The Most Effective Endurance Training Method - The Science Explained

Dear Academics, How much of your

training

should be low intensity, high intensity, or somewhere in between? In this video we discuss the current scientific evidence surrounding the best

method

s to distribute the intensity of your

training

to achieve the best

endurance

performance results. To begin this conversation, we must look. In this graph, as you exercise at low intensity your body produces blood lactate at low levels, there is a small increase, however this holds and remains stable, this pattern continues to a point where you can see A sudden increase in blood lactate, we can call them colons, lactate threshold one and two or ventilatory threshold one and two, mark training intensity zones at the

most

basic level, since

most

of us do not have access to a sports

science

laboratory where they measure our blood lactate response to incremental exercise that we can estimate. our training zones using practical measures such as heart rate percentages, maximum rate of perceived exertion or rpe or the torque test we must also recognize that training volume is a simple measure of how much, for example, if you ran 10 kilometers in 45 minutes Your training volume can be 10 kilometers or 45 minutes depending on your preference.

For the sake of this video, we measure training volume using distance. We can measure training volume for each training session we do, as seen in this example. You can also add the total amount. of the training volume you do each week, a typical training program will increase training volume five to ten percent per week for three weeks, followed by a one-week recovery where volume is reduced before beginning the next block of training. four-week training, however, my goal is to discuss this in another video in more detail. If we remember the training intensity zones, we can divide our weekly training volume into segments that tell us how much of our training was done in each of the three zones z1 refers to zone 1 z2 refers to zone 2 and so on if If we take a look at week 2, we can see that 55 kilometers of training were done, however, of these 55 kilometers, the majority was performed in zone 1 with lesser amounts of training in zones 2 and 3.

The fundamental question you can ask yourself is how much training should I do in zones 1, 2 and 3 to get better

endurance

results? This would be called training intensity distribution or tid. Should you divide your training evenly between the three zones? Should you do all your training in zone 3 for example how about a mix of all three zones but which tid is best there are three main tids threshold training pyramid training and polarized training threshold training splits most of the volume of training in zones one and two with very little done in zone three polarized training dedicates a large amount of training to zone one very little to zone two with little emphasis on zone three pyramid training dedicates the most of training to zone one less to zone two and even less to zone 3 receives its name from its shape but the question remains which of these three

method

s are the best after reading a lot of scientific evidence, there seems to be a consensus growing;

However, it must be admitted that the amount of research on this topic is quite scarce, so we look forward to what future

science

has to tell us. Regarding their findings to help continue this discussion on how we should schedule our training, the current consensus so far is that polarized and pyramidal training are superior to threshold training for endurance performance. An insight from Dr. Daniel Plus regarding training Iron Man noted that training intensity distributions are likely to change depending on where you are in your training program at the beginning of a season. Training may seem more polarized as race day approaches.

Your training may seem more pyramidal when athletes tend to add more specific race pace sessions to their training. To add to this discussion, a recent post looked at this trend in a group of world-class middle and long distance runners and said that depending on where they were in the season, a polarized or pyramidal training approach was more evident. A more recent line of evidence from a group of researchers suggests that instead of using physiological markers to identify your training zones, such as percentages of maximum heart rate or rating of perceived exertion, it may be better to use a percentage of race pace;

However, this is very novel and more research is needed to see if this method may be superior for applying what we have just learned. We will use a practical example of a moderately trained half marathon runner. We must first identify our overall weekly training volume. People often prescribe it based on previous experience or if they are very new. For sport that starts with very small training volumes, for example 10 to 20 kilometers per week, I will make another video specifically analyzing training volume and its relationship with endurance performance because its relationship is not linear as we once believed.

Once we have established an appropriate training volume we now need to calculate how much we should do in zones one, two and three. Here we will use the polarized training intensity distribution model if we multiply our weekly training volume by the percentage of training we should do in each. zone we can easily calculate how much distance we should run in each of the three zones, in this example we will run from 35 to around 43 kilometers in zone one from zero to five kilometers in zone two and seven point five to twelve point five kilometers in zone three now we need to decide how we can schedule this into our week to ensure we are in the correct training zone.

We should also program our estimated training intensity as we discussed above. We should also measure this during the training session to make any small adjustments necessary if we are off pace, keep in mind that heart rate will increase during the first three to six minutes of steady-state exercise and then level off, so don't Be concerned if your heart rate seems quite low when starting an exercise. exercise session if you are doing intervals take the last 30 seconds to a minute of the interval and use the maximum heart rate that you record once we have the amount of distance we plan to cover and the intensity at which we need to cover it we can schedule our workout on our week, so make sure you don't lump all your training together and that you have enough rest periods after high-intensity training and long sessions.

If we recalculate how much of our training is in each zone, we first summarize what we planned. weekly volume you have programmed, then summarize how much training was done in each zone, divide the volume in each training zone by the total volume and multiply by one hundred in this example, 79 of our training is in zone one, zero percent is in zone two and twenty-one percent are in zone three, this fits perfectly with a polarized training model, as mentioned above throughout the training program these distributions are likely to change slightly week to week and It may look more like a pyramid distribution if we can add more specific training sessions at or near race pace once we get closer to race day.

I hope you found this video informative. This is a relatively new channel. If you find this content interesting, you are more than welcome to subscribe and stay informed about future videos if you have them. Any recommendations for video content please let me know and I'll see what I can do. Thank you so much.