YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU EAT. YOU ARE WHAT YOUR BODY DOES WITH WHAT you eat. And what your body does with what you eat is strongly influenced by what you do with your body. Any given diet will generate very different outcomes in a person who does not exercise than it will in a person who does. The same diet will even generate different outcomes in two people who exercise but in different ways.
The term diet–exercise synergy refers to the idea that diet mediates the effects of exercise and vice versa. Our main interest in this book has been the diet side of this equation. My goal in the preceding chapters was to describe the diet habits that maximize the fitness-boosting effects of endurance exercise and to supply all of the guidance you need to practice this way of eating.
Now imagine yourself practicing the Endurance Diet flawlessly for six months and not doing a single workout during this period of time. How fit would you be at the end of it? Not very! Nor would you have a very high level of endurance fitness if you practiced the Endurance Diet flawlessly for six months and did only yoga or bodybuilding workouts.
The point of these thought experiments is to highlight the fact that practicing the Endurance Diet is not sufficient in itself to maximize endurance fitness. You need to exercise as conscientiously as you eat to become as fit as you can be. In this sense, the Endurance Diet is not complete without proper endurance training. Or, put another way, proper training is a part of the Endurance Diet. For this reason, I think it’s appropriate to conclude this book with some guidance on training.
Like the five eating habits that collectively optimize endurance fitness, the training methods that do the same were not deduced by scientists but instead evolved through a long-term process of trial and error carried out by elite athletes and coaches around the world. The difference is that there is more sport-specific particularity in the training methods of elite endurance athletes than there is in their diets. For example, elite swimmers typically swim twice a day and do a lot of technique work, whereas elite cyclists ride their bikes just once a day and spend little time working on technique. Yet the diets of elite swimmers and cyclists are virtually indistinguishable.
Nevertheless, the various endurance sport disciplines are similar enough in their physical demands that a shared set of core training methods has proved to be optimal in all of them. In the next section, I will describe eight such methods. Like the Endurance Diet, these optimal training methods are practiced far less often by recreational endurance athletes and exercisers than they are by the professionals. Incorporating any of these methods that you do not currently practice into your training will increase your fitness level and ensure that no portion of your optimal eating habits is wasted.
It should be noted that some methods are more relevant to athletes whose primary goal is peak performance in competitive events than they are to exercisers who work out for other reasons. Throughout this book I have addressed athletes and exercisers collectively because both groups seek endurance fitness and the same diet that is most effective for performance maximizes its health benefits also. But where training is concerned, athletes and exercisers are different.
The key difference is that athletes aim to “peak” for races—that is, to attain the very highest possible level of fitness on just a handful of isolated days each year. This orientation demands a variable approach to training in which athletes push themselves very hard at some times, prioritize rest at other times, and carefully sequence their workouts in such a way that they are always moving toward their next fitness target. Exercisers, on the other hand, are more interested in consistency. Most noncompetitive cardio buffs train progressively to the point where they are satisfied with their results and then try to hold steady. For this reason, training methods such as periodization (the exercise counterpart to nutritional periodization, discussed in Chapter 9) that are essential for athletes are not essential for exercisers.
It’s important not to confuse this distinction of types with the spectrum of “seriousness.” There are casual athletes who take a minimalist approach to training and don’t mind finishing races at the back of the pack and there are very serious noncompetitive exercisers who train harder than most athletes and look like they could win races if they ever chose to enter any.
It bears mentioning as well that the athlete/exerciser distinction is fungible. An athlete and an exerciser may be the same person at different times. Most athletes start off as exercisers (indeed, I enjoy nothing more than turning exercisers into athletes) and athletes often take breaks from competition for a period of time without giving up exercise.
In the following descriptions of the eight training methods that are essential for maximum endurance fitness, I will focus mainly on the interests of athletes but will conclude each section with a few words about the method’s relevance to noncompetitive exercisers. If you’re an exerciser who gets the urge to become an athlete or an athlete who needs a break from competition, simply switch from one set of guidelines to the other.
