Training principles
I love reading about other people's training.
Whether in running or another sport, and whether it's modern day or from years past, I find it all fascinating. Everyone is trying to solve similar problems and optimise similar qualities, but there is huge variety in what that looks in practice. It is a great source of new ideas and different opinions.
That is one of the reasons I write so much about my own training. I try to write things that I would want to read and I hope others find value in it. If nothing else, it helps me solidify my thoughts.
When reading about training, it is tempting to focus on the differences between training regimes - the unique sessions and interventions that make you think ‘I want to try that’.
I think it's more valuable to look for the similarities first.
Looking for the similarities gives an indication of the underlying principles. The foundations of good training. Understanding those principles can give us an appreciation for the myriad of options for endurance training and better understand the reasons why the training looks like it does.
Over the years I have tried to think about principles I think are important and apply somewhat universally. I add and edit the list as I read more and my understanding improves, but there are themes and ideas that come up time and time again.
Adaptations take time and consistency
Your body needs to change for there to be big changes to your ability. This takes time and we want to take a long term approach to training to maximise the adaptations our body can make.
Very challenging training sessions and huge training weeks provide large, but fleeting signals for adaptation. Consistent ‘quite challenging’ training sessions maintain that signal over a longer period.
Changing training philosophy too often can be counter productive. Balance novelty and consistency.
Adaptations require health, happiness, and a good environment
You have a limited window of stress which your body can sustain. It doesn’t matter whether this stress comes from training or from life. If you regularly exceed this, you won’t adapt to the training.
It's possible to gain fitness in ways that are unhealthy or negative but only by prioritising short term performance over long term progress. Sustainable progress tends to be healthy.
If you build training into your life in a way that you enjoy and is balanced with the other important things in your life, then you will be more consistent and more likely to make adaptations.
Hard work must be balanced with recovery and adequate fuelling
Training breaks your body down. In order to adapt to training, your body needs to repair and build. This requires energy from food and occurs when you are not training.
Endurance training requires hard work and high volumes, but it is easy to overestimate the value of the hardest work and underestimate the value of long term consistency.
Don’t work harder than you need to, and don’t progress faster than you have to
The goal is to adapt to training, not to do the training itself. Training which doesn’t lead to additional adaptations isn’t productive. It is just spending energy without the return of making adaptations and getting better.
Initial adaptations to training can be quick and this can make it tempting to progress more quickly. Long term adaptations require slower progress but result in larger improvements.
As you improve, you'll need more training load to make further improvements.
Most training should feel ‘easy’, some ‘hard’, some ‘fast’, and occasionally ‘very hard’.
Training needs to work for the individual
Training has to fit with your life, the time and resources you have available, and your individual abilities.
There are lots of ways of training that work really well. Find the training which works best for you.
What works will change as you do. What worked before is a great starting point but be open to new ideas.
Race specificity is more important closer to the race.
There is no perfect training
We don't have enough information or understanding to know, with certainty, how an individual will react to training. We can know what tends to work for a group, but not what will work, now, for you.
Aim to make good decisions, based on the information and knowledge you have.
Understand why you make training decisions. Accept that you will sometimes make bad decisions. Learn and keep improving.
You will probably notice that these things don't really tell you how to train. Instead, it is more like a framework on how not to train. Given the many options available, that is still hugely useful.
It can be freeing to understand: If there are a large number of options available to us (as is the case in training) then avoiding ‘bad’ options is probably a worthwhile starting point.
The basics done exceptionally well is most often what makes the best athletes.
It goes both ways, training is both Easy & Complex. If we are into starting phase meaning we have started any activity we need not focus on zones as our first priority should be we should have the drive to do it for at least couple of years to see some significant gains in physiology. And yeah at the start every kind of training works as a stimuli, it comes after a couple of months or one can say a couple of years as well when they need to focus on 1% improvement markers. Fundamental is the key meaning putting in the work, nutrition during the workout & for the whole day for months on and recovery in terms of sleep. Sticking to basics does wonders but in this era of information overload & easy access to it, we are focusing firstly to 1% improvement markers rather than 99%.
But even I myself have learned this the hard way, I have read tons of books, listened to almost fifteen thousand podcasts. When I read Scott Fauble & Ben Rosario's book Inside a Marathon, then I got a glimpse of how much of just running people like myself are doing, meaning just running and not training. People want to just run fast in just a couple of weeks or months, but this not how our physiological & muscular adaptations take place. As Kilian Jornet said it takes months and years for your bodies to adapt to the stimuli and our cells and mitochondria to adapt and get the stimulus to get fast and build a huge aerobic base. People don't want to run easy, they just see it on multiple social media platforms and then come to a conclusion I am no where near what people run, I need to run this fast but they need to study multiple coaches from Arthur Lydiard, Renato Canova, Jack Daniels, Joe Vigil, Ed Eyestone, Mike Scannell and others as well.
And isn't mileage just a by product of showing up with consistency to put in the work? Racking up miles is just one form of consistency. Eating enough food through out the whole day to fuel the body while training for any endurance activity needs consistency, sleep also needs consistency, strength & mobility work needs consistency and mental fitness also needs consistency. All these things need consistency and needs to be done in balanced manner, if one thing gets under done- then either the body crumbles or we will not be able to perform at our best level. If we take care of our bodies and listen to it, it will provide us with great performances but if we just keep banging the door w/o listening to it, somewhere down the road it will crumble and then we will think we were more focused on racking up miles which was just a small part of training.
There is one thing told that work harder than everybody else in the room but one doesn't tell it all boils down to mental component a lot as well, what kind of internal monologue goes b/w our ears is a great predictor of either limits or propels our progression, the amount of improvement we can do in any domain/walk of life.
Franz Stampfl, coach of Roger Bannister said-The great barrier is the mental hurdle.
If Roger Bannister's coach knew it 70 years ago, then there is for sure people need to know that yeah mental component is a huge chunk of whether one succeeds or not.
There is one thing told that work harder than everybody else in the room but one doesn't tell it all boils down to mental component a lot, what kind of internal monologue goes b/w our ears which either limits or propels our progression, the amount of improvement we can do in any domain/walk of life.
There is a lot of unraveling that can be done in terms of one's psychology. No one lays much emphasis on this thing b/w our ears. Iga Swiatek might me the first lawn Tennis player to have full time sports psychologist travelling with her. When Madison Keys won Australian Open this year, she was asked what lead her to win her first grand slam, her straight away answer was Lots of Therapy. Francesco Puppi has talked about therapy & Jennifer Lichter also.