Episode 369: Speed Work Distribution & Double Threshold Sessions

 


For this episode I outline how I like to position speed work in a training build up. I also touch on the double threshold training model, and if you should consider incorporating it into your endurance training. 

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Episode Transcript

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Human Performance Outliers podcast with Zach Bitter. 1.8s Alright everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Human Performance Outliers podcast. I'm your host, Zach Bitter, and today I have a solo episode for you. Today's solo episode is on a topic about how to distribute the intensity training that you do in your endurance plan over the course of a training plan. But most specifically, I want to get into a little bit more about maybe how not to do it, because I see a lot of interesting stuff online when it comes to speed work and things like that. And as you would imagine, the things that end up getting a lot of publicity and a lot of interest and intrigue are things that are either new or things that are perceivable new and things that seem to be working for some of the more recognizable figures in the sport. So elite athletes, Olympians and things like that, when in reality you have to think about also how they got to that point and whether or not you're skipping steps to try to replicate something when it comes to planning your speed work. Because like pretty much everything in endurance sport, you don't do yourself any favors, certainly no long term favors by skipping steps or by finding yourself in a position where you are taking a shortcut that may produce some short term results, but ultimately holds you back from finding where your true potential is. So I actually specifically got interested in this topic because of double threshold training. That seems to be the thing that's gotten a lot of buzz right now or a lot of interest from people in the running world in terms of whether they should or shouldn't do these double threshold training sessions. And if that's going to be the thing that brings them their next best race result. And part of that is just because you have individuals like the Engelbrecht Sons, specifically Yakub, who is one of the best endurance athletes in the world right now, using that system of training. And it would be hard to argue that Jacob isn't doing the right things in training to get the results that he's looking for. But he's himself and he's also somebody who has a very specific lifestyle as a professional athlete. So I'm going to get into some of the specifics about that particular training model and whether it's something you should consider as a way to maybe just outline how I view distributing intensity throughout your training plan. And in most cases, we're going to be looking at this in a weekly type of setup because that's how most people are planning their stuff out. Where do I position this within a week's time frame? So let's get into this and start chatting about intensity or speed work in your endurance training program. So the first thing I like to start with is just basically. I think what is useful for most people when it comes to planning speed work is the first backup. And think of it as, okay, how do I first get to that part? Or what should I be doing or thinking about before I even decide to introduce a speed work phase into my training? And what I like to do is first individualize it because everyone's going to be different. Everyone's going to have a different amount of time. They have a different amount of energy available and they're going to be starting in different spots. So what works for your friend or the person who may introduce you to a specific training protocol or introduce you to the sport in general? They may be at a different stage. They may have different resources, they may have different strengths and weaknesses. So it can be fun to talk to them and get ideas of what they're doing and things like that. But ultimately you need to individualize it and start where you're at. So the way I like to do that with my coaching clients, with myself and with anyone I'm talking to about this particular topic is first sit down and look at the time frame that you're dealing with in terms of what your what your target is. So if most people are going to have a goal race, they'll have a certain timeline between the day they decide to start preparing and this goal race. And what I like to do from there is have them give an honest look at how much time they actually have on average to dedicate to this training program. And the reason that's important is because I find that if you try to over deliver or target a number that you don't actually have the availability for, you're going to be very inconsistent. And there's one thing I've learned with endurance training that is almost more important than the way you train is being consistent within what you are doing. So if you're going to sacrifice consistency in order to try to target a specific amount of training per week, that's unsustainable for you, then you're likely going to miss the big one of the big rocks in terms of getting where you want to be ultimately with this stuff. So I like to sit down and say, first figure out what your non-negotiables are. I like that way of describing it. Pam Smith came on the show a couple of times. The action she talked about when she was, you know, going to world championships, winning the Western states, what she would do is she would sit down and she would first determine what are my non-negotiables, what are things that I cannot stop in order to prepare for this race? And then she found the balance within the remaining there. So there's going to be where I look at this through two different lenses. One is like your typical non-negotiable or what you can on average maybe dedicate to training. And then there may be an opportunity where, let's say you're six, maybe eight weeks out from your race and you decide, hey, there's these things that are technically non-negotiables, things I'm not just going to give up indefinitely, but I'm willing to sacrifice them for 4 to 6 weeks or 6 to 8 weeks or whatever the time frame happens to be in order to give just a little bit more dedication towards this goal event. But knowing that it's going to be a temporary pause. That. So when Pam described it, she said when she got to kind of the peaking phase of her training, she would maybe read a few less books, do a few less leisure activities, things that are generally things that she probably doesn't want to remove indefinitely from her life because they make things sustainable and worth doing. But if it meant running a little bit better and sacrificing