The personal experience of world class alpinist Mark Twight and founder of Gym Jones in Salt Lake city.
TNSTAAFL
There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
BY MARK TWIGHT
Periodically people write us to ask specific questions about endurance. While others may be more expert in this area (after all I do have a coach for my own sporting interests), I answer based on the 20-year period I spent climbing mountains, as well as more recent experiences with ski mountaineering racing and bike racing. Which makes my answers true for me. They are not true for all. With that caveat out of the way, every now and then someone asks about the “free lunch” method of improving endurance performance and I usually refer them here.
According to our definition endurance begins at 90 minutes, the point when fueling, hydration, thermal regulation and a host of other factors take on a greater influence than during shorter efforts.
One or two queries have insisted – as I once did – that combining predominantly short-duration, high-intensity work (circuits and gym stuff) with an over-distance effort once every 10-14 days, and a couple of medium-distance time trial type efforts is “very effective” and that great endurance may be developed. First, I take issue with the definition of endurance, and second, I usually ask what they mean by “great” because so far I haven’t seen such a program manifest meaningful results. On top of that, I have been around great, and trained and climbed with great so I know what it looks like. No great athletes became so by taking shortcuts. Finally, I actually tried the method they describe, and not just for three months, or six, or even 12. Did it work? To answer yes I would have to change my definitions of “endurance,” and “great,” as well as “power,” and “speed.” But I won’t, so I answer NO.
I’ll treat this topic with more care in the near future but for now I’d like to post a couple of conversations with, and notes about some truly great athletes and coaches, as well as quotes pulled from various sources to describe why intensity cannot replace volume when it comes to endurance performance.
During my infatuation with “free lunch” method of improving endurance I argued it to a friend and former National Nordic Ski Team member with the fervor of a born again fanatic. Being a friend he was nice enough to listen, and even tolerated the spittle. Eventually he countered by writing, “I still stick by the tried and tested methods I have described. Not because I know so much but because I have seen them work, and work well for many years on both myself and many, many others. They have produced world champions and top national results.”
2002 Ski Mountaineering World Champion Stephane Brosse during the 2005 Powderkeg,
http://www.nutri-site.com/interview-entrainement--stephane-brosse-sport--2--27.html (interview in French that includes an outline of weekly training volume)
He was nice enough to treat me with kid gloves when he stated, “To say that one anecdotal experience convinces you that your way is better seems hasty. It seems unlikely that all these great athletes have been wrong in their approach and that you have stumbled on some secret training method yet to be discovered. Because, if your way could give the best results then the best athletes would have adopted it; especially if it could be done in less time.”
When I opined that so-called “elite athletes” were finishing well in endurance events on a diet of 20-minute workouts and less-than-800m runs he replied, “I have seen this phenomenon many times in younger skiers but also in Masters racers who, because they didn't have much time to train, did a majority of their training in Zone 3 and 4. Basically they were looking for a shortcut to fitness. In every case that I have personally seen or been involved in coaching; when these skiers (from ages 20-50) went to a more conventional Zone 1-2 regime followed by well timed and administered Zone 3-4 workouts their results improved.”
It’s tough to argue with experience earned on the national and international level. But I did. I went down my path as far as I could take it. I trained short then raced long. I wasn’t fast. I didn’t recover well. I didn’t progress from year to year. Surely I was doing something wrong because the program itself couldn’t be flawed. So I tried harder. When that didn’t work I tweaked and changed (tried the over-distance effort once every 10-14 days thing), and modified and tested and continued racing to the same [bleep] results. When I tired of that I began looking at the definitions, and the general sameness of the intensities, and I discussed the causes of fatigue and my lack of power with various coaches, trainers, and thinkers.
My XC ski friend clued me in to the relationship between volume and recovery. “In XC skiing the shortest normal man's race (before the advent of the sprint format) is 40 minutes going up to 2+ hours. A World Cup (WC) skier will compete in 40 races in a season (not all WC events). My biggest year was 45, which included 8-50km races. We were racing 3-days a week, sometimes 4. A big base seemed to be what allowed us to recover quickly from one effort and be sort of rested for the next. Note: there was not training during competition phase only race and rest so volume would drop a lot. At least that was the theory we were sold on and practiced, and all the big guns seemed to prove. Hence a big training volume for a WC skier would be 800-1000 hours/year. This included hard training too but probably 90% time-wise in Zone 1-2. My guess is that Alpinism is closer to XC skiing than it is to swimming or rowing in terms of duration and need to recover quickly.” I had used examples of rowing and swimming and sprint triathlon results to bolster my position on the subject of high intensity training. Then I read this:
“Back in the early and mid 60s the German’s training approach ... (placed, ed.) ... a greater emphasis on high intensity intervals. What they found was that, to a great extent they did reach high performance levels with this training program. But, they were not seeing progressive improvement from year to year among their elite athletes. Every year they came up to the same level, fell back down in the off-season, and repeated the process the next season. Then they changed the composition of the training to higher volume, lower intensity (fewer killer intervals at max speed) and the long term progress began to occur.”
Stephen Seiler
I realized how badly I’d swallowed the hook, and how hard I had hit the ceiling of anaerobic development, at the expense of other capacities. So I read on.
“In an endurance workout lactate content must not rise too high … if it does then lactate tolerance is trained instead of endurance capacity … Intensive workouts going together with high lactate values may be damaging to endurance capacity … Endurance capacity may deteriorate by this kind of training.”
Peter G.J.M. Janssen
“The acidosis, caused by high lactate values in the muscles, damages the aerobic enzymes system … the acidosis is the cause of the deterioration of aerobic endurance capacity.”