Eight Essential Training Methods for Maximum Endurance Fitness
Just as eating individually is a key part of the optimal diet for endurance fitness, so too is training individually a key part of the optimal exercise program for endurance fitness. For example, some athletes need more time to recover from high-intensity intervals than others do and therefore must plan out their weekly workout schedule accordingly. Experience will reveal what works best for you.
Such individual differences occur at the level of details, however. There is a core foundation of best practices in endurance training that are the same for all athletes. Think of these eight practices as the rules that you cannot get away with breaking if you want to get the greatest possible benefit from the time and energy you invest in working out.
The 80/20 Rule
The foundation of optimal training for endurance fitness is an appropriate intensity balance. Intensity is simply how hard you are exercising at a given moment relative to your personal limit. Research conducted mostly within the past decade has demonstrated that endurance athletes of all experience and ability levels gain the most fitness when they spend approximately 80 percent of their total training time at low intensity and the remaining 20 percent at moderate to high intensity.
Nearly all elite endurance athletes obey the 80/20 Rule of intensity balance, but very few recreational athletes do. A 1993 study by researchers at Arizona State University found that competitive recreational runners did only 46 percent of their training at low intensity and another 46 percent at moderate intensity. And, in 2012, Stuart Galloway and colleagues at the University of Stirling in Scotland reported that a group of recreational triathletes training for an Ironman event did less than 70 percent of their training at low intensity.
Other research has shown that this training error is not only common but also costly. In controlled studies in which some athletes follow the 80/20 Rule and others don’t, the former always improve more. For example, in a 2014 experiment led by Jonathan Esteve-Lanao, fifteen club-level Spanish runners followed the 80/20 Rule while another fifteen maintained a 50/50 split (as most recreational runners do). After ten weeks, the runners in the 50/50 group had lowered their 10K time by an average of 3.5 percent, which is not bad. But the runners who followed the 80/20 Rule most faithfully improved by double that amount.
Escaping the “moderate-intensity rut” that most recreational endurance athletes are stuck in and falling in line with the 80/20 Rule is a three-step process.
Step 1: Learn to distinguish among low, moderate, and high intensities. Physiologically, the borderline between low and moderate intensity falls at 96 percent of the highest heart rate you could sustain for one hour. The borderline between moderate and high intensity falls at 102 percent of this heart rate.
To determine your personal low-intensity (LI), moderate-intensity (MI), and high-intensity (HI) training zones, warm up and then settle into the highest speed or power output you believe you could sustain for one hour. Wait for your heart rate to plateau and then note it. Subtract 4 percent from this number to determine your low-intensity ceiling. Add 2 percent to the same number to determine your moderate-intensity ceiling.
Step 2: Plan your training so that roughly 80 percent of your total weekly training time is spent at low intensity. This is a simple game of math. For example, if you exercise five hours per week, that’s 300 minutes. Eighty percent of 300 is 240, or four hours. Here’s how a five-hour training week with one hour of moderate- and high-intensity training might look:
Step 3: Execution. It’s one thing to plan the perfect 80/20 week, another to actually do it. If you’re like many endurance athletes and exercisers, you already intend to do most of your training at low intensity, but when you get out on the road or the water, you do something else—without even realizing it. Fixing this problem requires what Stephen Seiler, the aforementioned discoverer of the 80/20 Rule, calls “intensity discipline.” Training with a heart rate monitor is helpful in this regard. Once you’ve established the heart rates that correspond to low, moderate, and high intensity for you, it’s easy to stay in the right zone by keeping an eye on your monitor.
Understand that there is no magic in round numbers. It is not necessary to do exactly 80 percent of your training at low intensity. In fact, there is no need to follow the 80/20 Rule at all except when you are aiming toward maximum fitness—for example in the 12 or 16 weeks before a race. During “base” training, when you are really preparing just to prepare for maximum fitness, it may be best to spend even less than 20 percent of your total training time at moderate to high intensity.
Note that the 80/20 Rule says nothing about the best way to balance moderate- and high-intensity training. Stephen Seiler favors a “polarized” approach, in which most of the 80 percent of training that is not done at low intensity is done at high intensity. My own view is that, for competitive athletes, the optimal balance depends on the distance of the races being preparing for. The longer they are, the more the balance should tilt from high intensity to moderate intensity.