those for a couple free extra hours per week to dedicate to training, she was willing to do that for a short time frame and that's how she structured it. So I like to use that same kind of model. First, let's come up with what is the average amount of time you can realistically dedicate on a weekly basis. Then is there not some flexibility within that during a peaking phase to maybe stretch that out a little bit? It's not always about volume. Some people have plenty of volume available or the volume they have available is ample in terms of what they're trying to get ready for or what they'll actually be able to do physically. So there are a lot of moving parts here at the individual level. But the point is you want to consider where you are there and start building. So for example, let's say that somebody has ten hours available. They find out when they look at everything, family obligations, social life, sleeping, working, everything that is going to be non-negotiable. And then when they get all those things sorted, they've got ten hours that they can carve out and be consistent with, Then that's what we work with. And the reason I'm talking about this is because before someone decides to say, start throwing in speed work, you want to maximize the volume you have available to you at lower intensity training first. So what I mean by that, if somebody is, let's say they're training and they're running six hours per week and they sit down and they determine, all right, I have ten hours available for this training plan to get ready for this race. What I would rather see them do versus say, start throwing in a whole bunch of different stuff with speed work is first, let's maximize the potential you have available in getting your volume up at that low intensity. And then once we get it up there, let's maximize how much movement we can get at the pace you're moving at that low intensity before we start using inputs like speed work to drive that number further. So that's going to be the big factor. Let's pretend now for the sake of this podcast, you're there, you've got ten hours, you've figured out your non-negotiables, you've maximized your volume at low intensities. With that ten hours, your pace is more or less plateaued. You need to introduce a training stimulus that is going to increase the training load that you're going to do without adding extra time to your training plan. So that, in my opinion, is a great spot to do a speed work development phase. So the next step is what does that speed work development phase look like? So as many of you probably know or who are interested in this topic, if you go online or if you look anywhere, you will see an endless number of ways to structure speed workout. You'll see a bunch of different philosophies. You'll see big coaching names that say this is the way that I train my athletes, all sorts of stuff where if you just start. Picking and choosing amongst them. You could end up with just a spattering of random stuff. Or maybe you could just pick one of those people and follow their program. 1.5s Those are all options, obviously, but I want to explain maybe some things to consider before you choose one of those programs or before you start kind of picking and choosing the inputs you're going to put here. First is priority one with your speed work if you want to maximize the quality at the appropriate volume. And what that means is you're better off doing less speed work. If it means all of it is high quality, then adding more speed works if it reduces the quality of some of that. So priority one is maximizing the quality of the execution there. So a lot of that is just going to come down to how much you can tolerate which for somebody who is new, that might just be a little bit less. For someone who's experienced, they may already have a pretty big threshold by the end of your speed work development phase, you'll likely be able to tolerate more volume at intensity because of the adaptations that took place over the course of it. If you give yourself enough time and that's going to range, but just using some general principles I think can be helpful here where when you go out to do a speed work session, whether you're doing something more in the moderate to moderate high intensity range, like long intervals that we would pin to say something like your threshold or short intervals that are going to be a little shorter, a little higher intensity that we're going to pin to something like your VO2 max. You want to make sure when you finish that workout, you're not wrung dry the way you are at the end of your race. You want to leave enough on the table that when you come back to repeat that workout, you can still maintain that quality and you can come back and repeat that workout sooner rather than later. So the way to think about that is let's say I went out and I said, I'm going to do a speed workout on Tuesday and I go out and I just do this killer hero workout where I nail it, feel like it was high quality, looks high quality on paper. But when I finished it, I rang every last ounce out of myself and the rest of that week I feel like I'm still recovering from that to the degree where I don't do another speed work until the next week versus say, I do that workout on Tuesday and I stop a couple of intervals before that point I got to in the first example, and that allows me to go back out on Thursday and do another speed workout to the degree where now I have an extra, let's say 15 to 20 minutes of total volume at the goal intensities I was targeting for that week. If you start extrapolating that out over the course of a plan for weeks and weeks and weeks, you end up picking up weeks worth of training by the end of the plan, by appropriately targeting the amount of volume in a given workout, you can do. So like I said, that's going to be an individual. So you're going to want to go in there with that mindset of like, be honest with myself. Let's stop this when I have something left in the tank. So if that short enrolls, maybe it's a couple intervals. If it's long intervals, maybe you're doing one less than what you could do, or in some cases maybe even two less than what you would actually be able to do if you had to. Going basically all out and then give yourself that opportunity to increase the amount of volume you can tolerate that week because you distributed it better. So that's all to basically lay out the framework here where when we're looking at what you're doing and your training and your speed work, the more volume you can tolerate at a high quality, the better off you are. So we want to make sure we're hitting that volume at the right spot so it's reproducible week after week. But we also want to make sure that the quality remains high