Running not improving on treadmill?

ok thanks, the only one I can find is this…

he claims 19 others debunk this one… but I am not finding those

Is that the study that essentially says “it only really works if you’re running at ~7:00 min/mile; otherwise 1% incline doesn’t matter?”

@cmart (we’re not related, are we?)
There’s lots of different ways to play with your treadmill to increase your speed: you can set the TM 15 to 30 seconds faster than your outdoor goal pace and see how that translates; you can ramp the TM pace up at intervals over a certain distance, and see if the quicker pace carries over onto the street; you can increase the incline further than 1% (kinda like hill repeats)

Mess around with it, be patient, and see what you come up with

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  • If you’re looking at a short term window such as 6 weeks or random runs during 6-10 weeks that’s not really an effective measurement. You should do some sort of A/B comparison to really gauge.

  • I also see a lot of triathletes that live in hot environments not get much faster during the peak of summer due to the heat. Yet come fall they are crushing the run splits

  • Are you matching your indoor effort to your outdoor effort/PRE? Not necessarily making the speeds the same but the efforts/PRE

  • Are you doing structured workouts or just running?

  • Don’t forget about cooling. Just like cycling indoors, maybe more so since you’re going to mostly have a higher metabolic rate, cooling on the TM is super important.

  • Overall training load. If it’s really high due to lots of riding and/or swimming something has to give until you adapt or change things up

TM’s are great for doing hill reps, intervals, learning how to pace intervals so you eliminate/reduce the U shaped curve most people tend to race (faster/est in the beginning and ending few minutes but slower in the middle 90+%). If you can flatten out the curve/learn better pacing you can actually run faster for a slightly lower overall PRE. This is really important when you’re chasing others trying to close the gap or being chased since most people are going to have their slowest miles in the middle 50% of the run. Run near your fastest miles there and really close/open the gap.

IME I was running my best in triathlon when I was doing about half my yearly mileage on the treadmill.

With my athletes I’ve had many that run 65-90% of their miles on the treadmill & one that only ran outside on some Sunday’s and in races, maybe 15x all year. It didn’t stopped them from crushing their on the road PB’s/and triathlon PB’s despite/or because they did a large % of their training on the treadmill.

Often it’s just tweaking program design in order to maximize your time on the treadmill.

Hope that helps

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Really interesting, thanks. Regarding the tips, sounds like I did all that so still a little bit lost on why it didn’t seem like my run is improving but maybe it still was the training structure.

I have had a phase of a lot of easy TM running years back and maybe took it a little bit too easy. I was trying to just do a lot of low impact easy mileage but also then… didn’t work out or at least still felt like outside running was a different sport. But didn’t do a race back then, so who knows, maybe just fatigue.

So you never had an athlete where they felt like they didn’t improve because of the TM running? I keep thinking it might be the simple fact that the belt is moving and I’m not really. That makes a huge difference then outdoors. But if it works for Ingebrigtsens, it should also be good enough for me :smiley:

without reviewing all your training it’s a shot in the dark at why you feel like you didn’t improve.

Over nearly 30 years of coaching triathletes and runners I can’t remember anyone who didn’t benefit from using the treadmill. That includes age group athletes looking to break 2h in the 70.3 run to NCAA runners to pro triathletes to marathoners. In fact have a female running SYD marathon this weekend who only runs outside on Saturday and then not even every Saturday. Would not be surprised to see her break her marathon PB by ~ 2 minutes this weekend.

Yours could be any number of reasons.
Hope that helps