The 80/20 Rule is relevant to exercisers as well as athletes. Even if you don’t compete, you will get the biggest fitness bang for your workout buck if you spend four minutes out of every five at low intensity. The exception is when you care more about fat loss than any other outcome of exercising, such as during a weight-loss focus phase. In this case, a high-intensity interval-based program in which as much as half of total training time is spent at high intensity and the overall volume of training is relatively low is likely to be most effective.
Progressive Overload
The principle of progressive overload is based on the idea that fitness improves most reliably when the body is consistently (though not uninterruptedly) exposed to slightly greater exercise challenges than it is accustomed to. Applying this principle to the training process generally entails making each week of training a little harder than the one before—either by increasing the overall amount of exercise or by holding the total amount of exercise steady and increasing the fraction of total workout time that is spent at higher intensities—except in recovery weeks, which I will discuss below.
The alternatives to progressive overload are (1) repeating the same training every week, (2) increasing the training load drastically from week to week, and (3) decreasing the training load from week to week. Each alternative is inferior to progressive overload in its own way.
Repeating the same training from week to week: This will keep you at your current fitness level but won’t make you any fitter, even if you work out a lot. Fitness is an adaptation to stress, after all, and stress comes from challenging the body more than it is accustomed to. A swimmer who has not swum more than nine thousand yards in a week recently will get a fitness-boosting stimulus from swimming ten thousand yards next week, but a swimmer who swims ten thousand yards per week routinely will not.
Increasing the training load drastically from week to week: This will overstress your body, resulting in chronic fatigue, declining performance, and ultimately illness or injury. The effect of this mistake was demonstrated in a 2002 study conducted by researchers at the University of Birmingham and published in the Journal of Applied Physiology. Cyclists completed two weeks of normal training followed by two weeks of training in which their workload was doubled. Their time-trial performance was found to be 6.5 percent worse at the end of this block of intensified training than it had been after normal training.
Decreasing the training load from week to week: This causes an initial increase in performance capacity in fit individuals because it gives the body a chance to fully absorb the stress of recent training and overcome fatigue. This was shown in the final part of the Birmingham study I just described, where two weeks of sharply reduced training caused time-trial performance to rebound to a level that was 1.4 percent better than in the first time trial done after normal training. But prolonged decreases in training loads result in detraining, a reversal of the fitness-building process. For example, in a 1993 study, Danish researchers found that four weeks of sharply reduced training caused performance in an endurance test to drop by 21 percent in previously well-trained endurance athletes.
It is easy to avoid the negative consequences of all three alternatives to progressive overload with good planning. The following table offers an example of a sensible three-week pattern of progressive overload in the training of a generic athlete. (Note that the high-intensity training done on the first day of each week would necessarily be divided into short intervals.)
If you’re a noncompetitive exerciser rather than a competitive athlete, you need not practice progressive overload beyond the point where the training you’re doing is yielding the benefits you seek. Thereafter you can choose to maintain a consistent routine, cutting back spontaneously for brief periods when your body needs a little extra rest and changing things up as much as you need to in order to keep from getting bored.
Purpose-Driven Workouts
If you knew absolutely nothing about how to prepare for races in your sport, your first intuition might be to just practice racing over and over—in other words, to make every workout a rehearsal for actual competition. This approach has been tried, and it hasn’t worked very well. Generations of experimentation have revealed that racing performance is maximized when, instead of simulating competition in every workout, athletes work on individual components of endurance fitness separately in purpose-driven workouts.
In each endurance sport, there is a collection of tried-and-true standard workout types that all of the most successful racers do regularly. Some workouts focus on low intensity. Slow, steady sessions of short-to-moderate duration serve the purpose of developing and maintaining basic aerobic fitness and fat-burning capacity, while longer sessions at low intensity are used to increase raw endurance. Workouts focusing on moderate intensity often consist of an extended effort at moderate intensity sandwiched between an easy warm-up and a gentle cooldown (often called a “tempo” or “threshold” session). High-intensity training is almost always done in an interval format, with short, fast efforts separated by short periods of recovery at low intensity. In cycling and running, high-intensity intervals are often done on hills to add a strength-building element.