so we don't have a situation where, say, you get to the end of a speed work session and now the last couple intervals or the last few minutes of the workout starts to depreciate in quality because you overreached what you were capable of, because that's also going to lead to that same situation where you overreached in one workout. The likelihood of you reproducing that workout with high quality sooner rather than later has just dropped quite a bit. And then on top of it, you also increase your injury risk. So a lot of reasons to avoid that if you can. And to some degree that just takes a little bit of learning. You shouldn't look at it as perfect. You want to go out and kind of test that a little bit and figure out where those lines are. But just be honest with yourself about that. And early on probably err on the side of caution because you're better off aiming low and walking away from a workout, technically being able to do a little bit more, but then being able to reproduce it sooner because of that versus that first scenario where now you're skipping full workouts because of what you did with that thing. So the next becomes how do you actually space that? And this is where we'll eventually get to kind of that double threshold thing if you can actually also improve the amount of, I should say, increase the training load that you take on by closing the gap between those sessions. So you can look at this through an individual workout where you reduce the recovery time between intervals that will increase the training load of said workout. Or you can look at it through multi workouts where you reduce the time between the training sessions themselves. So instead of maybe that Tuesday, Thursday repetition that I described, now you're maybe doing a Tuesday, Wednesday, so you're doing the same exact amount of volume, same exact amount of intensity. You're just reducing the time between that is going to get you a little bit of extra training load. Keep in mind, though, the reason why you focus on goal volume at call quality intensity is that's going to be the bigger mover. So you don't want to sacrifice that in an effort to shorten this. So an example here would be if by moving that Thursday, that second workout to Wednesday reduces the quality of that second training session, it's likely not going to give you a benefit above or even on par with having it still spaced out. So step one is always going to be following this model that I like to refer to as hard, easy, hard, where if you're doing a speed work session, you're giving yourself at least one easy day in between in order to recover from it. And be able to reproduce it at a high quality. And in some cases, you might even want to give it two days. You might want to go Monday, Thursday or something like that, where you have two easy days in between. It's going to be something where that's going to be individual and you are going to want to watch the quality of your workouts to make sure that you are you're hitting that and then if you are consistently hitting high quality, then start thinking about reducing that in to one day in between or no days in between. In some cases, if you're blocking the workouts like that. Tuesday, Wednesday example I gave. So where does this put us with double threshold sessions? So for some of those who are listening, you might be thinking, well, what even is a double threshold session? The philosophy behind it goes as if you're targeting your threshold, which a lot of people that is going to be an intensity they could sustain for roughly 60 minutes in a race day setting. You get a range on that, though. An example that would be if you look at elite marathoners like guys who are running in the low two hour range in the marathon, they can actually stretch out their threshold longer. So you'll see some data on those guys where they're running at something like 94% of their lactate threshold for just over two hours. So you can imagine that that's something where if you do a lot of work, that number is a little bit floating. But generally speaking, if you're just trying to plan out your training, targeting your long intervals or your threshold work at the intensity you could sustain for about 60 minutes on a race day setting is a pretty good way to go about it. 1.1s And the reason that's important is because the theory behind these double threshold training programs is that you are taking away some of the higher intensity stuff, like I shouldn't say taking away because you do have what they'll call like an X Factor workout where you maybe add one higher intensity workout during the week. But generally speaking, you're reducing things like Olympic distance race pace efforts like the 1500 to the ten K and focusing more of your training load on what is a high quality intensity at the threshold. But you're doing that at the expense of doing things faster. But because of that you're able to do more of it and you're able to consistently do it. So they're arguing or their philosophy is that by staying away from the really hard stuff, you're able to do more of the threshold stuff. And since it's also less of the higher intensity stuff, which is going to take more time to recover from, they're able to compress that time window between the sessions to the degree where a true double threshold build up is going to have two days per the week where you do two threshold sessions per day on each of those days. So you're actually doing four workouts in that program. And then if you add that X Factor workout, which is just what they used to call like this extra workout that you maybe do near the end of the week, that is going to be a little shorter, a little higher intensity. If you look at like the Engelberg center, they'll typically do these on hills and that's actually a really smart way to do it because if you're thinking about the damage you're going to do from a higher intensity workout like short intervals then. You know, by doing them uphill, you're going to reduce some of that impact. And that just kind of follows the idea that when you look at endurance athletes, the reason the runners do the lower volume compared to triathletes, swimmers, cyclists and things like that is because of the impact of running. So you can reduce some of that by doing that uphill. And then hopefully the idea there is you're able to reproduce the volume at the intensities you're targeting between those double threshold sessions and that X Factor workout. More often to the degree where you get more total workload over the course of a training plan. But here's an example of what the what that training plan would look like if the model that the Engelberg teams will follow, they'll do like Monday, they'll do an easy day where they're running an easy