I'm not as experienced with Allen/Maffetone, but in general, with going "slow to go fast" you should have an appereciable bump in training volume to compensate for the loss of intensity.

It's definitely worked for me for pure running when I got much faster doing overall lots more miles with overall less intensity (but still retaining at least one high-intensity speedwork day per week) , and also in triathlon where I cranked up volume by over 30% in bike/run and had PR races despite training at what seemed like really slow paces (due to fatigue).

But you don't get anything for free - if you don't crank up the volume, you're not going to get any faster if you train slower. The exception I'd make here is for swim noobs swimming slower than 2:00/100 who generally will get substantially faster IF they work properly on swim technique and likely have a coach pointing out their big swim flaws - for them, swimming correctly slower will be higher yield than swimming hard, but that's really a different concept than Maffetone altogether.

x2 on adding volume. The slow to go fast means putting in major amounts of time overall.

If you hit a plateau with intervals/intensity, then move to slow efforts for a little while and it'll help stimulate the body even if you don't add volume. You might not see improvements but you'll be changing it up, which is something you have to constantly be doing.

One must also remember that before Mark Allen started doing the "long slow stuff", he had YEARS of doing the hard fast stuff.

In my experience it was a total bust. After an entire winter of trying that approach I sucked unbelievably bad and spent a few more months desperately trying to get back the intensity I'd neglected. Being able to roll around/run around all day at low heartrates is good if you want to roll around/run around all day at low heartrates, but in a race that stuff doesn't fly.

It sounds like you're trying to go from one extreme (a bunch of speed) to another extreme (very little speed) and in my opinion, both those methods are terrible.

Why not just up the aerobic work while still keeping in touch with the threshold (cruise intervals and tempos) and a small bout of strength/speed work (hill sprints or short 3k-5k intervals on the run, big gear work and spinups and hill repeats on the bike)?

You can still see big gains from more aerobic work while not losing the stuff you've worked hard to get over the last few years. You don't have to build on intensity at this point, but it doesn't take a lot to maintain it. And the last thing you want to do is lose it.

That method is all about volume. You can bump up the volume at low intensity because you won't need as much time to recover.

Have you ever done a tempo run and sprinted the last mile and finished with nothing left in you? Or climbed a mountain on a bike and blew up 50 feet from summit? Easy swim next two days, or a recovery ride, right?! Hard effort requires more recovery. Easier effort does not, and you can increase your training duration, and train two maybe even three times a day.

oh yeah 1 or 2 weeks and you should be golden bro

You expected to get faster after the FIRST week?

Base training, if you're doing it properly, can and will lead to gains and should leave you healthy and uninjured like your high intensity days. However it is not an overnight success, patience is a virtue here. It's not sexy, you won't brag to your friends about your 4hr ride in low/mid z2, but it gets the job done. And it's not ALL low z2 training, you mix in the intensity when it's appropriate but the hours and hours of base training will help support the intensity when it's time for race specific intervals. It'll take months for your body to adapt, if not more, so take a deep breath and stick with it.

Stick with it.

Must leave ego at the door and not be phased about pace. You're going to run slow and you're going to want to push it but you need to be consistent and keep it within the heart rate range.

For me I was doing 3 runs a week, 12km, 15km and 18-20km. All at sub 160BPM which would normally work out to be around 5:00min/km often slower, I trained this way for 3-4 months ran a HM in 1:24. Prior to this best I had run was a 51:10 10km. Other perks of running this way is that you don't have anywher near as much fatigue in your legs for bike days.

One week isn't going to make any difference.

My experience: I've had my fastest races off no speed work whatsoever. I was training for Ironman, doing BarryP's plan without adding tempo or intervals and I was finally able to put in a decent amount a volume because I wasn't that tired. Not a single run felt all that stressful. I ran my fastest olympic distance run split (43min), 3 weeks out from IM without pushing it hard at all and almost broke my sprint distance run split (20:30), 1 week before, despite feeling like I was jogging. This was off 20+ weeks of adding 10 minutes per week with a maximum week of 60km.

So I say keep at it for 5 months not 1 week.

Note: I'm not saying speed work isn't going to make you faster, just that you need to have a decent base. Like someone said, speedwork is the icing on the cake, but first you need the cake.

You expected to get faster after the FIRST week?

This is the new endurance athlete. Everything has to happen, right now!

It matters little that it goes completely against the laws and rules of physiology. It has to happen right now!

Someone forgot to tell the new endurance athlete, that things take time. That real results and improvement are measured in at a minimum 6 month to one year chunks of time!

That's why it's important to enjoy the journey, because to really be "successful", to really achieve some ambitious goals, it's going to take some time.

The Maffetone methodology is not perfect. It's a bit misleading. However, at some point in time in an athletes career it's never a bad idea to just focus on distance and volume. But again, to do this right takes time - like years of time, if you are just starting out.

---

---

Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

My experience is when I trained slow, my races were slow. When I trained fast, my races were fast...strange I know.

---

______________________________________________

I *heart* weak, dumb ass people...

I used MAO and the slow training when I trained for IMLP in 07. It did not work for me. I tried and tried to go slow, to the point where slight inclines in the road and I was walking.

Maybe I was impatient but I gave it a few months. When I went back to my normal pacing I found that I could not get back to where I was prior to going slow.

I read so many success stories with that but it effected all race distances for me. Move forward a few years and I'm now going a bit long again after only sprints and Loy's for a few years. I do feel that I understand pacing a lot more now then I did then. I mix it up now, easy days are easy, tempo days are quicker, and intervals are quick. I'm finally starting to feel like my run is improving now doing that.

Everyone is different though.

---

Matt
Race-Ready Endurance Training
Team BIKEWAY.com
NYPD Racing

I think training just has to be specific to each person.

