- Oh!
Good morning trainiacs.
Things are turning up around here.
It was 18 degrees, Celsius, yesterday.
Can you believe it?
I wasn't planning on actually doing this video,
but last week an interesting thing happened
that I was not expecting.
At the moment, I'm currently doing a four week test
where I am running just as much as I was before,
which is just kind of a maintenance level of twice a week.
One being long, one being a little bit more intense,
but what I'm switching up over the next four weeks
is I'm doing all of those runs on hills.
At the end of the four weeks we'll see what kind
of progress I make.
Now, to quantify the progress,
what I did last week was I ran a 5K time trial.
And then at the end of the four weeks,
I'm gonna run the 5K time trial again.
When I came into this 5K time trial last week,
I was expecting to maybe, maybe get under 21 minutes.
My personal best is a 19:08.
That was on the track actually being paced
by World Beer Mile Champion, Corey Gallagher.
And had tried the PB as something like a 19:40.
So I've never been super, super fast,
and I figured having only done two runs,
maybe three a week, for the past 18 months
where almost all of them have been low heart rate,
I've done a grand total of about 12 fast workouts
in the last 12, maybe.
Yeah, about 12 fast runs in the last 18 months.
I figured that I would have lost a ton of speed,
but the time that I put out was 20:13,
which I wanna say is in the top 10 fastest 5Ks
that I've ever done.
So for the past week, I've been thinking
about what were the things that allowed me to maintain
some of that run fitness
while not really focusing on running.
If you are somebody who doesn't really wanna focus
on running, maybe you're really injury prone,
or maybe you just don't like running,
but you still want to run fast.
I think I've got some of the things
that I've tried to incorporate into this
that I was very pleasantly surprised worked.
All right, let's head downstairs
to whiteboard this out.
Before I do that I need a fizzy drink.
Do we have any though?
Yeah, we've got a couple.
If you're in Canada,
president's choice fizzy drink, vanilla cherry, delicious.
This stuff is like Dr. Pepper, highly recommended.
So, I've listed out the five things
and like there's three sub things here
that I'm gonna go through that I found led
to that ability to run that 20 minute, 13 second 5K
without really training for it.
A couple of disclaimers though.
I didn't specifically train to run a fast 5K,
but I ran a somewhat fast 5K.
But, I was still running
and I have trained for running.
This isn't how you can go from absolutely no running
to a 20 minute 5K.
This is how you can be more efficient
and get more out of your running while running less.
Next, this is not about how you can become the best runner
you can possibly be.
This is very much hacking away at becoming
a fairly decent triathlon runner.
But when we're talking about being the very best runner
that you possibly can be, or a world-class runner,
this isn't gonna cut it.
Third, this will break down
when it comes to applying these types of methods
to Ironmans and half-Ironmans,
you are gonna need to run more than just twice a week
and hack together some of these tips
that I'm gonna give you,
but the basic principles apply.
You just need to really scale up the amount of running
that you do when you get into those longer distance races.
Now, let's get into these.
The first thing here that I feel
is very important is gonna be no surprise to anyone
because I have become the zone two guy,
do 80%, or the vast majority of your run training,
in zone two.
Under your heart rate cap for the top of zone two.
This is also known as Maffetone method training.
On Team Trainiac we use the Karvonen method
of calculating your top of zone two
because it's a little bit more customized to you.
The reason that zone two running is still very,
very important, even though you're way beyond zone two
in a 5K race, is because it's still a very aerobic effort.
There's actually a study titled, "Energy System Interaction
and Relative Contribution During Maximal Exercise."
Essentially it found that even in a 5K race,
84% of the energy output is contributed
by your aerobic system, your heart and lungs,
your low intensity effort,.
Only about 16% is done by that high intensity effort.
And it goes even up to 97% contribution
from aerobic capacity for something as long as a marathon.
So, these are all very aerobic efforts.
Zone two is how you improve your aerobic efficiency
and you'd wanna do about 80%
of your training in that zone to pace
so you can become really good at it.
What happens if you're really, really good at zone two,
is all of the pace, up to the fast pace that you want,
is going to be easier on your system
because it's going to be more aerobic.
It's just gonna be easier to get up to that fast pace
because it's easier to go through all of that slower pace
because your body is more efficient at doing it.
Number two on this list
is endurance specific strength training.
Probably can't see that very much,
but what you want your strength training to be
is specific to the needs of endurance athletes.
General strength training that you would consider
to be normal strength training in a gym
that you would just commonly think of as
this is what weightlifters or bodybuilders do,
is great for building muscle,
but it's almost contrary to what we want
as an endurance athlete.
Realizing a mix up here.
Better.
Strength training should compliment,
swimming, biking, and running,
it shouldn't be in competition with
or even be detrimental to it.
So, these three things are how we look
at designing the strength training
that we program for our athletes.
Number one is you need to build stability.
Erin Carson, who owns RallySport Boulder, ECFIT,
great follow on Instagram.
She talks about energy leakage.
That if you are nice and stable,
every single foot strike you have is going to be stabilized
by all your stabilizer muscles
instead of energy leaking out the side.
And if you're much more stable,
you're gonna be able to move forward.