There are infinite permutations of each basic workout type, many of which are specific to individual sports. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to catalog all of them, nor is it necessary for you to learn and practice every single permutation that exists in your sport in order to maximize the results you get from the time and effort you invest in training. But it is important that you learn and practice all of the “bread-and-butter” workouts that are most commonly used to develop the various components of event-specific endurance fitness. Table 12.1 presents the full repertoire of bread-and-butter workouts in running. In my experience as a coach, at least one or two of these tools is missing from the typical recreational runner’s purpose-driven workout toolbox.
Exercisers should not feel compelled to do all of the workouts that athletes do. The essential workouts for noncompetitive seekers of endurance fitness are easy runs or their equivalent in another activity and high-intensity intervals. These formats alone will enable you to adhere to the 80/20 Rule and reap its benefits. But it’s okay to mix in other workouts if the variety helps sustain a high level of motivation for training.
Table 12.1 “Bread-and-Butter” Workouts for Runners
The Hard/Easy Rule
The Hard/Easy Rule states that the most challenging workouts an athlete does each week should be separated by one or more less-challenging workouts (or days of outright rest). For example, if you do three challenging workouts and three easier workouts in a given week, the challenging workouts should not fall on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Scheduling them on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday would make more sense.
The Hard/Easy Rule exists because challenging workouts generate a significant amount of fatigue that takes time for the body to recover from. When challenging workouts are done too close together, fatigue becomes magnified to the point that it interferes with the body’s fitness-boosting adaptations to training. In a 2014 study, Brazilian and American researchers found that subjects who performed exhaustive interval runs on three consecutive days exhibited signs of compromised immune function. This type of stress as well as others make challenging workouts less beneficial when performed consecutively than they would be if they were spread out over a slightly longer period of time.
Any training session that results in significant fatigue qualifies as challenging. This includes not only high-intensity interval workouts but also long workouts at low intensity. Generally, it is no more advisable to do a long endurance workout the day before or the day after an interval workout than it is to do back-to-back high-intensity interval workouts. Note that a rest day counts as an easy day, so it’s okay to follow one challenging workout with another challenging workout if there’s a rest day between them.
Select exceptions to the Hard/Easy Rule are allowable. For example, if you are preparing for a multiday stage race, you might want to perform challenging workouts on consecutive days occasionally to inure your body to the experience of pushing your limits when already fatigued from prior exercise.
The Hard/Easy Rule applies to exercisers and athletes equally. Whatever your goal is, doing back-to-back challenging workouts will make it harder for you to achieve.
Recovery Weeks
Fitness does not improve during workouts. It improves at rest, between workouts. Rest is therefore as important a part of the training process as exercise itself. Your body needs rest on three different timescales: micro, meso, and macro. The microscale is day to day, and we’ve just addressed it in our discussion of the Hard/Easy Rule. The macroscale encompasses the complete training cycle from the first day of base training through race day. I will discuss macroscale rest in the penultimate section of the chapter. Mesoscale rest occurs in the context of multiweek training blocks, each block concluding with a recovery week.
Recovery weeks work hand-in-hand with progressive overload. If you practice progressive overload, making each week of training a bit more challenging than your body is accustomed to, you will become increasingly fatigued, eventually reaching a point where your body is no longer benefiting from your hard work, unless you cut back periodically to give your body a chance to catch up on rest. Elite endurance athletes typically make every third or fourth week a recovery week.
The amount by which the training load is reduced in recovery weeks should depend on the context and on the individual athlete. A 30 percent reduction in total training time is a good place to start. In this scenario, if you exercise nine hours in the last week of hard training in a given block, you would aim to complete about six hours and 20 minutes of training in the recovery week that follows. The following week would then be slightly harder than the week that preceded the recovery week.
Exercisers who consistently maintain a training load that is easily managed do not need to plan recovery weeks. They should, however, cut back on training for a few days whenever unusual levels of fatigue or soreness indicate the need for extra rest.
