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80/20 Stuff...

Friday, 20 March 2015 01:10

YndeCam Photo - A great pic that has little or nothing to do with the story.

By Mackenzie Lobby Havey (triathlon.competitor.com)

Follow the 80/20 rule for new performance gains.

To get to the finish line the fastest you have to power through at your hardest effort, but when it comes to training, a growing body of research confirms that endurance athletes should be doing 80 percent of their training at a low intensity and the other 20 percent at a moderate or high intensity. Simply put, hammering your way through every workout is ill advised.

The latest of these studies, published in the Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, demonstrated this by rounding up a group of recreational runners who ran between 30 and 43 miles per week. Half of the participants followed the 80/20 rule, ...

while the other half ran at middle- to high-intensity paces for the majority of their training. At the end of the 10-week training period, researchers found that the 80/20 group made greater improvements in their 10K times, finishing a time trial an average of 41 seconds faster.

Another study examined three elite Canadian marathoners and discovered that they completed 74.3 percent of their training at low intensities. Other research found that highly trained cross-country skiers trained at a low intensity 75 percent of the time.

Stephen Seiler, an exercise scientist at the University of Agder in Norway, has extensively studied this approach to training across a wide range of endurance athletes. He explains the 80/20 rule, saying, “Training is about integrating intensity and accumulated duration—we think an important advantage of doing more low-intensity training is that we signal adaptations without incurring too much systemic stress.”  READ MORE