If you're designing
your strength training program to build muscle
with traditional strength training movements,
it's not really focused on stability.
So, you might still just have more mass
that's leaking out more energy out the side.
Next, and this is why I really like kettlebell training.
Kettlebell training is really,
really good for muscular endurance.
The ability to perform an action over,
and over, and over, under load, under fatigue.
And building up your muscular endurance
with something like kettlebells,
which is designed to actually build up muscular endurance,
is going to allow you to go
and run those fast efforts.
And when it starts getting uncomfortable,
A, it's gonna be longer into the event,
and B, you're gonna be able to withstand it
a little bit better.
You're not gonna fall apart completely.
And the third thing, this is where
that traditional muscle building strength program
falls apart is that you want to ideally build strength
and not weight.
You want to build yourself to be stronger
while not weighing any more
so you can have a higher strength to weight ratio.
Muscle building puts on weight.
If you can make yourself stronger
without really putting on weight,
and you do this with explosive movements,
lower reps designed for muscular endurance,
as opposed to hypertrophy.
And by doing that, you're gonna be able to be stronger
without putting on that weight.
Next thing that you need to focus on
at some point in your running career
is you need to develop your fast twitch movements.
You need to be able
to turn your legs over really, really quickly.
Back when I first started running,
I had plateaued at around a 24:25 minute 5K.
After about two years, I went and decided
that I was just gonna train really fast, really hard,
not really realizing that I was hitting neuromuscular power
and connections between the brain and the muscles
to fire really quickly.
What I was doing was I was doing wind sprints
across a soccer field, walk back.
What it was teaching me how to do
was actually learn how to move quickly.
This is the idea of over-speed training.
Lucy Charles talks about doing this with swim training
and using tools so that you increase your arm turnover
so that when you come back to your comfortable pace,
that will actually be faster.
So, at some point in your running career,
you have to spend some time really working
on your fast twitch muscle fibers.
What we do on our training app
is we actually have a time, every single year,
for about four to six weeks
where we're prescribing eight to 12 second blasts uphill
so that you are turning on those fast twitch muscle fibers
and recruiting a whole bunch of new muscles.
Fourth thing, even though you might not
be running really fast, you might only be doing,
like over the course of 18 months, 12 fast runs.
You still need to, at some point, work on VO2 max.
When you improve your VO2 max,
you're improving your ability to process
a larger and larger amount of oxygen every single minute.
If you can process more oxygen every single minute,
you are going to have more fuel
to actually fire your muscles.
Now, it doesn't mean that you have to do VO2 max efforts
of anywhere from one to eight minutes or so,
running and cycling.
You just have to have some efforts at VO2 max.
So in my case, what I think ended up making that top end
still fairly comfortable
while not doing a lot of top end running,
was I was working on VO2 max efforts on the bike for FTP.
Inadvertently I was improving my 5K time
by improving my bike FTP.
So, as triathletes, it's that interaction
between swim, bike, run,
where you can make all of them bigger
if you're designing each of the parts properly
to compliment each other.
Finally, the last thing is that you need to run.
You need to run regularly.
I'll often get athletes who say,
"Well, you know what?
I just took up running.
And about once a week, I go for a run,
but then I get a little bit bored with it
or I get discouraged.
And then I go away from it and I'm not making any progress
and that's why I'm getting discouraged."
Well, in a lot of cases,
it's just a matter of running regularly.
The more you run, the more your body is going to learn
how to be efficient at running, but it can go away.
I recommend that whether you are in training
for a race or not,
because running takes a long time
to build up that efficiency,
that you need to run at least twice a week,
just for maintenance.
That's what I'm doing.
I'm in maintenance mode here.
And you need to do that year round
because that coordination, that muscle memory,
that smoothness that you get,
that goes away pretty quickly with running.
So, you've gotta stay regular and run,
in my opinion, about twice a week.
In a perfect world. what you're doing for your running
is at some point in your career,
just like you've unlocked the fast twitch muscle fibers,
I really like having a run efficiency
and a run durability program.
What is a run durability program you might ask?
Well, Chris, who I actually did that run with,
I just put him on a run durability program over the winter.
And what we did was he ran six days a week,
starting at 10 minutes a day.
That's it.
Just a 10 minute run, six days a week.
And then he built that up to 11, 12, 13, 14 minutes.
He increased by a minute every single week.
This is something that Patrick McCrann
from Endurance Nation taught me.
What happens is your body gradually gets used
to that increased load and it gradually builds up endurance
and that additional every single day
you get a running stimuli into your body,
your body is really going to increase
the efficiency fairly quickly.
If you wanna get a training plan that is designed
with all of this in mind, automatically for you
so you don't have to worry about it,
year after year, it's designed to be efficient
so that you don't have to spend hours upon hours training,
just slogging through things,
relying on the fact that you're doing 15 hour weeks.
You can train however much you want,
however little you want,
and it's gonna be designed as efficiently as possible.
Go check out our training app at app.mymotive.com.
You can try it for free for 14 days.
So, that's it for today.
I have to clean off the whiteboard now and learn how to,
I should get some bigger whiteboard markers
so that you can see these things.
Like it's very clear when you're up close.
Very clear.
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