVO2 should not be seen as isolated to the intervals at close to 5 k race pace, but more like a result of several factors that cooperates ,

Yeah I'm not really an expert on this stuff and I question why I still keep up with the sport and the developing science given I quit running (seriously) well over a decade ago!

But it is interesting to see how training has drastically evolved from when my middle school days. It used to be that 200m-400m reps, and the "Michigan" were mandatory for aspiring middle-distance runners like myself. I ended up injured/burnt out for much of my collegiate career and part of me is a bit upset at the "what ifs" and how differently things might have turned out if I had trained under some of the newer methods that at least to me, don't seem as brutal as the track sessions I was doing every week (like 20x 400m @ 58-60s with 45s rest, followed by a 1600m all-out time trial so come on!). It seems to me much of our training was copied/pasted from the workouts El Guerrouj were doing, but the thing they never factored in was those guys were WR setters and maybe had other forms of "assistance" if you know what I mean. I kind of get the point of the 400m repeats, but to this day I still don't see why we did a 1600m time trial at the end...afterall wasn't the point of the 400m repeats to maximize time in zone by breaking up 8,000m worth of "intensity" or "time in zone"? Why not just do 4 more reps of 400m? All that 1600m at the end seemed to do was fry any last remaining muscle fiber and force you to strain your connective tissue to squeeze out every last second of running.

I'm guessing HS studs like Webb and Hall are much in the same boat, but who knows.