Hey, what's up, motivators Taren here.
With so many fitness gurus out there
talking about different methods of training,
it leads to a lot of confusion with beginner endurance athletes.
Do you focus on sweet spot training or Mafatone method training, or hip training,
or a low carb method of training, or a high carb method of training?
I think it becomes so much noise that it
creates a lot of confusion with what do athletes actually do.
Today I want to touch on one of those methods of training being
the Primal Endurance Method of Training pioneered by Mark Sisson.
Now the Primal Blueprint has been around.
It's actually one of the first books
that I ever read that got me on my fitness journey.
That contributed to me losing 65 total pounds and becoming an endurance athlete.
So I think there are a lot of good nuggets, but let's start analyzing
the Primal Endurance Method of training to see where we can possibly take some
of the great aspects of it and improve upon it.
My name is Terry Gazelle.
In my twenty s, 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.
So let's show you a sample training week here.
This is from the Primal Endurance Book and full credit to them.
I will put an affiliate link in the description below.
I highly recommend you go and buy this book.
I think it gives a nice counterbalance to the all you have to do is suffer
mentality that is out there in endurance sports where this clearly lays out
that you can perform very well with a different lower intensity kind of method.
So to show you an example of what
the training weeks are, they have them broken up into aerobic
building training focuses and then race building training focuses.
So let's go part way through the aerobic
building and look at a fairly typical week here this week six.
So what they've got is a rest on day, 190 minutes swim on day,
245 minutes swim on day three, a 45 minutes run later in the day,
20 minutes swim on day four, two hour run later in the day.
Day five is a 20 minutes swim, then a 45 minutes run later in the day.
And day six is a 1 hour bike followed
by a 20 minutes math test which is just running at the top of your zone two
for the 20 minutes, seeing how far you can go and then a 1 hour 30 minutes run.
What you're going to see is there isn't a whole lot of structure to this.
What they recommend is that during
the endurance building period, all you do is low intensity.
And they recommend using the Maffetone method of training, which we'll discuss,
and they just say, do that over and over and over.
Low intensity, only low intensity.
That's all you do.
And then you can go forward into some
of their more intense, focused weeks, like the competition focused weeks.
So let's look here at week four again.
Day one is a rest.
Day two is a 45 minutes swim bike with 45 minutes of low intensity at math.
Day three is a onehour bike.
And then day four,
there is one intense day throughout the week where you are doing five times
four minutes with 40 seconds rest and then a 20 minutes swim and a 20 minutes run
on day five, a 1 hour bike on day six, and then a rest on the 7th day.
So there's only five total days of work here, only one day with a total of 20
minutes of intensity throughout the entire week, and 5 hours and ten minutes.
Now, to say this is good or bad, we need some context here.
So what I've created here is a bit
of a spectrum where on the one hand, there is focusing strictly on performance,
on the other end there's focusing strictly on health.
I think where the primal blueprint really
comes in is it's focusing really just primarily on health, on balance,
on let's just keep people exercising where performance tends to be ignored.
There are some good methods in here that we'll talk about,
but historically it is completely against the alternative method that is much more
traditional endurance sports, which is focusing strictly on performance.
You just give up one or the other.
You can go strictly for performance
and then face it, you've got to sacrifice a little bit of health.
Your hormones get beat up a little bit,
you start getting aches and pains that build up, your stress levels go up.
It opens the door for short term injuries
and possibly long term injuries, as well as short or long term illnesses.
Now, it's not to say that either method is
wrong, it's just that you have to understand what you're getting
into when you are choosing one method over the other.
Now, personally, where I see most people
following isn't actually on the ends of the spectrum, tends to be more aligned
with just focusing a little bit extra on performance.
But we all really get into endurance
sports to enhance our health and see if we can challenge ourselves.
What I also see is that if people back off of a strict focus on performance and they
get a little bit closer over there, they actually inadvertently get
the performance because their body is a little bit healthier.
This is particularly the case with age group endurance athletes who might be
tipping a little bit into out of balance and overtraining and getting into a stage
where they can't even absorb the training that they're doing.
So they're working hard and spinning their wheels.
If you've ever felt like, wow,
I'm just working so hard here, but I'm not seeing drop dead times.
This is because people tend to push more
towards performance and their body just can't handle that total load.
So based on those sample training weeks,
where I look at primal lying is actually here where the focus is very effective
at creating good health, but it's packaged up a little bit as hey,
you don't have to do much and you're going to perform extremely well.
So I think this is why we haven't seen this huge explosion of people using
the Primal Endurance method because they're coming in expecting excellent
performance and they're getting good health, great.
But I think the balance is really right here in the middle where we're looking
at performance and health and then inadvertently you also get performance.
Now here's where I would keep things from the Primal Endurance method and I
would change things from the Primal Endurance method.
So the first thing that I would change from the Primal Endurance method is
that the Primal method, it is very big on the Masatone method
of calculating your low intensity training zone.
I don't mind the Masatone method,
but I think a more accurate method is the Carnival method.
What I found is about 20% to 30% of the people that use the Mafatone
method, their heart rate and their physiology was either way too high or way
too low and the mafiaONE method wasn't really accurate.
The carbon and method actually takes your unique physiology into account.
So I find that it works for more people.
There will be a link in the description
below to a free calculator where all you have to put in is your maximum heart rate,
your lowest resting heart rate, and then with the carbon and method,
you'll be able to calculate your actual training zones.
The second thing that I would tweak is
the Primal Endurance method talks about the black hole of training,
the gray zone of training, otherwise known as sweet spot training.
