I. Deconstructing the physiology of speed
II. The problem with LSD
III. The necessity of speed work
IV. The focus of an endurance program at different ability levels
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II. The problem with LSD
LSD (long slow distance) has recently gotten a bad rap and for good reason. If your goal is to improve your distance times there are quite a lot of problems with using LSD only to facilitate improvement.
As we discussed in the previous section, there’s 3 things that need to be improved concurrently in order to improve speed at long distances.
- Increased strength (neuromuscularly) = more powerful engine, and
- Increased muscular endurance (metabolically/energy pathways) = bigger gas tank, and
- Increased cardiovascular ability = improvements in carburetor, fuel line, and exhaust system
The glaring error with LSD is that it does not improve strength much. Thus, our stride length never improves much, which leads to very little increases in speed.
If you take your average person who competes in 5k/10k/marathons and test their strength it will be abysmal. Of course, if you also take a look at their training program they do no speed work or strength training as their whole program probably only consists of LSD with maybe some tempo runs.
While LSD does improve muscular endurance and cardiovascular endurance, we know that high intensity exercise such as intervals produce equal or faster adaptations. One such study is here. It’s easy to find these in PubMed by searching for ‘high intensity lactate endurance’ (no quotes). You will find hundreds of studies showing that high intensity exercise as compared to traditional endurance training shows equal or greater improvements in variables such as lactate threshold, VO2max, and the most important factor which is performance which is shown by improved times.
The same is true of improvements in body composition (losing fat/gaining muscle) as I’ve mentioned in previous posts. Anecdotally, it doesn’t take a genius to see that most middle and long distance runners do not have as good a body composition as their short distance counterparts.
I’ve ripped on LSD for good reason as you’ll later see in section 4, but it is useful in some cases. For example, there are a lot of elite distance runners who on their off days go out for longer “leisurely” runs. This is known as active recovery and should not be misconstrued as actual training to improve their times. (You will see these runs are not actually “LSD” and not really “leisurely” either)
In conclusion, LSD is for the most part worthless except for active recovery as an “enjoyable activity.” LSD does not show any appreciable improvements in strength, and high intensity exercise shows equal or more improvements for muscular endurance and cardiovascular ability than LSD especially in novices.
However, I will say that miles do build champions (in the end). Enough volume WILL elicit enough adaptations to become elite (combiend with all of the other work above), but at the expense of other productive time. IF a person does not have the time to devote significant portions of time (non-sponsored athletes who can’t train as their job cannot do this), then LSD is basically a time inefficient way to handle training.
We will take about this a bit more later.
Hey great article but I do have a question.
You say that LSD is useless except active recovery but now in cross country we are doing almost all tempo, interval, or race pace runs. How beneficial would a 4-6 mile tempo run be?
Also, we do some speed work such as 3x 30 second sprint, 4x 800m sprint, 3x 1000m tempo, finally followed by 10 hill sprint. How helpful is this speed workout?
1. What’s your distance? 5k?
Tempo runs usually are shorter than your distance work since you’re working up near/at/a bit over lactate threshold to build up capacity there. So if you’re working tempo, you’d probably want to do about 1-2.5 miles (5k is ~3.1 miles) of tempo work. It should feel uncomfortable to maintain the pace you’re running at, but you can maintain it for a fairly decent amount of your actual race length.
2. Speed work is generally best separated into separate days (so the muscles can heal and physiologically adapt to that type of training). That conglomeration of work is just everything at once which as you may know strength and endurance (or in this case, speed and endurance) aren’t gained optimally at the same time.
The off season in any sport should be spent working more strength/power/speed work while in season you should be starting to work longer distances and conditioning to prepare for your race.
Since you’re in season now you’re probably better off with the tempo/interval/race pace as the majority of your work, and select few days as speed work + strength power. These should be separated from each other into sessions and not done at the same time.
You are correct, we do run a 5k race. It does get rather uncomfortable later in the run. I should probably increase the speed of my tempo pace if I can do it for 4-6 miles then. Season ends in 2-3 weeks so I’ll be doing winter running at school. Right now we’re going to start tapering down. I don’t know what winter is composed of but will also be lifting.
I probably wasn’t clear enough about the speed work we do. It is separated into days. We may do 1 or 2 speed workouts per week but mainly tempo+ runs. Friday’s we do a pre-meet LSD run.
About the lifting, what are the best lifts in your opinion to help me out? I have a 0-hour class at school that we rotate days.
