Group Workouts Allow Greater Intensity

From The Economist

The researchers got 12 members of Oxford ’s heavyweight squad to row on machines in four 45-minute sessions over two weeks. In two sessions they rowed in complete isolation and in the others in groups of six, perfectly synchronised. Immediately following each session their endorphin levels were tested. Because endorphin levels can only be measured directly through an invasive lumbar puncture—unfeasible, even for notoriously pain-hungry oarsmen—the researchers used a readily accepted proxy: they deduced pain tolerance, and hence endorphin levels, by gradually tightening a cuff around each rower’s arm. When he said “now” they stopped squeezing and noted the pressure. As expected, the rowers’ pain thresholds were significantly higher following the group sessions. This was despite nearly identical power outputs in all four tests and efforts to control for possible confounding variables, such as the time of day.

Low Carb Training

From TriFuel.com

For years, well intentioned coaches and exercise physiologists have given endurance athletes very strong recommendations to ensure high carbohydrate intake during training and racing to optimize performance. Some recent experimental evidence and the actual practice of some very successful athletes has many of us rethinking our previous advice especially in regard to training. As a coach, I sometimes encourage my athletes to purposefully deplete glycogen stores during training or to limit the intake of carbohydrate during certain endurance training sessions.

The Dangers of Intensity

From Xtri.com

Alan provided me with a great way to define Red Zone training – it’s anything that you can’t repeat tomorrow. Given that fitness is built from the capacity to repeat relevant sessions – the bulk of our training will need to be 1/2 effort most of the time AND, most importantly, the session that you can handle has no impact on the session that I can handle

Joe Says Whoa on Sodium

From Joe Friel

I’ve been doing a lot of reading in the literature and talking with informed people regarding, especially, sodium. I’m coming to the conclusion that sodium is not necessary during exercise for all of the reasons we have previously been told were so critical - cramping, coping with heat, and maintaining pace/power. I can find no good evidence to support any of these. Just a lot of opinions and sports drink marketing stuff (which most athletes have come to accept as factual).

Drink to Thirst

(Editor's Note: For the longest time I practiced and preached a philosophy that one needed to drink more than thirst. Mark Allen first taught me that you can train your fluid requirements to some extent and soon require less. My initial work on this was very successful. Then Tim Noakes' experiments, mentioned in the article below, further confirmed it. A week ago I went for an easy 4 hour ride in admittedly moderate temperatures (~20C), drank to thirst and only consumed 750ml of water. I checked my pee after the ride and there were no signs of dehydration. This is not an experiement I recommend to others because of the many variables but it should lead you to perhaps reconsider and further analyse your hydration practices)

From Active.com

How much should you drink? Studies such as the one above suggest that you should simply drink according to your thirst. Drinking more will neither keep you cooler nor improve your performance; but it will increase your chances of suffering from GI distress.

Minimizing the Importance of VO2Max

From Matt Fitzgerald

Ross Tucker, PhD, a South African exercise physiologist and coauthor of The Runner’s Body (Rodale, 2009), points to two reasons. “The attraction of finding a single value that determines your performance ability is too great to resist,” he says, “so the notion that VO2max is the physiological stand-in for performance potential has become something of a dogma among runners and within exercise physiology, despite the abundant evidence that performance is far more complex than a single number.”

“Another reason for the exaggerated importance of VO2max to performance is that it is so easy to measure and quantify,” Tucker continues. “Some of the other factors that are recognized for running success, such as muscle-tendon elasticity, the ability to use fat as fuel and the capacity to generate ATP at rapid rates are a lot more difficult to measure, and often impossible to quantify or compare from one runner to the next.”

Intensity vs Volume

Last winter I did a little n=1 experiment. I had not done a run of longer than 30 minutes for 3 months. Then, I proceded in this manner: I restricted myself to 2 to 3 30 minute interval-based (Zone 4/5) treadmill workouts per week for 6 weeks. I then did a 90 minute continuous Zone 2/3 run on the treadmill. The result was that I felt fine - no excess muscular or metabolic fatigue. Interestingly, the only 'new fatigue' was was found in my respiratory muscles of the ribs.

Here's a study recently released on the same subject:

From Xtri.com or PubMed

The major novel finding from the present study was that six sessions of either low volume SIT (short interval training) or traditional high volume ET (longer endurance training) induced similar improvements in muscle oxidative capacity, muscle buffering capacity and exercise performance. To our knowledge this is the first study to directly compare interval versus continuous training using a research design that matched groups with respect to exercise mode (cycling), training frequency (3 × per week) and training duration (2 weeks), but differed in terms of total training volume and time commitment. Several previous studies have examined muscle metabolic and/or performance adaptations to interval versus continuous training (Henriksson & Reitman, 1976; Saltin et al. 1976; Eddy et al. 1977; Fournier et al. 1982; Gorostiaga et al. 1991; Edge et al. 2006), but the data are equivocal and in all cases the total volume of work was similar between groups. The present study was unique because, by design, the total training volume for the SIT group was only ∼10% that of the ET group (i.e. 630 versus 6500 kJ). In addition, the total training time commitment over 2 weeks was ∼2.5 h for the SIT group (including the work intervals and the recovery periods between intervals), whereas the ET group performed continuous exercise each training day for a total of ∼10.5 h. Thus, while previously speculated by others (Coyle, 2005), to our knowledge this is the first study to demonstrate that SIT is indeed a very ‘time efficient’ training strategy.