What’s the best workout?
I get asked this question all the time. I never have a good answer for a simple reason: there is none. There is no magical workout that gives you everything you need. There’s not even the best workout for a specific parameter, like improving your Vo2max.
But when I venture online, I often see influencers and longevity gurus providing the answer. It changes every few years, but right now, we seem to be in a moment of “the Norwegian workout.” Everyone from Rhonda Patrick to the man trying to reverse aging, Bryan Johnson, speaks about this workout. Johnson loves it so much, he repeats it or a variation of it three times a week. What is this magic workout? 4 x 4 minutes at 90-95% max heart rate with 3-4 minutes rest.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this workout, if done properly (Hint: Johnson does not do it properly).
But I think this search for the perfect workout gets at a much larger and damaging trend in the health and longevity space. The people espousing them approach training in the same way they do everything else: trying to find the optimal protocol. They want the BEST workout. They want the PERFECT plan. But when it comes to performance in any athletic endeavor, there is no best workout, plan, or protocol. The magic is in the mixture. Why? Because the foundation of improving athletically is applying a stimulus to embarrass the body so it adapts in a particular direction. That stimulus is going to differ based on your physiology, psychology, training history, nutrition, sleep, and so much more. The perfect workout doesn’t exist because how you react to the workout should change every time you do it. Even if you control for speed, weather, heart rate, and on and on.
Instead of searching for the perfect protocol, we need to learn how to adjust workouts. So what I’d like to do is walk you through the 4 keys I use in my own coaching and training. We’re going to stick to talking mostly about the ‘hard’ workouts you do, which in most programs are done two (& occasionally for advanced people 3) times per week
- Performance or fitness has many components. They interact and support one another
- You are either building or maintaining a component. Not leaving it behind.
- Build the support. Then funnel towards specificity.
- Progress to Adapt. But take the next logical step.
- The Many Components of Performance
In endurance sports, we could look at this from a physiological standpoint. Your Vo2max, lactate threshold, running economy, critical velocity, speed reserve, and on and on all combine to contribute to performance. We can simplify this a bit using speed and endurance. For any race, we have a speed and endurance component. Training is like balancing a see-saw. The pivot point shifts depending on what race you’re training for (i.e. the balance of speed and endurance is different for a marathon and a mile). Sometimes, you intentionally unbalance the see-saw initially, just so that you have the ability to rebalance it later (Think: why you do lots of endurance to build a base, then add on speed when you get closer to race day. Sometimes you need to add a lot to one side of the equation (i.e. Very fast sprints), other times you need to add just enough to fine tune (i.e. repeats that are just faster than your goal pace, so that on race day that pace feels easier).
The point of this little analogy is that all of training interacts. How you organize your hard workouts is about gradually building up each side of the see-saw so that nothing topples over. Which brings us to point #2.
2. Build and Maintain
During any training period, we are either building or maintaining a capacity. Building means you are trying to emphasize a quality. You are trying to add a bit more stimulus so that you improve that component. This could be in the frequency of time you are doing a workout aimed at that component, or in the degree of difficulty of the workout. It’s about increasing the stimulus so that we adapt.
Maintaining means you are doing just enough to keep that component fit and raring to go. It’s about resisting detraining. Generally, when we maintain something, we do it less frequently (instead of once a week, maybe once every 3-4 weeks), or decrease the overall stimulus (Instead of 10×400 at mile pace, we do 6×400).
What your building depends on the goal of this training period. Remember back to the see-saw of speed and endurance. Early in the season, we may want to build our general endurance, so we do lots of easy and long runs. During that period, we maintain our general speed, so we do some strides and hill sprints. Later in the season, we are trying to re-balance the see-saw by sharpening our speed. So we maintain our endurance by running about 70% of our previous volume and having a long run and some recovery runs sprinkled throughout, while we are building our specific speed, so we include some weekly 200 meter repeats.
3. Build the support. Then funnel towards specificity.
But how do we know what to build and maintain? Here’s my rule of thumb for periodizing training: Build the foundation, then funnel towards specificity. Remember back to our see-saw. We have endurance and speed on either side. Well, as I’ve been hinting at their are different types of speed and endurance. Think of it like this. If we are training for a 10k, then 10k pace is our specific pace. That’s the goal speed we’re trying to get comfortable at. Anything slower is endurance work. Anything faster is speed work. But…the paces that are closer are more specific and supportive, while speeds that are farther away are more general. Let’s break it down. If your 10k pace is 7:00 miles. Than 6:45 is closer to the pace than 6:00. Though each is on the “speed” side. The further away we get is more general. Same goes for the endurance side. 7:30 pace is closer and more supportive than 9:00 pace.
Now I want you to think of a funnel, where our specific race pace is in the middle of that funnel. Periodizing training is about starting as general as we can get on both sides of the speed/endurance continuum. That means we start off with lots of easy slow running, plus some very short strides that are pretty fast. That’s what we build. As our training progresses, we get a little more specific. Instead of just easy slow running, we add in some steady or tempo workout once or twice a week. Instead of just very short and fast, we add in some 200s or 400s that at mile or 3k pace. We don’t forget the easy general endurance, or the fast strides, those go into a bit of a maintenance mode. As we get closer and closer to race day, we start to get more and more specific. Those 400s at 3k pace, become 800s at 5k pace, and then mile repeats at 10k pace. Those 30 minute steady tempos become 3x 10minutes at half marathon pace, and then 2k repeats at 15k pace, and on and on. Again, we don’t leave the other stuff behind. We just do a tempo workout once every 3-4 weeks, instead every 7-10 days. Which brings us to the final rule.
4. Progress to Adapt. But take the next logical step.
When it comes to those hard workouts, the goal is to slightly embarrass the body. If we repeat the same workout (i.e. 4x4minutes with 3min rest) over and over and over, eventually it stops serving as a stimulus. We adapt. And the only way we increase that stimulus is by trying to run it faster and faster. Until we stagnate. When it comes to hard workouts, we need to be like artists. We have a number of variables to play with, we need to use them. We can increase the speed, decrease the rest, lengthen the intervals, increase the number of repeats we do, add a hill component, and on and on. What we adjust helps direct the adjustment of the adaptation. For example, instead of just running faster in the repeats, we might choose to make that 4x4min into 4×4:30. We’re working on extending our specific endurance. Alternatively, we may decrease the rest from 3 minutes to 2:30, challenging our aerobic system to catch up. We may find that we’re stuck at a speed, so instead of 4x4min, we break it down into 2 sets of 4x2min with 90 seconds rest between reps and 4 minutes between sets. Why? This allows us to maintain a slightly faster speed with similar physiological demands. When it comes to workouts, use the whole canvas and all of the paints at your disposal.
But we need to do so in a smart way. What that means is we take the next logical step. After you feel like a hard workout is becoming more and more manageable, change one component in the slightest way. That means going from 800m repeats at 2:30 to trying to run 2:28, and not jumping to 2:20! It means, going from 8×400 to 9×400, instead of 15×400. Take the next logical step.
That’s it. This isn’t a secret recipe. It doesn’t include any magical workouts. And I realize it’s a bit harder to understand than “Do X workout 3 times per week to maximize gains!” But that’s because training is more complex. We don’t need to over complicate it. But we do need a general understanding of how sequence, periodize, and progress hard workouts appropriately.
The goal of training isn’t to overwhelm the body. It’s to gently embarrass it. To remind it that you were just capable of getting through it okay, but might need a little boost to handle it better next time.
— Steve
