What's up, Motivators Taren here?
I believe that everyone, no matter your capabilities,
your physical abilities, your level of fitness,
you deserve the right to be able to change your life and experience all
of the benefits of accomplishing your goals with endurance sports.
However, fact of the matter is that our culture in endurance sports is often
associated with nothing but suffering putting in hard training.
I think this scares a lot of people away.
Granted, it does suck a lot of people
in and a lot of people gravitate towards nothing but hard training.
Now, I think that what is more accessible
to the average person that is more effective for everyone.
Is hard training done smart?
Today we are going to talk about hard
intervals versus smart intervals and how you can incorporate them into your
training to accomplish all of your endurance sport adventure goals.
My name is Terri Gazelle.
In my 20s, I was overweight unfulfilled
and couldn't even run to the end of the block.
Over the following years, I found endurance sports lost £65,
won age groups, race world Championships, broke records and trained and learned
from some of the best athletes and coaches in the world.
You too can use endurance sports to change
your life and accomplish your fitness goals.
You just need a system, a system that's meant for us amateurs
who want to be our best while feeling our strongest and healthiest.
My company Motive offers that system and I
want to share some of the tips from it today.
Now, I am typically known as the person
online that professes to do much more accessible training.
But then when athletes get on our Motive
training app, a lot of them say, Whoa, this is actually really challenging.
What I profess in endurance sports isn't
just going in Nambi pamby training and not doing anything very difficult.
What I actually believe should be the case
is hard training, but hard training done intelligently.
Fact of the matter is that just strictly
only doing hard training and saying, you know what, all you have to do is push.
All you have to do is get over low motivation.
All you have to do is go harder than you did the day before.
All you have to do is do another couple
intervals beyond what you think that you should do.
That is just dumb training.
So what we're going to go through is intervals.
When you're doing hard intervals, how do you structure smart intervals?
With all of these factors that we're going
to talk about in mind and what is typically done with just hard intervals,
we're going to go through this really quickly, so buckle up.
First thing that we have listed off here
is other this is where all of your training is outside of intervals.
Traditionally, the other training in hard intervals.
Let's say your top of your zone two, your top of your aerobic threshold,
your top of your easy pace is about 140 beats per minute.
What most people do who just strictly train hard is on their easy days,
which should be somewhere around 80% of your workouts.
They're actually going to push beyond that 140 beats per minute and they're
going to go, well, I only did about 150 beats per minute.
Whereas with smart intervals you treat that 140 beats per minute as a ceiling.
And you try to do actually about five
beats per minute under your top of zone two.
Why you do this and why this is the smart way and this is just the hard way and this
is more effective is because when you're doing the effort levels under your top
of zone two, you're going to have a much smaller stress response in your body.
What that's going to allow you to do is when you get into an actual day that has
a bunch of hard intervals, really difficult intervals where you have
to push, you're going to be able to push a lot more.
Whereas when you're doing a ton of training just over that zone too,
you're going to get into those interval days and you're not going to be able
to push very hard and you're not going to be able to absorb those intervals very
well because you have so much stress in your system.
Next, when we get into duration hard intervals the traditional way that most
people train and we've actually done a survey on this.
And most people in endurance, they set up most of their intervals year round.
Come winter, summer, race season,
they're pretty much all going to be two to eight minutes.
When you are focusing on just two to eight
minute intervals, the only thing that you're working on is your Vo two Max.
That's a great thing to focus on, but it's not everything.
What we focus on with smart intervals is
everything as short as 15 seconds to as long as 2 hours.
And what this does is this makes you a complete athlete.
These 15 2nd intervals are going to be ballistic.
They're going to be like 15 seconds on two
minutes off or 30 seconds on four minutes off.
These two hour intervals are going to be
for the Ironman and Gran Fondo athletes to dial in their race pace.
Now what do you think is going to develop a more well rounded athlete?
The person who is just doing the two
to eight minute intervals year round, or the person that is doing everything
from 15 2nd ballistic intervals all the way through the two minute intervals,
the eight minute intervals, the half hour intervals and the two hour intervals?
I think it's clear that it's this person.
The third thing here is the effort level.
When we look at hard and the traditional way of coaching and training,
the effort level that is prescribed in a workout tends to be a very hard number.
Let's say it's half marathon training.
What a coach might write is at your ten K Race Pace for a series of intervals.
The downside to that is what if you can actually do better than that?
What if you are maybe a little bit sick, maybe you're not nailing it that day
and you're off of that ten minutes and you can't actually reach it.
Well, in either case, you're not doing yourself a very good
service by saying you have to hit your ten K Race pace an exact pace number.
With smart training, there should be a range.
So in the case of a ten K interval and that type of effort,
I might write something for myself that would be something like four minutes,
which is going to be a stretch to four minutes per 20 seconds per K.
And what this does is, let's say I just don't have it that day.
Well, I can still successfully do
the workout at a slower pace, but let's say I'm firing all cylinders.
I've got that stretch goal.