run in the morning of around 15 km, plus an easy run in the afternoon evening, 12km Tuesdays, their first double threshold day, where they'll do a threshold session in the morning and then a threshold session in the evening, plus a strength work session. And I believe the way they structure theirs is they'll do slightly longer intervals in the morning session and then they'll do really short threshold intervals like 400m and sometimes up to 20 of them in the afternoon session. Then they'll have an easy day where it's easy in the morning, 16km, easy in the afternoon, evening, ten kilometers, Thursdays, a repeat of that threshold, that double threshold session with the morning and afternoon, evening. One Friday's easy again, 15km morning, nine kilometers, afternoon, evening. They've got their strength day on that easy day for that particular set of workouts. Saturday is then when they have that X Factor workout where there's a little higher intensity hill workout plus ten kilometers easy in the evening, afternoon and then Sunday's their solo day where they'll go roughly 21km. So that's an example of how they do it. There's other ways to do it, obviously, and clearly they're doing distances at a pace much faster than anyone else for the most part. So you'll want to calibrate on that. But that's the structure idea where you have these four threshold sessions during the week, they're paired up on two days with one easy day in between. And just thinking about that in terms of what I've been talking about so far, you can start to appreciate that when you start doing two quality sessions in one day, you're looking at if it's well planned, probably 4 to 6 hours in between those. So the risk of not being able to properly execute that second quality session becomes quite a bit higher, especially once you get into that second day. So you really do have to ask yourself if you're going to try something like this. Am I even able to tolerate the volume required to do this right? And then also tolerate the ability to maintain quality throughout this stuff? So I would consider a double threshold session type of training, like the end stage essentially of a speed work development route for people where if you've exhausted everything else, then maybe you're ready for a double threshold session. So most people. Are going to be better off following, sticking with, I should even say, a hard, easy, hard structure. And then maybe if they're getting to a point where they've just got, they're really good at speed work and that's something that they can lean into a little bit more. They start blocking that workout where they're doing two harder sessions or two speed work sessions on back to back days. One thing I will note, if you're going to block your workouts and I've talked about this in different podcasts too, generally speaking, you want the harder of the two to be the first one. So if you're doing like say you're doing two speed work sessions on, say, Monday, Tuesday or Tuesday, Wednesday or something like that, it's better off to program the harder one first. And usually what that will look like is if you're if you're blending intensities, if you're doing something like short intervals and long intervals or like VO2 max and threshold, then you're probably better off putting the VO2 max stuff first, assuming it's not skewed in a way where the volume is high enough in the threshold work that makes that workout like noticeably more difficult. All right. So that is my quick explanation of how to kind of set up and develop your speed work and then my take on double threshold. I'd love to hear your feedback on that. If there's other topics you'd like me to address when it comes to speed work or training in general, let me know. Happy to jump into some of those topics the listeners are interested in. For those of you who are new to this podcast or just are unaware, I do have a full range of episodes that add a lot of detail to some of the things I talked about on this episode. So I have a whole bunch of episodes that go from endurance training simplified, where I just kind of simplified the basic scaffolding structure that I think people should start out with or consider before they start building out their plan. And then I have a bunch of different episodes that kind of go into the different components of that. So I've got short intervals, simplified, long intervals, simplified. I've got an episode called Long Run. Considering the variables, I've got an episode on the mental side of training and racing aid station navigation. 1.5s I'm losing track of all of the topics for that series now. So what I'll do is I will put links to all of those in the show notes. So if you want to go back and listen to those and do a deep dive into my philosophy and ideas behind how to set your endurance training stuff up, you can find those there. Also just worth noting too, if people are looking for details on the podcast episodes themselves, I actually have an individual landing page for each one of my podcast episodes now, so it has like all the links of everything that we talk about, whether it's a guest interview or a solo one. If I'm talking about studies or we're talking about specific things, that is something that I think you might want to go check out. I put those details in those show notes, so you'll find links to those podcast episodes on that as well. And on top of that, I have a show transcript. So if you go to that landing page for each of the electrodes, there's a text version of the entire podcast there, which I think is probably the most useful for outside of people who just want to read versus listen to it 1.4s being able to search for things. So if you think of it this way, like I say, I talk about something during an episode you're listening to and you're like, Oh, I got to double back and check that out and just remind myself of some of the details. The transcript can be great for that. You don't have to go searching through the audio again. You can just go on to that page where the episode transcript is and search for a few of the keywords and then it'll highlight that section. You can skip right to that spot of the podcast and grab some of those specific details. I think that's probably something that is going to be maybe more important for podcasts that get a little more detailed with research studies or specific programming type questions and specifics, but that is available as well. So thanks again for checking out this podcast. If you don't mind, share this, subscribe to the podcast, share it with your friends and family. Let them know about the topics that you enjoy and thanks for tuning in. 2.7s Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Human Performance Outliers podcast with Zach Bitar. 1.6s