Periodization
The term periodization refers to the practice of dividing the training process into distinct phases, each emphasizing a different type of training. The classic approach to periodization begins with a base phase in which the athlete completes gradually increasing amounts of low-intensity training in order to gently develop the aerobic system, increase endurance, and enhance the body’s ability to handle higher training loads. This is followed by a strength phase that serves to build a bridge between base training and speed training. The strength phase emphasizes high-intensity work against resistance: cycling or running uphill, swimming with handle paddles or fins, and so forth. After the strength phase comes a speed or intensity phase in which the most challenging workouts are done at race pace and faster. The final phase is a short taper phase, in which the training load is reduced stepwise to ensure the athlete is well-rested for competition.
Periodization is approached in somewhat different ways in different endurance disciplines and can even be done effectively in more than one way within a given sport. In recent years, for example, some elite cyclists have begun to experiment with an approach called block periodization, which entails separating the volume and intensity elements of training to some degree. For example, an athlete might do three high-intensity workouts and one low-intensity workout per week in every fourth week and do one high-intensity workout and three low-intensity workouts in other weeks.
Whether you choose the classic approach to periodization or the block approach, your training should become increasingly specific to the challenge of racing as your most important competition approaches. The types of training that are least similar to the race or races you’re preparing for should be emphasized early in the training cycle and those that most closely simulate the specific demands of racing should dominate later in the training cycle.
Additionally, volume and intensity should be combined in such a way that the overall workload slowly increases as the training process unfolds. Typically, this is done by increasing volume while holding intensity steady in the early part of the training cycle and increasing intensity while holding volume steady (or even slightly decreasing volume) in the latter part.
There is no need whatsoever for exercisers to periodize their training. Periodization requires thoughtful planning, an effort that amounts to wasted time for those whose goal is to maintain the results they’re already getting from their training.
Downtime
In our discussion of recovery weeks, I mentioned that seekers of endurance fitness require rest on three separate timescales. We’ve already discussed the first two: the microscale, where rest is obtained through observance of the Hard/Easy Rule, and the mesoscale, where rest is supplied by recovery weeks. The broadest timescale for rest is the macroscale, where rest is achieved through downtime, a multiweek period of sharply reduced training that falls between race-focused training cycles.
Just as recovery weeks are required because applying the Hard/Easy Rule does not provide enough rest to obviate the need for deeper rest on a broader timescale, downtime is needed because recovery weeks do not completely eliminate the need for an even deeper level of rest on an even broader timescale.
This important fact has been demonstrated in an interesting way by Stephen McGregor, an exercise physiologist at Eastern Michigan University and also a cycling coach. McGregor monitors the training of his athletes with the help of a software program called the Performance Management Chart (PMC), which quantifies fitness and fatigue levels through the input of training data. This tool is meant to be able to predict how well an individual athlete will perform in competition, and it does this quite well overall. However, McGregor has observed that when an athlete maintains a high level of fitness for an extended period time (usually four months or longer), performance tends to decline, even when fatigue is well managed and the PMC predicts improvement.
McGregor is not certain why this phenomenon occurs, but he suspects that prolonged hard training slowly fatigues the nervous system, so that the same training that increases performance initially causes it to decline later. Whatever the reason, highly competitive endurance athletes have long observed that heavy training offers diminishing returns over time until it becomes necessary to take a break and allow both body and mind to regenerate.
Elite athletes take downtime at least once and more often twice a year. In the most typical case, an athlete takes an extended break from structured training during the “off-season” period that begins after the last event of the competitive season and takes a shorter and/or less complete break roughly six months later. Off-season downtime might consist of two weeks with little or no exercise, whereas midseason downtime is more likely to consist of a couple of weeks of very light daily training. It seems that 24 weeks is about the maximum length of time that an athlete who is training for peak fitness can go without downtime.
Some athletes don’t like taking downtime because it amounts to purposely giving away hard-earned fitness. But sacrificing current fitness in this way creates the opportunity to attain a higher level of fitness in the long term. When you begin a new training cycle after downtime, you will be fresher than you were at the end of your last training cycle yet fitter than you were at the start of that cycle. As a result, you will be fitter than ever at the end of the new cycle.
