It isn’t how many grams of carbs or fats you eat (even though they are very important).
It isn’t how many ice baths or sauna sessions you have (also really very useful).
It certainly isn’t the nice new training shoes you bought.
It’s two simple things that describe your workouts:
Exercise intensity
Exercise Volume
Understanding (or not) what they are and what they mean for your body, it’s ability to recover or improve could be the biggest piece of knowledge you’ll learn this year.
Lets get into it….
EXERCISE INTENSITY
How fast you are running, how heavy are the weights you are lifting, how short are your rest periods and how high did your heart rate get.
These variables are all about the effort of the current workouts. The harder you work, the harder the strain and the higher the heart rate are all measurements of intensity. The more intense a training session or training block is will be the single largest factor with regards to recovery. This is because when you work really, really hard its not just about the recovery of the muscle fibres or the replenishment of glucose in muscles or the liver; its about the strain these types of workouts have on the nervous system.
Nervous system strain is probably one of the most overlooked areas of recovery time because its difficult to see or measure, its more that it is felt by the individual.
When you do a maximal or near maximal workout, you are unlikely to be able to repeat this effort again for a little while. You can absolutely train yourself to be able to deliver multiple maximal efforts but this takes tome. CrossFit athletes are a prime example of individuals who over the course of a weekend are asked to deliver maximal intensity/effort workouts multiple times. But after their weekend of competition, a lot of them will need to take a decent break to allow
for recovery.
High intensity results in a a huge amount of stimulus to the Sympathetic (fight and flight) branch of the nervous system. Over activation or extreme bouts of sympathetic stimulus results in body wide changes to sleep, digestion, energy and hormonal systems. Recovery and resumption to normal nervous system tone varies from person to person but this generally requires quite a bit of extra rest relative to more parasympathetic (rest and digest) stimulus.
Low intensity or recovery workouts illicit a completely different (albeit just as important) stimulus.
From a running perspective, high intensity training is predominantly working Type 2 (Fast Twitch) muscle fibres. These are muscle fibres that have a short battery life and fatigue pretty quickly. They use glucose or creatine phosphate for energy and are used for fast work or lifting heavy weights.
Low intensity running will predominantly use Type 1 (slow twitch) muscle fibres. These have the ability to work for long periods of time and use fatty acids as their main source of fuel.
If you train high intensity all the time you’ll get really good at going fast or getting stronger. You just won’t be able to do those things for long.
If all you train is low intensity you’ll turn into the Duracell bunny and can go on and on for hours. You just won’t have that finishing kick or the potential for the highest cruising speeds.
From an injury perspective, both have their risks. High intensity training puts much more stress on the joints, muscles, tendons and ligaments and requires a lot more strength and stability.
Whilst the level of forces on those areas are lower in low intensity training, the general increased time spent doing low intensity work presents different issues like repetitive strains or inflammation due to the sheer amount of time being exercised.
You are how you train.
This leads us nicely onto the next crucial element of training that affects performance/recovery/injury rates.
EXERCISE VOLUME
This is the total sum of all the work you do. The greater the volume of work (even at low intensities), the more strain on the system. Ultra runners or cyclists are those that will have the highest total volume of work during a training block. In the strength training world, body builders will have the highest volume compared to the high intensity/heavier weights of weight lifting or power lifting.
Gradually increasing volume is the best way to increase adaptation to the demands of your sport whilst decreasing injury risk. And from a running perspective, if done at low intensities like Zone 2 (60-70% of your max heart rate) creates the perfect environment to build foundational fitness and the ability to clear lactate from muscles when you do want to run fast. There is obviously a point at which the volume of work you do exceeds the threshold for gains. And that is when you need to be most in tune with your body, or work with someone who can help you see those signs.
Higher volume workouts (especially done at low intensity) don’t have the immediate stress on the sympathetic nervous system like their intense counterparts; but there is an accumulation affect on all runners or those that do any sport a lot.
The obvious double whammy are a training block of both high intensity AND high volume workouts. Think sprint type or very fast tempo (Zone 4 heart rates) multiple times a week for consecutive weeks. Most people don’t need to combine high amounts of both, unless you are training for a specific event.
You may think, “that’s certainly not me”, but a lot of people out there are doing high intensity workouts a few times a week with no rest weeks and wonder why they can’t make progress or are nursing an injury. A classic case is of someone who loves to run. They aren’t necessarily running for anything in particular, maybe just to keep fit or to lose a little weight. They run 3-4 times a week doing an average of 3-8km per run (that nice 30-60 minute workout time). This sort of person (who by the way is not at fault at all) finds after a series of weeks that they just can’t get any quicker and may become frustrated with their performance and start to lose motivation. They may even find themselves carrying more niggles in their body, or feeling more tired generally.
If you looked at their data a little closer you may find that they are actually running at the top end of their Zone 3 heart rate and low end of their Zone 4, in EVERY run. Thats 75-90% of their max heart rate, every run.
It might feel like a decent workout because (and rightly so) they are puffing really hard at the end of each run.
But if you string together 12-15 of these types of runs in a month, with no foundational or cross training work in the gym or elsewhere and aren’t recovering at home or seeing someone like us; you are on a slippery slope to injury, burnout, fatigue and regression in running speed.
Issues in performance do also appear when the volume of training is TOO LOW. If you have specific goals, are training hard but not training enough, then you won’t meet your expectations.
This is why it is really important to be aware of both the INTENSITY and the VOLUME in which you train AND the combination of them both.
If you want to Run Faster For Longer as in our mantra here promotes, you need to embrace balance in your training. Including both high and low intensity work. Be mindful of whether your volume is too low for what you want to achieve, or too high for what your body can tolerate at the moment.
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