Can Sprints also Build Endurance? (Read 1163 times)

The Lydiard method appears to be good... http://www.fitnesssports.com/lyd_clinic_guide/Arthur_Lydiard.htm#Introduction

[...] The Lydiard System The meat and potatoes of the conditioning period is the long runs, three a week. Many parts of your physiology improve as a result of these longer runs. The under-developed parts of your circulatory system are enhanced; neglected capillary beds are expanded and new ones are created. This increases oxygen transportation and utilization, thereby improving your Steady State. Also through aerobics training, your heart, which is just another muscle, becomes bigger and is able to pump more blood with each contraction and to pump the blood faster. Your lungs become more efficient, with increased pulmonary capillary bed activity, which improves the tone of your blood, allowing you to get more oxygen out of each breath. Blood circulation though out your body becomes better, waste products are eliminated more easily. Anaerobic Training Once you have developed cardiac efficiency though aerobic exercise, it is time to develop your ability to exercise anaerobically., to increase your ability to withstand oxygen debt. The absolute limit of oxygen debt that a person who has exercised consistently for a long time can incur 15 to 18 liters. If you have a Steady State of 3 liters a minute and you run at a pace that requires 4 liters of oxygen a minute, you will be able to last for about 15 minutes--one liter of debt per minute. If you increase your pace and now require 5 liters of oxygen per minute, your debt increases to two liters a minute, and you will be empty in about 7.5 minutes. It's common sense, the slower you run, the farther you can run; the effort and speed are determined by your aerobic capacity. When your Maximum Steady State is low, you can be running anaerobically at a relatively slow speed. As your fitness improves, the speed that was anaerobic before is now high aerobic. Therefore, you want to get your Steady State, your best aerobic pace, at a high level before tackling anaerobic training. With anaerobic training, your objective is to create a big oxygen debt and lower your blood pH level so that your metabolism is stimulated to build buffers against fatigue. This is done with interval or repetition training. Once you have built those buffers, your anaerobic training is complete: to continue this type of training is to invite injury. [...]

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/fitness-matters/

[...] Here are some real cases to review – and many of these are people I know personally: Greg Welch, one of the most versatile all-around triathletes ever (he won Ironman Hawaii, the ITU World Championships and the world Duathlon Championship) was forced to retire at age 37 due to severe heart problems. He has had over 10 open heart surgeries and wears a pace-maker. Mark Montgomery, who was a top pro triathlete for many years, had his pace-maker installed at age 46 as a result of V-tach issues. Johnny G, the developer of the popular “Spin” classes and a RAAM racer, has had severe cardiomyopathy and recently had a pacer-maker installed. Maddy Tormoen, 3-time world Duathlete-of-the-Year and 35-year old Emma Carney, twice ITU World Triathlon champion each now have defibrillators implanted in their chests to correct life-threatening arrhythmias. Chris Legh and Julianne White, both Ironman winners, have each had entire sections of their colon removed immediately after a race due to “ischemic conditions” where the blood supply to the GI tract was rerouted for so long (as the body diverted the blood to its periphery to cool itself) that whole sections of the colon literally died from lack of oxygen and nutrients. Alberto Salazar, arguably the greatest marathoner the USA has produced suffered a heart attack at age 48. John Walker, one of the greatest milers of all-time was diagnosed with Parkinsons at age 46. Marty Liquori, another world-best miler was diagnosed with leukemia at age 43. Bruce Balch, Steve Scott and Lance Armstrong (all endurance athletes) all got testicular cancer after a few years of competing. Most of the top runners from the 80’s don’t run anymore; many can barely walk due to arthritic conditions. And we think endurance training is healthy? One of the most alarming trends in sports these days is the increase in EIA or Exercise Induced Asthma. In some countries, over 25 % of elite endurance athletes eventually develop EIA as a direct result of their superhuman training schedules. In many cases, the diagnosis requires treatment with otherwise “banned substances” such as salbutamol, salmeterol and corticosteroids under a special IOC “therapeutic use exemption.” Another phenomenon that has concerned me for a while is the prevalence of amenorrhea in younger female athletes who train at elite levels, particularly runners and gymnasts. This condition, along with cortisol output, can result in loss of bone density during competitive years and dramatically increase risk for osteoporosis later in life. The list goes on. Clearly, training and competing at the elite level has huge costs. We weren’t designed to train that hard for that long. We were built to migrate – at low level aerobic pace - across the plains foraging for food, scavenging leftover meat some carnivore had already killed and finished, maybe having to sprint for a few seconds to the safety of a tree. Even later when we became hunter-gatherers, we probably relied more on methodical tracking skills than on trying to outrun our prey. Nothing in my research indicates that earlier humans spent regular long periods of time at a high VO2max output other than in periodic games. [...]

We are born to run

How Running Made Us Human: Endurance Running Let Us Evolve To Look The Way We Do ScienceDaily (Nov. 24, 2004) — Humans evolved from ape-like ancestors because they needed to run long distances – perhaps to hunt animals or scavenge carcasses on Africa's vast savannah – and the ability to run shaped our anatomy, making us look like we do today. [...]