So it gives latitude to make sure
that your body is getting what it's able to do on the day.
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The fourth thing that we have here is a metric.
What tends to happen is you get coaches
that tend to get married to, well, I'm a pace coach.
I'm a heart rate coach.
I'm just a rate of perceived exertion coach.
I'm a power coach for the cycling coaches.
So for those types of coaches,
they will just have a favorite metric that they will go with.
In our case and in our app,
what we've actually just implemented is for every single interval, the warmup,
the cooldown, the rest between the intervals,
the hard intervals, we use the best metric for the best scenario.
So a perfect example is somebody just
commented on this new feature that we rolled out and they said, well,
the warm up is heart rate base and this allows you to go at whatever pace your
body is capable of doing at that heart rate.
It allows you to feel out how you're feeling that day.
Then the intervals, the run intervals for this particular
workout were pace based so that we gave people that nice big range because we want
to hit a certain time that they're trying to hit for their race.
But then for the cool down, we went with rate of perceived exertion.
Because your heart rate from the pace is
going to be very high, it's not really appropriate to go with heart rate.
And then because pace is kind of irrelevant for a cooldown,
we just want you to go with rate of perceived exertion.
So as opposed to just having whatever your
favorite metric is and just blindly saying, I'm a pace person,
I'm a heart rate person, I'm a feel person, I'm a power person.
Smart Intervals have the best of all worlds.
Next, the third to last thing is the cycle throughout the year in hard intervals.
Remember when I said that most of the time
people just focus on two to eight minute intervals?
I've actually looked at most people
who just want to go and work really hard all year round.
Whether it's the off season, whether it's the basebuilding season,
whether it's the race season, they tend to do nothing.
But that two to maybe they stretch it up
to a 20 minutes interval, but year round it's kind of in that same range.
It doesn't really matter what cycle of the year that they're in,
whether they are in a Vo two Max building or an FTP building or a race pace building
or a Neuromuscular power building, they don't really even look at that.
They just say intervals are intervals
and we're just going to have intervals all year round.
So what should my intervals be?
Whereas the cycle that you're
in throughout the year with Smart Intervals is everything.
During the off season we have no intervals because we want your body to recover
from the year before and prepare for the year that's upcoming.
Then we get into Neuromuscular power with these 15 2nd intervals.
Then we start taking those peak powers and seeing how long we can extend those
efforts by getting into those two and eight minute intervals.
And then as your race starts getting
closer, we start doing longer and longer intervals.
So you're gradually refining what the intervals are throughout the year
and having that full, well rounded ability is everything.
Second to last thing here is cadence, and this is with running and with cycling.
Cadence tends not to be thought of a lot with just hard intervals.
People are just focused on let's go suffer
for two to eight minutes as many times as we can, but it's not really a thing NA.
Whereas with Smart Intervals we actually use cadence specifically on the bike all
the way down to 50 revolutions per minute and up to 120 revolutions per minute.
Remember when I said
that with the duration we're trying to build a well rounded athlete ranging
from 15 2nd intervals to two hour intervals.
But we want to make sure that your body is also comfortable with really low cadence.
Slogging it out, really high cadence spinning.
Because when you're in a bike race, you're going to have moments where you're
going up and down a Hill and you are going at low and high cadence.
When you are in a race and you're running, you want to make sure that you've done
a lot of trail running so that you know how to slog it through and grind it out
and have a really strength focused run or you're going really fast downhill.
In hard intervals, they tend to just say,
you know what, we just want to hit the power or the pace over and over.
So you're becoming a very narrowly focused athlete over here.
Finally, the last thing and this is one
of the most important how many intervals you do when it's hard training?
Well, more is always better for these people.
So it's more, more intervals.
But I'll tell you,
I have worked with a lot of pros and been around them for their training.
More is not always better.
With smart intervals, less is actually better.
The best rule of thumb that I've ever heard with the right amount of intervals
to do is find the pace or the power or the effort level that you are able to go
at for every single interval where you aren't fading at all.
At the end of an interval, you aren't fading by the final interval
and you end up feeling like you could have done one more.
What this is going to allow you to do is make sure that you have performed
a workout that you are able to absorb very quickly.
It's also going to make sure that you're
not so spent the next day filled with so many stress hormones that you're not going
to be able to back it up with another good day and another and another and another.
And it has many good days in a row that make a good athlete.
Not one great day in a row. There we go.
I am a big believer in hard training done smart, not just hard training.
Thank you for watching. Motivators.
If you're looking for a training plan
that incorporates these methods that is as good as a one on one coach but as
inexpensive as doing it yourself, check out our Motive training app
that covers triathlons, running races, do Athlons swim runs and cycling events.
The link in the description below where
you can check out your customized training plan for free.
Also, if you'd rather listen to these tips, we also publish these videos
in podcast format on the Terrance Motive Method podcast so you can check that out.
And if you don't want to do either of those things, but you found this video
helpful hit us up with a virtual high five by smashing the like button below.
Later. Motivators.