This is really interesting, but I have to doubt it.

Before Christmas I had a month or so layoff, and having nothing planned this year I did a lab test in January to find my aerobic and anaerobic heart rates.

Since Feb I have only been running within my aerobic heart rate limit, building up from 30km per week to 70km per week now. I live in a flat area, so this was easy to do.

I have seen barely ANY speed gain for the same heart rate. I was running within 5s per km in Feb at 145-155 bpm that I am now.

I am slightly lighter, 2kg, so that doesn't make much difference.

I just don't believe in these one size fits all assumptions.

Five months saw almost no improvement for me.

What has happened is that I have no tolerance for any speed. I can run all day at 5:00/ km, but 4:45 is a killer.

Considering last fall I ran a marathon at 4:35/km, I have actually regressed massively.

My plan is in August to go back to normal mix of speed and tempo and slow for an April marathon.

You definitely have a solid argument and could be right on the money, I just find this new research interesting and have an inquisitive mind. And to your point, what about cycling? It's low impact/low stress like swimming and data shows the 80/20 approach works. I wonder if that 80/20 type of training has ever been tried by endurance swimmers. I can see how the usual style of training works for shorter distances because different energy systems are being used (ATP/CP and anaerobic glycolysis), but for half-ironman and ironman distance open water swimming I have to think that the main energy system at play is aerobic oxidative phosphorylation. Maybe it's been tried and studied and failed. Maybe it hasn't. Maybe I just want it to work so I don't have to swim as hard as often ;)

Although swimmers in theory go "hard all the time"...the reality is that they go somewhat hard and then they get to rest at the wall and drop their heart rate. So maybe if you average this out, they are actually going relatively easy overall to actually manage those 30 hour training weeks, if not it would not be sustainable. Sure some of the training falls into the 20% category and it is spread through every workout in every week. Maybe its more than 20% hard, but likely not that much more if you sit down and quantify the impact of all those breaks that you should count in the training time. So rather than look at the average pace coming in, look at the average pace for the entire workout with all the breaks etc and the average comes down.

An equivalent example would be my 4:15 ride today, during which my AVERAGE power was only 153W. I had one 20 min section at 98% FTP and a whole bunch of 1 min hill surges at 125% FTP, but the rest of the ride was doodling around with friends. The Average power was really low, but I am shelled. I'd have to download today's NP, but I doubt it is much more than 200W. The entire workout barely had 40 min of hard stuff out of 255 minutes, so it was like 15% hard, 85% ultra easy. I still felt like I went "HARD" today, but the stats show it was 85% easy.

If you took the "Average power" of most swimmer workouts, I bet you'd see the same scenario shaking out.

Maybe its more than 20% hard, but likely not that much more if you sit down and quantify the impact of all those breaks that you should count in the training time.//

SO there you have it don't you? You have to quantify hard before you assign any numbers and % to anything. I think people perceive hard in the water because of the lack of oxygen. Every other sport you get to breath on demand, not swimming. In fact there are a lot of times in training where you restrict it even more. I think cycling comes close in training "hardness". I imagine cross country skiers come close too. Perhaps it is the nature of swimming and an entirely interval based regime. Even if you do 1500's, the big distance guys will do 10 of them on a fixed interval, usually descending each one.


But without assigning exact percentages to how much is hard/easy, swimming is the sport where folks train the hardest. The water is just so forgiving that it allows athletes to push up against the physiological edge without the threat of injuries like other sports. And then hold your breath while doing all this, and you get a pretty superior cardio vascular human being. Probably why swimmers pick up the other sports much easier than athletes from run/bike backgrounds. But of course once on land, they have to deal with all the gravity induced injuries, usually worse because of all the years of living on the moon..

Monty, my guess, is the 'swimmers swim hard' in every workout is more about "perceived amount of hard" versus actuals. If swimmers actually went harder more often than XC skier, cyclists or runners, then their VO2's and physiological markers should be superior in lab tests. I think you are on to something when you refer to the "breathing on demand". Swimming ends up being perceived as being hard because of the oxygen supply being limited. Having said that, if you do 20% threshold (or higher training) per week and one guy is doing 30 hours and the other guy is doing 10 hours, well there is your answer.

This week as part of my training week, I did a 10K running race, a sprint tri and a 20 min bike TT. I added it all up and it was 2:30 minutes out of a 19 hour training week. There were some additional bouts of high intensity on the bike and swim this week so add it all up and it is barely 3 hours....that's just over 15%. The rest of it was not much harder than IM intensity. I think doing 20% at threshold intensity is actually quite difficult. People under estimate how much this truly is.

When Chris Boardman was training for the world hour record, he had a bunch of weeks that were 8 hour training weeks. Except outside of warmup, it was 7 hours at World Hour Record pace (threshold pace for him). The rest was recovering.

Dev if you do another comparison from running to cycling or any other sport to any other sport I'm going to pull strings and get you booted from ST. Seriously dude just stop muddling up the issues with that crap. You're comparing oranges to pineapples.

Swimmers aren't going hard 80% of the time. the large majority of their work is sub threshold.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

Not easy. 80% is not easy. It's not hard but it's not easy.

You've missed some of the key takeaways in the video if that's what you got out of it.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

Brian, where did I say swimmers are going hard 80% of the time. I was saying that I doubt they are going hard more than 20% of the time. Sometimes your animosity towards me colors your response in a negative way. Please read what i was saying to Monty. I am not sure where I said or implied they are going hard 80% of the time.

I harbor no animosity towards you, you know I'm a pretty easy going individual. You compared swimming to the cycling workout you did, you've often used p/wt in cycling to indicate running ability/potential. Basically I'm saying often you make comparisons/examples that are fruit to vegi.

Don't take it as animosity.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

Brian...I never said swimmers train hard 80% of the time. Perhaps if you did not jump to a conclusion that i never stated, it would be simpler and you could just leave it that there is no point comparing sports. But twisting what I stated and misrepresenting what i said is not appropriate.

Thanks for posting, I enjoyed reading this. Have also enjoyed the ensuing discussion. Simplifying greatly, is it fair to say that a large part of the overall success of Mark Allens triathlon career was to slowly build up capability (ie, in his life; pre & post Maffetone) to the point where he could utilise the three-phase approach? If so, that is a good message for all "how soon & on how little training can I KQ?" aspirants. Even granting that the specifics are more complex (as per the debate above) the principle of the patient approach seems worthy to me.

If we use the same measure of intensity shown in the chart with L1 being 55% to 75% MaxHr it would seem that the 80% IS really easy.

Look at this chart from Ingrid Kristiansen - 80% is L1. I don't know about you but I find 75% of MaxHr to be very easy. In my case that's a Hr cap of 131. It's even lower then then if I used the Maffetone method which would give me about a Hr cap of 135.

If we took a sample of the majority of people on ST, including me, I bet we would have very little L1 and a ton of L2. In fact I think most people equate easy with L2. This presentation is saying something very different.


It was interesting that in one of the quoted clinical trials the non responders were those that did not follow the protocol and ended up with lots of time in L2 instead of L1.




My takeaway from this presentation is ;


Training a lot makes you faster


To train a lot you must train at a very low intensity (L1) for about 80% of the training hours


The polarized model seems to work for elites that train huge volumes and recreational athletes training 6hrs a week

a. The heart rates were wrong
b. You didn't actually do what you thought you were doing
c. You are a non-responder.
d. You're actually had positive changes but aren't measuring them appropriately (IE. if you get retested you'd be better aerobically, but not anaerobically which is why you see your performance stagnate. With a build phase / more intensity you'll add speed onto that aerobicness that you've developed).

I'd bet its one of the above.

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