Noncompetitive exercisers who maintain consistent, moderate training loads seldom require downtime. The challenge for many exercisers is avoiding unplanned and unneeded downtime as a consequence of low motivation. One way exercisers can escape this problem is to become athletes. Preparing for races is powerfully motivating and has a way of drawing fitness seekers into a seasonal routine in which breaks from exercise become a helpful part of the overall plan rather than harmful interruptions to the plan. If you decide to go down this road, you’ll want to begin following athlete guidelines for all eight essential training methods, not just periodization.
Strength Training
To perform optimally in races, rowers need to do more than row, swimmers need to do more than swim, and cross-country skiers need to do more than ski. All of these types of endurance athlete and others must supplement their sport-specific training with strength training in order to attain true peak performance in competition.
Studies prove it. In 2011, researchers at the Norwegian School of Sport Science reported that twelve weeks of supplemental strength training improved double-poling performance in a group of elite junior cross-country skiers. Four years later, a study conducted by scientists at the University of Greenwich and published in the International Journal of Physiology and Performance found that recreational runners who completed six weeks of supplemental strength training experienced a 3.6 percent improvement in 5K race times. Similar results have come out of studies involving other types of endurance athletes.
Strength training is also believed to reduce injury risk in endurance athletes, although there is little scientific proof of this. Research has shown, however, that weakness in particular muscles predisposes certain types of athlete to injury. For example, runners with weak hip abductors and hip external rotators are more likely to develop overuse injuries of the knee. It stands to reason that strengthening these muscles would reduce the risk for this type of injury.
There are many ways to strength train and not all of them are equally beneficial to endurance athletes. An effective program will include movements that condition the so-called prime movers, or larger muscles that do the most work in a given activity. It is helpful to develop not only the strength of these muscles but also their fatigue resistance. Strength-building requires heavy loads, whereas muscular endurance comes from lighter loads and higher reps. Exercise selection is important as well. It is best to condition the prime movers with functional exercises that mimic aspects of sports movements rather than with isolation exercises like the ones that bodybuilders favor. For example, cyclists are better off strengthening the quadriceps muscles on the front of the thigh with bench step-ups than with machine leg extensions.
An effective strength-training program will also include exercises targeting smaller muscles that play important balancing or stabilizing roles during sports movements. The small muscles of the rotator cuff play such a role in swimmers. These muscles tend to be relatively weak compared to the highly developed prime movers of the chest and upper back, but giving them due attention in the gym will reduce the risk for the shoulder injuries that are so common in swimmers.
A little strength training goes a long way. Some studies have shown that as few as two half-hour sessions per week yield significant results. As an endurance athlete, you want to avoid doing more strength training than is necessary so that fatigue produced by these sessions doesn’t interfere with your sport-specific training.
Strength training is advisable for exercisers as well as athletes, but for a different reason. Although the performance benefits of strength training are not relevant to exercisers, and although exercisers are less prone to the overuse injuries that a good strength-training program may help prevent, strength training complements endurance training with respect to the goal of developing a leaner body composition.
If getting leaner is your top priority, you’ll want to select different exercises than you would if competitive performance was the main objective. Traditional movements like bench presses that do little for athletes carry the benefit of building more muscle mass, which in turn increases resting metabolism and ultimately burns more fat than many of the functional movements that are most beneficial to racers.
Follow the Leaders
There isn’t enough room in this book to supply all of the guidance needed to train effectively in every endurance discipline. But I trust that I have made the point that you will get the best results from your training if you emulate the methods used by elite endurance athletes, just as you will get the greatest possible benefit from your diet if you eat like the world’s fittest people.
In my work as a running and triathlon coach as well as a sports nutritionist, I take great satisfaction in seeing the breakthroughs that occur when an athlete or exerciser begins to train or eat like the pros. As you might expect, the greatest breakthroughs occur in those who do both. Take Holly, a physician and runner in her forties from Kansas, who after twelve years of “winging” her training and diet and making little progress began to follow an “80/20” training plan I created, to cook Georgie Fear’s recipes (Holly actually served as a tester for the recipes in this book), and to track her Diet Quality Score. In just two months she lost 6 pounds and 2 percent body fat and bettered her 5K race time by a full minute. What’s more, she enjoyed both her running and her eating more than ever before.
What works for the world’s fittest people worked for Holly, and what worked for Holly will work for you. Will the next breakthrough be yours?