Now, what they're saying is you really spend no time in moderate intensity.
It's all absolute sprinting or very low intensity.
I think that this sets athletes up
for failure because they don't ever develop that moderate race type intensity
that is more vo two max focus, tempo, focus.
I believe more in a pyramidal model of training where the base,
the bulk of your training is in the low intensity training zone, about 75% to 80%.
And then the tip of the pyramid is rounded off by moderate intensity training.
So you can build comfort at race effort
and then very high intensity training so you can build that top end speed.
Studies show that this is just as healthy and just as effective at creating
the metrics required for good race performances while getting athletes much
more comfortable with their actual race pace.
Next, the Primal Method only recommends
four weeks at maximum of high intensity training.
I really just don't think that this is
appropriate for somebody who needs to build a lot of vo, two max,
to be comfortable going and racing at a fast pace for an extended period of time.
You got to be comfortable being out there for a long period of time.
So we have our training plans that max out
at six months for an ironman, which is more than appropriate,
but it builds up and it's not just six months or year round of hammering.
And then finally, the Primal Method is very big on a keto approach.
Really not talking at all about the downsides of a keto approach.
I certainly believe that being able to be metabolically fit and burn both fat
and carbs is necessary for health and performance.
But keto itself is a very high stress
thing on your body, keeps cortisol levels really high.
Carbs are great at blunting your cortisol and stress response.
So I think there is a carb appropriate approach that needs to be taken.
Now, let's dive into what I would actually put into a typical training plan.
So as opposed to getting into the exact
workouts, what I would do, just for example, is these two days here.
This is like Monday and Friday.
This is before a weekend on the far right of the screen.
These are the recovery days.
These are the low intensity, completely low intensity days.
This can be a low intensity bike, a low intensity swim, a very low intensity run.
Should be short, should be focused on rejuvenating the bike.
You should feel guilty about how easy these were when you do these workouts.
Now, on the weekend, I would encourage people to go long.
So this is long, low intensity, closer to race season.
We're going to build up bigger and bigger
chunks of these long endurance building efforts that are at and above race pace.
So you're getting comfortable at that gray zone or the black hole or whatever you
want to call it, but you're getting comfortable at race effort.
You're figuring out what your race pace is and then to really build up that intensity
and that ability to go fast for a long period of time in the middle of the week.
This is when we have the intense focus at the beginning of the year.
Yes, these are sprints, as Primal mentions, in the 15 to 62nd range.
But then it builds up throughout
the season, getting up to tempo efforts of 30 minutes.
Now that 30 minutes would be called
the gray zone of training or the black hole of training.
But it's very important to be comfortable
at race effort and not just have sprints to do your top end,
but have sprints and vo, two max intervals of two to six minutes
and then more tempo based intervals of eight minutes to 2 hours.
So you're becoming a well rounded athlete as opposed to just being able to go really
long at super slow paces or being able to go fast for 10 seconds.
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They have what's called superstarch, which functions like a carbohydrate,
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Yes, this is very good for training, but it's also good for day to day nutrition.
I really like taking the Yukan bars,
the yucan granola, as a food source that gives me a good
amount of carbohydrates and energy while not shooting my blood glucose through
the roof, causing a hunger and energy crash later in the day.
And then particularly after a workout, I like the Yukan energy plus plant
protein, which is a good way to again get the carbohydrates and start recovering,
but also gives you a really nice source of protein.
You can go to UCAM Cotran and if you purchase anything after going through
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That is, you can co taron and purchase anything to get a 20% discount.
Thanks you Ken.
And then as far as the carbs are concerned here, we have lots of carbs because to hit
these very high intensities here in high intensity training, you need carbs.
You need the fuel that's easy to access in your muscles to hit it very hard
on these low intensity days, this is where you can go with primarily fat burning.
I'm not a big fan of fasted training, but during these two sessions here,
you can eat primarily fat and protein from like eggs or nut butters.
They're very short workouts,
so just have a little something so that you can become metabolically flexible.
And then these workouts over here on the weekend depend on what the purpose is.
Is the purpose just to go long at a super low intensity?
Well, yes. Then you can have something that is more
like berries, keeping that blood glucose nice and low.
You can bars keeping the blood glucose nice and stable, but then closer to your
races where you start adding in a lot of race specific intensities.
This is where you start bringing in the carbs again so that you become
comfortable with your race nutrition strategy.
Overall, I think the primal method isn't bad.
I think the message that you have to spend
much more time than you expect at a much lower intensity than you expect is good.
I think the message that you don't have
to train the house down year round is also good.
I think sprints and strength training are very good.
I think the packaging of it just needs
to change a little bit, because like I say on that spectrum,
I think what it's doing is giving people a training plan that is designed strictly
for good health and being able to complete a race while packaging it up,
indicating that while you're going to have drop dead performances and I think it
leads to underperformances and people not meeting their expectations.
That's why our training plan uses a much
more balanced approach that is balancing health and performance.
And as a result, we have a lot of athletes
that get surprised with getting on podiums, getting to World Championship
spots, because they're training not quite as hard as they think they need to,
but their body is able to absorb and respond to the training and then boom,
come on race day and have a drop dead performance.
That's a good surprise.
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, dothlons 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 rather listen to these tips,
we also publish these videos in podcast format on the terrain's, motive method.
A podcast so you can check that out.
And if you don't want to do either of those things that you found this video
helpful, hit us up with a virtual high five by smashing the like button below.
Later, Motivators.