I have speed & power, but no endurance. I just started running 9-23 miles a week and have gotten a lot faster with only LSD. I'm just now adding tempo & intervals. I went from a 6:00 mile to a 5:12 mile in 1.5 months with running slow. So it just depends on the person & their background.

I totally did NOT have this experience.

However, and this is a BIG however - I trained with enough volume so that my legs were pretty much shot/toasted on every workout. I rarely had a workout on happy fresh-feeling legs, not even once.

I did zero 400s/800s in my last HIM build and the fastest I ran in training were 1200m repeats at 6:50/mile pace, which felt really hard for me since my legs were so frequently tired.

Then to my surprise, I ran a 5k with a STROLLER late in that buildup and ran a 19:12, which is only a hair slower than my standalone non-stroller 5k time. I ran a standalone 5k a few weeks after that and ran almost my all-time PR time which was set when I was a pure runner doing 75+mpw of running with speedwork and all.

In summary, I def do not think that training on the slower side with big volume will necessarily result in slower times - as long as you're not dogging it completely, and going far enough that your legs get worked over, you'll gain a lot. I actually find the volume approach far, far easier than the low volume-hi intensity approach, even though the time factor is a higher.

A lot of the 'train slow race slow' ironman athletes around here (and there are a lot of them) are really a product of 'train slow with low volume', and not even remotely products of 'train slow with big volume.'

I used MAOL for about a year.
There were pros and cons. I'm glad I did it but wouldn't do it again.
The HR zones I was given for running and the fact I live in a very hilly area meant I had to run incredibly slowly up hills to stay in zone. I felt that just ingrained a slow running technique.
On the plus side, I had a lot of time to think about ways to get my HR down, such as relaxing muscles not used in running, breathing deeply in and fully out and playing around with my posture and running technique.
On the bike, I actually found the HR zones on the high side so some of the bike workouts were reallly long and tough. I had my fastest IM bike split off that training (~5:05) and felt bullet proof but I recall spending a lot of time on the bike! Pretty sure I had at least two 7.5hr training rides in the plan.
Overall, the training was monotonous but effective.
The next year I hired a coach who trains pros, probably trained 1/2 as many hours but with a lot of intensity (generally late in sessions). I set PBs at every distance tri that year and enjoyed the training more. But, I would be wiped out after some sessions!

On adding lots of volume---many of us have only so many "free" hours each week. Thus a major hindrance to follow this concept.

I don't expect results overnight as you suggest the "new endurance" athlete expects. The concern is that the Maffetone method strays from conventional wisdom. I am not new to the game or exercise physiology. I do not expect to get faster overnight, but when I'm getting slower at the same heart rate for 5 consecutive runs an alarm goes off. I'm running at paces almost 3 minutes slower than usual and biking 80-90 watts lower to stay in my heart rate zone. If this experience is normal and the trend will reverse itself then I'll keep going for as many months as it takes. If it's no better than conventional methods then I'd rather go back to mixing it up with some intensity... that's far more enjoyable. It's just hard see negative trends when I'm already going slow. Additionally, as someone else mentioned, I'm concerned my mechanics are suffering by going so slowly. It is very difficult for me to keep a 90+ cadence while keeping my heart rate below 138 bpm's; I feel like I'm just plodding along. So I guess I'm really asking is keeping these ridiculously slow paces/speeds going to facilitate more speed. Keep in mind there are no speed days; it's all 138 bpm or slower (my threshold HR is around 173).

I read up on the Maffetone program about 20+ years ago, so it's possible that the plan has changed since then, but...

As I recall, the program wasn't all about slow and easy. You were supposed to alternate a slow/easy phase with a phase containing more intensity. The shift was dictated by a monthly(?) test that you would run at a specific, fairly easy HR. As long as you were seeing improved speed at the designated HR, you would stay in the current phase. When your test results plateau (or regress), you were to switch to the other phase.

So, besides becoming more a bit faster at easy to moderate efforts, I wouldn't expect much improvement at raw speed in truly hard efforts until you've cycled through the different phases at least a time or two.

Also, I agree with the comments about the need to increase volume if you're looking for improvement while mostly slow paced training - which has also worked for me, as others have described - but it is certainly not an overnight transformation.

---

__________________________________________________
Happy trails,
Chris

1. There is nothing that justifies going slow all the time.
2. Training by HR is even less justified
3. And expecting results after just a week, now you're in for a disappointment in endurance sports.

So, scratch 2-3, and instead of doing 1. try a combination of aerobic training coupled with some VO2max training in each sport (get Phil Skiba's book for instance to have a quick look at polarized training).

Again, I'm not expecting meaningful results in a week or 2, but why am I getting slower in every successive workout? I expect this negative trend will stop, but it sends a red flag. I would have thought that over the first few workouts I would have trended in a positive, not negative, direction. Almost every plan I have ever implemented produced the most consistent improvements early on.

Usually, a change in training methods, especially if you were using something that worked for you before, and that you're used to, will have a negative trend for a little while. Time to adjust to the new sessions, to the new structure, etc. It's rather common.
Regardless, points 1 and 2 still apply.

I really thought that at least during the first week I would notice significant improvement


Are you being serious?

Training adatpations take time. A change in your recent training will at least 4-6 weeks before making an impact. A very short term negative trend could be due to fatigue, not sleeping well, one stressful day at work, your body fighting off an infection, or any number of minor things that have nothing to do with your training methods.

Your body adapts when your training load is high enough to stimulate the change. If you reduce intensity, you need to pick up volume accordingly. Depending on what your body is used to, higher volume may produce additional fatigue that will cause you to be slower in the long term.

I'm not a fan of the "Go Slow to Go Fast" strategy, but if you're going to try it, give it time to actually do something before passing judgement.

---

-Andrew