Day 1: hang-cleans, front squat, hang-snatches, supplementals
Day 2: supplementals, DL, overhead squat, power complex
Day 3: Squats, Bench, Incline
Day 4: Metabolic Workout
Right now I have a max squat of ~1.21x body weight with 155 but can probably do more. I haven’t done much benching but can do 100+. Hang-cleans I have a max of about 100. DL is a little over body weight at 135.
The link in the first section is a good template for how to structure your weightlifting sessions, plus a good read in itself.
http://www.dragondoor.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?rm=mode3&articleid=269
Check your squat form, and especially your deadlift form. Your deadlift should be over your squat. How deep is you squat? are the top of your thighs parallel to the ground?
check crossfit.com for some tips on out of season workouts for strength
(I run crosscountry)
Hi Steven,
Great article and thanks for sharing it! Question for you regarding speedy long distance runners, the elites. These guys are running 5 minute miles in the middle of marathon and are booking it! However, I hear “stories” that these runners can’t jump more than a few inches off the ground. This doesn’t seem to make sense…they probably can smoke me on my best 400 M (60 seconds) but can’t out jump me? What do you think their max back squats are?
I can’t quite figure out the paradox here…i realize their running economy and gas tank must be tremendous. But it still takes a fair amount of strength to run at that speed. What do you think ? Thanks!
Xi Xia
That’s one of those fitness myths that somehow got started. I’m sure many of the elite endurance guys can jump well, although not as well as the power athletes. Since they exercise they can probably out leap many most sedentary people though.
Hey steve, good read. But I would like some more insight into actual “endurance athletes”. More or less in the >90min. range. I would agree in the periodization of linear blocks in off season working strength, then power/power endurance, endurance.And I am a complete believer of strebgth/interval and speed work etc. But I’m under the impression that you believe a large majority of elite athletes are “wasting” their time with LSD. Obviously the definition of elite can be skewed, but I think even more, the term LSD can be misunderstood. An elite marathon runner who is say running a 2:15/ 26.2mile race would put them in the 5min mile pace, to most people this would be considered an “elite” time. So to take this particular athlete as an example, what would be too slow of a pace for training and what would be too much distance? Cycling would be an interesting example as well seeing that the bigger of the races are multi-day and each day would consist of 4-6 hrs of work. But then that work gets divided into sprints, climbs, attacks etc. While actual time spent in the pack for most of the race is spent WAY below threshold, so most cyclist train for this by just “being” in the saddle for hours on end. How would you modify the general cyclists regiment? All of this is in theory of course I appreciate the examples given, this is obviously a compelling argument that has been founded on both sides and it most likely won’t end here. Again thanks for the article
Suffice to say you need everything. You can’t do without the strength/power work, you can’t do without speed work, you can’t do without intervals, and you certainly can’t do without the longer rides either.
Starting out as a beginner/lower intermediate (which is what this one was geared towards) is much more beneficial to build a quick adapting base from power/strength, speed work, HIIT, and then modify it for that use. That’s where I’m coming from. From there you maintain with power/strength, speed work, HIIT as the volume of long distance work rises.
As far as getting up in terms of aerobic engine you definitely need a lot of the longer runs. Those that are at that level generally have coaches telling them what to do, so I don’t need to write an article geared towards that. However, I have considered revising this article stating more as such that you do need longer stuff more explicitly as your level rises. I know I said it a couple times, but the tone of the article kind of blocks it out as you may have noticed.
Take a look at Lyle’s stuff (recently had a good series) and then get back to me (or him) if you have further Q’s:
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/category/training/endurance-training
Thanks for clarifying, the link is an amazing read. I guess I’m figuring things backwards than usual coming from a strength/ power-endurance sport into endurance, my base is my weakness so finding information on expanding on something as simple as aerobic output becomes tricky. Thanks again for the reply and the link.
Love the article. I have been a LSD runner for many years with no formal training, but some natural talent and a love for running. In the past year, my interest has peaked on how to get faster. I thought I was to run more. But I started Cross-Fitting and doing more high intensity workouts, coupled with running. I have backed off of my long weekend run, doing more speed work and strength training. My “fear” is that I will lose my cardio-capacity, if my workouts are all short and high-intensity. Sorry, to be repetitive, but do I NEED to keep my long weekend run? Many Crossfitters say “no” but these are mostly runners that have no desire to ever to a marathon or half marathon.
Yes, you need both especially for very long runs like marathons.
Thanks for this article. I would love to see it adapted for cycling – specifically xc mountain bike racing which is generally 1-3 hours of racing.
I have always “base” training because it is boring to me. When I ride – I ride hard and when I need rest – I rest. This year however I am attempting to be more structured by measuring FTP and doing 20 minute intervals @ 90-95% http://ftp…later in the season I will start doing shorter intervals at a greater intensity.
Thanks again