We can all become pretty unstoppable. With a well developed aerobic system and a good understanding of our pace and fueling, the only real limiter to how far we can go is our mind. However, very few of us today are even training in the right rhythms to develop healthy aerobic systems.
Even among people who do a decent amount of running or other “cardio” activity, it’s fairly unusual to find people who can truly rely on their bodies’ fat oxidizing aerobic pathways to fuel high levels of long duration performance. For many, exercise is a nonstop cycle of workouts that feel challenging and give us a sense of accomplishment while blasting our systems with stress hormones and endorphins. These workouts make us feel great afterwards and actually work great for a few months, but ultimately our bodies and our actual prolonged endurance performance don’t progress. “No pain no gain” was a simplifying lie obscuring the more nuanced truth about human development, but it’s a lie we tend to embrace in our time-starved lives. The days of our distant ancestors were dominated by large amounts of easy low intensity activity with occasional bouts of quick movement, and true aerobic development generally follows this pattern.
Today fitness industry hype, poorly interpreted scientific studies, lack of knowledge, and our natural temptations and time limitations are pulling us away from a path of actual aerobic endurance development. Going the distance is no longer fashionable and no longer prioritized in the typical frantic life. We’re in the middle of a wave of high intensity hype that appears to be fueled by a few things: (1) our lack of time, (2) our inability to find joy in low intensity activity, and (3) substantial confusion about a series of short term scientific studies about the dramatic effects of high intensity interval training on VO2max (a measure of the maximal oxygen the body can consume) of training subjects.
Let’s clear up some confusion about VO2max and high intensity intervals. Science conclusively shows us that a couple days per week of short painfully intense running or cycling intervals over a couple months will result in impressive increases in VO2max. However, this isn’t some new groundbreaking scientific discovery that will revolutionize fitness and turn us into fit endurance performers or aerobically healthy people in just a couple twenty minute interval workouts per week (unfortunately we see this message from unscrupulous trainers, fad gyms, and even some real fitness magazines). We all love efficiency and we all love results; if merely doing some quick high intensity intervals is a good path to real endurance performance, this is of course what most athletes would be doing. However, this hasn’t proven effective from a performance perspective and from a long-term perspective. There are no short-cuts. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we can’t train ourselves to endure for long distances by going really hard for 30 seconds, but some scientific studies about the effects of 30 second efforts on “VO2max” have led to some interesting recent theories about this. Sometimes as soon as a scientific study is cited people seem ready to abandon their common sense and follow strange claims.
The effect of hard intervals on VO2max is actually something athletic coaches have known for many decades and it’s one of many tools in the endurance training arsenal. The bumps in VO2max that we get from high intensity intervals (“HIIT”) are powerful but do not have lasting effect, which is why endurance coaches tend to time these intervals in small dosages at appropriate times leading up to competition. This is like sharpening a sword right before battle, but it’s no substitute for forging a strong sword to begin with. HIIT efforts are done at levels of intensity that primarily rely on our anaerobic systems, and we can’t really develop our more important aerobic pathway without actually using it.
In addition, VO2max’s role in endurance performance is highly overrated, especially in an activity with any real duration. VO2max is simply a measure of how much oxygen we can use in one painfully hard minute of maximal exercise. True aerobic endurance is something entirely different; this has to do with the levels of effort we can maintain using our aerobic energy pathways. When we are good at using our aerobic systems, we can operate steadily without the accumulation of blood lactate (which forces us to slow down) for many hours and even days.
Luckily, we actually have a broad wealth of wisdom from the experience of thousands of athletes and top coaches about how true endurance is built. When we examine the experience of decades of great athletes, we can rise above the fitness fads and put recent sports science research into its proper perspective. Voices in the media and internet sometimes try to draw a battle line between the long slow distance (“LSD”) and high intensity interval training (“HIIT”) schools of training but this debate is largely a fabrication of the fitness industry (which lags many decades behind the real world experience of athletes.) For most good coaches, there never was a debate between LSD and HIIT. The answer was always both.
One of the most helpful contributors to our endurance training wisdom is Stephen Seiler, an American sports scientist based in Norway. Seiler examined actual training of elite athletes across many different endurance sports in many different countries and realized that the same essential training distributions are seen in almost all elite endurance athletes. About 80% of their training sessions are low intensity (essentially an easy conversational pace) and 20% of their training sessions include high intensity intervals (essentially painfully difficult efforts). There is very little training done at the moderate intensities (which incidentally is where most people will unconsciously train if they go out and run a few hours per week). This is pretty compelling evidence - decades of Darwinian selection in the ruthless world of competitive sports have proven that this “polarized” predominantly low intensity type of training is what works in practice for building a strong and fast endurance athlete. The evidence compiled by Seiler generally lines up with the guidance offered in the books of most great endurance coaches.
So how do we truly develop our endurance potential to a high degree? From a high level training intensity perspective, the best answer we have today generally follows the findings of Seiler and what great endurance coaches have been teaching for decades. If it’s real endurance we seek, most of our training over the course of time is done at low intensity and we can start adding in small dosages of high intensity training when our bodies are ready. Aerobic training is a big topic and there’s far more to explore. The only point of this post is to warn people to avoid some of the limited “science-based” claims and potential traps that are very popular right now in our fitness industry and to look towards the broader experience of athletes and their coaches. In future posts we’ll discuss in more practical terms how we can use the lessons discussed here in our normal lives.
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