Peter G.J.M. Janssen
“Overloading this training intensity ... prevents the body from developing the aerobic base. Rowers can even fall so far behind that they have to start developing the aerobic base from the beginning. It can take weeks or even months to correct such overloading.”
Wolfgang Fritsch
“In the end, excessive anaerobic training pulls down your VO2 max, and you can't even run the slow stuff very well.”
Ron Daws
"Anaerobic training raises your respiratory quotient. This means your percentage of energy derived from sugar increases and fat burning decreases. In time, this may force more anaerobic metabolism and less aerobic function."
Philip Maffetone
“During short maximal exercise fat mobilization and utilization is inhibited by lactate production and acidity; even low lactate concentration (3-4 mmol/L) has diminished FFA concentration in the blood.”
Heikki Rusko
Lean muscle, economic movement, and high-tech machinery during the 2007 Rothaus Regio-Tour
“Because oxygen transport (at low intensity) is not a limiting factor, the muscles in question can be more easily overloaded by the duration of the training session to increase their oxidative capacity and fat utilization.”
Heikki Rusko
“During the 1950s and 1960s, the top runners’ training heavily emphasized intervals. But the interval-trained champions were soundly trounced when Arthur Lydiard’s runners came on the scene. Peter Snell, Ron Clarke, and Murray Halberg did just 6-8 weeks of speedwork, after laying in a 12-week base of pure aerobic endurance running. Runners who’ve done tremendous volumes of speedwork — like Emil Zatopek and Bill “Mad Dog” Scobey — couldn’t match the times of the endurance-trained Lydiard athletes.”
George Beinhorn
“Everybody thinks a four-minute mile is terrific, but it is only four one-minute quarter miles. Practically any athlete can run one one-minute quarter; but few have the stamina to run four of them in a row. How do you give them the necessary stamina? By making them run and run and run some more, until they don’t even think in terms of miles. There is no psychological magic and no pain barrier involved. It is merely a process of gradual conditioning.”
Arthur Lydiard
“Zatopek is a good example of the failure of sole reliance on repetition training. As a national coach, he can tap the whole potential of Czechoslovakia. But where were his men at the Rome Olympics? They didn’t win a thing. Yet most coaches still will not believe my system is the right one. One result is that a good many fine prospects have been ruined by excessive speed work and by trying for quick results." (emphasis added)
Arthur Lydiard
Finding holes in the fitness
"Perhaps the most important part of your body, the one most responsive to training and most important for competition, is the nervous system ... One unique ability of the nervous system is its capacity to learn ... Each workout is a small part of a memory stored in the brain ... If we train indiscriminately, that is recorded. If we over train, that too is recorded. But if we train effectively, we maintain that memory too. The nervous system remembers everything it experiences, so be careful what you put into it. Sometimes a long process of ‘re-training’ is necessary, especially in those who have abused their body through improper training.”
Philip Maffetone
My best climbing performances happened during the years when I averaged between 800 and 1000 hours of training volume annually.
By the end of June 2008 Steve House had already done over 600 hours of training volume in preparation for a visit to the 5th highest mountain in the world later this year.
During the eight weeks prior to setting the record on the Grand Traverse in the Tetons (6hrs 49min) Rolando Garibotti hiked and climbed and ran 125,000 feet of elevation gain. The final week of his preparatory program, which included the actual record-setting traverse, totaled 31,700’ of vertical gain. Of course, he covered many, many miles as well.
A professional cyclist logs between 20,000 and 25,000 miles per year.
Why is such specificity and volume necessary? If mere fitness were the dominant contributor to success in a sport then the fittest would also be the best. But over and over I have seen incredibly fit athletes – by all measures and testing – lose to less fit athletes who have better technical (neurological) skills. It happens in climbing all of the time. It happens in jiu-jitsu. It surely happens running, cycling and Nordic skiing. Great technique differentiates athletes at the highest level; most top tier athletes share similar degrees of fitness. This being the case, technical training must take precedent, which begs the questions, how much conditioning is appropriate to one’s sport? How strong is strong enough? How transferable is one’s “artificial” training? If the answer to the latter is “not very,” meaning significant re-education is required then sport-specific training is preferable because the brain and central nervous system must continually learn and refine specific motor skills. Achieving fitness at the expense of skill is a waste of time and resources so using “cross-training” as the primary means of improving sport performance is a dead end. That said it’s a fine approach to basic conditioning, and a useful supplement, or diversion in the off-season for active athletes. Of course, one can improve endurance performance by, for example, increasing strength and muscle contractility but this is a single characteristic of endurance fitness and speed, and like anaerobic metabolism, finite. It’s easy to pick a particular aspect of the whole and make it one’s shtick. And it’s a trap. I’ve fallen into it, as have others: we have ignored the diverse characteristics of specific fitness to our detriment.
My love affair with short duration, high intensity “cross-training” efforts to the exclusion of other forms of training ended with counseling and efforts to overhaul the method itself. Finally, when that failed, I had to rehabilitate my own fitness. I did it by building a solid foundation on low-intensity, long-duration efforts, and tempered the base with a variety of high intensity work to improve particular characteristics: specific strength, MVO2, LT, movement economy, etc. There is an order to follow (Matveyev, Bompa, Lydiard, Daniels, Kraemer, Fleck, Friel, Ferrari, among others – take your pick) and methods of building small peaks along the way toward a season-ending monster peak. It’s not random. It’s not whatever-the-[bleep]. It’s planned and executed and tested and modified along the way because there is no such thing as a shortcut or a free lunch, and no way to evade hard, intelligent work.
If what you’re doing now isn’t working get off your ass and do something different.