According to what I reasd, sprints can improve your endurance, if done properly. There are 2 types of muscle fibers "responsible" for endurance - slow twitch and fast twitch type IIa. Short full intensity sprints will help to transform fast twitch muscle fibers to type IIa. The key there is that sprint should be short (no more than 15 sec - out of wich 3-5 sec a really full intensity), so anaerobic glycolysis will not start during exersize (it will start after it, but break will allow your body to handle lactic acid created). Breaks between sprints should be long enaugh to let your HR to drop to 120-130 bpm. You can do up to 40 such sprints during practice.

There IS a place for sprint work or intervals in your program. As far as I'm concered, it's almost silly, in a practical sense, to question which is better--long run or intervals. They're both important and they both have place to be performed IF you actually want to perform well. If you only have 30-minutes a day to run and try to get the best out of that 30-minutes; then you may need to look into different way to stumulate your body than just simply going for a 30-minute jog (there's nothing wrong with that either). But if the repetitive sprints go up to 90~120 minutes, I would seriously question the purpose of comparison.

That's it in a nutshell.

B) 120-130 bpm? Based on what? My easy pace puts me at around 140. The easy period between should be one and half to two times the length of the period run.

I (personally) think there is some confusion with HR for recovery. A kind of rule of thumb when doing intervals is that your HR should come down to about 120 before you do another one. There's a great story about Dick Quax, when he was coaching Athletics West, cancelling the workout, against athletes' strong objetion, because their HR didn't come down to 120. This was more or less beginning of the era of HRM, or training by HR. Up untill then or thereabout, people just train how they feel. Smart runners, or runners with good running sense, did intervals fast rep and went around for a recovery jog; gauge the effort of the recovery jog and make sure they recover adequately. Sure, sometimes, they would make recovery shorter so they would push a bit harder...something like that. But that was mainly what Lydaird called "green-finger approach". At the time, I think, heart rate helped greatly because, in most cases, highly motivated athletes are very much eager to push themselves. Consequently they would train at the effort that exceeds their desired effort. By monitoring their heart rate, coach and the runner can determine if the effort is too much or not. Now the swing is going the extreme--we don't listen to our body and follow blindly the numbers and figers. In my case, when I do reps, if the HR drops down to 140, I'm usually ready for the next one. Granted, I'm older now and my resting HR is a bit higher so it's probably compensating that way. But I certainly don't adhere to 120 "rule". Now, having said that; I think "striders" or any form of technique work is quite different. When you are actually working on SPEED, you need to be fresh. You cannot produce good speed with tired body. If anything, you'll start to struggle and your good form will go out the window! So if the purpose is to teach your body a good running technique, it pays to have a plenty of recovery in between. I don't know what the recommended HR might be; but Arthur Lydiard used to say that, when doing what he called "fast relaxed strides", you should have AT LEAST 3 minutes recovery in between--or if you're doing them on track, 300m, or the rest of the track, for recovery jog. Sometimes I see people doing strides at the end of the run and they would just run very hard and quickly turn around and go back (the same distance) and rush into the next one. That's not really the best way to go about unless you're trying to stimulate in which case the distance should be a bit longer than just 100m anyways. There should be a very clear purpose for what you're doing in training. If you don't ahve that, then the workout just becomes pointless momentum.

Interesting, Gordon Pirie... http://www.geocities.com/kevn57/running_fast_and_injury_free.htm

Interval running, properly applied, is not only scientifically sound, but is also the most efficient and quickest way to bring an athlete up to a high standard. Improperly applied interval training has led to this time-honoured and well-proven system being maligned and blamed for athletes experiencing all kinds of difficulties. This is because careless application of interval running can damage runners. On the other hand, when it is applied intelligently, its results can be nothing short of miraculous. The plain truth about interval running is that it serves the purpose of developing the heart, circulation and muscles better than any other system. Its beauty is that it does so in a fraction of the time required by long slow distance (LSD) training. The longer stretches of race distance together with middle distance are an indispensable part of Gerschler's system, which is now well over half a century old. It preceded all other such systems of training, and it should be appreciated that Gerschler was the forerunner of a long line of experts who have put forward his ideas as theirs. Much of the difficulty many athletes have with interval training is that they approach it like a competition. Gerschler's motto for interval running was: "Take it easy". As I started my faster runs in an interval session, he always called to me: "Langersammer (Slower)!". You should take an interval session in your stride, running well within your capabilities. We cruised around the faster sections of our runs with controlled power. As a result, even after 80x200 metres I was still able to go for a run around the forest in Freiburg for another 3 miles or so, and then be ready for more later in the day. It was a very enjoyable way of running, but involved a lot of sweat!

Not to hijack but I have a question about a workout I tried in a book called "Self Coached Runner". He has you do 16x100m with 100m jogs between. Is this a "strider" type workout or is this an "interval" workout. I was wondering if there is any use for such a workout in today's modern methods or is this an obsolete kind of old style workout. I thought it might be teaching a person about pacing??? Anyhow, thought I'd pass it by here to the training gurus for comment.

Most 100m striders workouts that I've seen involve a minute of recovery - the intention of which is full recovery. Most modern plans call for strider workouts for basic speed or as a transition from base work to harder workouts. I would guess that the answer to whether that workout had any value for you would be what your training goals were.