I would suggest that you add intensity to nearly 20% of your workouts.

Which intensity depends on what you are good/bad at.

Edit: And keep your easy stuff near 50% of your FTP or ~70% of your HRmax

not a coach or an "expert" by any means, but what seems to work for me is to forget about what my physiological makeup is, and focus instead on training for the demands of my chosen event.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

Are you training for something in particular?

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https://www.strava.com/...tes/zachary_mckinney

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
THIS

QFT

Great post!

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

I like the Steven Seiler approach to training, 80% long, 20% intensity. He has lots of good data on that overall approach. Individually some folks seem to respond better to intensity, others volume. Since you are on ST , you can test them both in yourself with a 60 min test, a 4-8 week block of volume , 60 min test, then a similar block of intensity and 60 min test and then tell us what worked better for you. Or you could read Seiler's work and skip all the testing.

What I do is try to balance the year with steady volume in the winter with 1-2 hard sessions (4-8 min intervals at VO2+) per week. That means 1 track session 800-1600m reps with my group and one trainer session. I then switch to race intensity "practice" as racing season approaches. As a triathlete/runner racing means 5k up to HIM for me. So the intensity sessions are 10-30 min intervals at goal race pace/power which turn into sweet spot intervals.

(not a coach, but I listen to many podcasts)

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Brian
“Eat and Drink, spin the legs and you’re going to effin push (today).” A Howe

To answer your question, I would be working on my "low-hanging fruit" while not neglecting my strengths. So in your case, your high intensity / fast twitch stuff is your low hanging fruit. I bet you doing a solid VO2 max intervals session on the bike twice a week would do you wonders.

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- Jordan

My Strava

Many thanks for your reply, that was along the lines that I was thinking, I don't particularly enjoy that sort of effort, but will start doing them soon.

To answer the other questions on what I'm training for, 10k to hopefully a marathon this year. I will be predominantly running based this year, with biking a few times a week for recovery etc. My main aim is to complete my local marathon, which happens to fall on my birthday this year. I've never done a marathon before, so looking forward to the challenge.

Thanks for all the responses. And somehow it looks like I deleted my first post!

I wrote a few things years back on what I learned while learning to run.

https://beginnertriathlete.com/...l.asp?articleid=3032

You might get a thing or two out of it. GL on your journey!
A marathon is still an aerobic event but multi-pace training is important.

But I always tell people that the simple truth of run training is:

Run often.
Rest enough.

Great points already made here. Only thing i would add is that if you have never done marathon distance and your training was always short distance, you really need to add some LSD to get some adaptation to distance running. In other words, if you've been training for 5k's (for example) for years you already have great fitness, but your body is not used to "slow" steady effort of marathon. So you need to incorporate long runs to train your body to use this fitness for longer distance/duration.

Completely agree with this. In terms of athlete 'types', the real strength of the 'slowtwitch' athlete lies in their ability to do more specific endurance work than their competition.

They are easily recognizable by their ability to hold a strong effort "all day long" and by their inability to produce high levels of lactate in anaerobic efforts (often 6 or 7mmol/L peak lactate, certainly never double-digit)

Because of this inability to really hurt themselves (at least in the short term), slowtwitch athletes are the "workhorses" of the squad. You can throw amounts of intensive endurance training (e.g. marathon pace) at them that would completely fry most athletes.

In many ways, building yourself into more of a slowtwitch athlete is a key objective of base training for most. An ability to fuel more of your efforts from your lactate-gobbling, fat burning fibers will enable an athlete to do more of the specific work when the time is right.

I wrote more about these different athlete 'types' here:
(https://alancouzens.com/...-of-athlete-are-you/)

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Alan Couzens, M.Sc. (Sports Science)
Exercise Physiologist/Coach
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Alan_Couzens
Web: https://alancouzens.com

[/quote] They are easily recognizable by their ability to hold a strong effort "all day long" and by their inability to produce high levels of lactate in anaerobic efforts (often 6 or 7mmol/L peak lactate, certainly never double-digit)

Because of this inability to really hurt themselves (at least in the short term), slowtwitch athletes are the "workhorses" of the squad. You can throw amounts of intensive endurance training (e.g. marathon pace) at them that would completely fry most athletes.[/quote]
Many thanks for your reply Alan, the quotes above sum me up so well!
Great site of yours, lots to read and take in.

Long runs are important for 2 important reasons:

1)getting the muscles used to the long duration of the activity
2)getting the connective tissue and your skeleton used to the duration of the activity

Thank you for the kind words about the site. Very appreciated.

Also, just recently came across this great new study and immediately thought of this thread....

"The torque at MVC recovered within 20min in the slow twitch group, while the FT group had not yet recovered 5 hours(!) into recovery"

In some instances, fast twitch athletes took 15x longer to recover from the same stimulus as slow twitch!

As a slowtwitcher, you have quite the advantage in terms of work capacity!

https://journals.physiology.org/...plphysiol.00636.2019

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Alan Couzens, M.Sc. (Sports Science)
Exercise Physiologist/Coach
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Alan_Couzens
Web: https://alancouzens.com