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Full Video Transcript

Introduction to PhD-Level Workout Design

Today I’m going to give you a master class, a PhD level of workout design and development, specifically on periodizing your training and how the workouts come together. So, this is going to be a little bit of science, but more so art. This is like the behind the scenes. Promise you, you’re going to enjoy it or just nerd out on it.

So, here we go.

Understanding the Athlete and Event

First up, before we get to this point, you’ve got to know the athlete in front of you and the event that they’re training for. Those two factors come together and tell us how do we organize the training, right? They tell us what’s our goal, what are we looking at, what is the physiology of the person coming to it. Are they more fast twitch or slow torch oriented?

I’ve given videos on this stuff in the past. I’ll do more in the future, but we’ve got to know where we’re headed by looking at the event and the athlete sitting in front of us. Once we do that and we have an idea of where the map’s pointing, then I like to start

Mapping Out the Training Plan

with developing stepping stones. Okay? And what I mean by that is mapping out how I’m going to progress workouts and how they’re all going to fit together. This isn’t going to precisely me out all of the workouts they’re going to do.

This is so I could see how it fits and then along the way I adjust as I go. So, let’s go down to the sheet of paper here. So, here’s how I set it up. I start with putting my specific race distance in the middle.

So, for this example, we’ll go 5k. It sits front

Aerobic and Speed Support

and center. And then above that, I start with above is aerobic side, endurance, below is speed side. Okay, this framing will help. And then from the aerobic side, what we have on this far corner is what I’d call direct support.

Okay? So this is the closest aerobic side that we can get. It’s for a 5k. We might say that’s 10k pace.

This is all plus or minus over here. Then we’ll go with um our aerobic support. So it’s not as direct. This is more so if that’s 10k this is probably lactate threshold.

And then over here on the far side we have like our general aerobic support. This is everything from like steady to slow, right? Everything up. So steady marathon paceish um to slow.

Okay. So you can see from most specific to least. And then we do the same thing on the bottom here. we go this is our direct speed or anorobic support.

Okay. So for in this case 5k this would be like 3k pace stuff. This is our anorobic support. So here I like to combine a little bit and say h it’s roughly like 1500 to like 800ish pace.

And then over here is our general which in this case we’d call like pure speed. So this is like sprints to 400. Okay. And then so what we have here is we have kind of our classification of like okay how do these all fit together?

This is the key. This is what we’re building towards that specificity those key workouts. And then everything else is supporting it in some way. We could also see this as like a a triangle where at the top is our specific and then on each side of the Christmas tree or triangle we go down a layer down a layer down a layer both on the speed and on the different support.

And we can see they they have to like uh fit together. You can’t do uh 6×800 at 230 if you know your 10 400s is are only in 73 or slightly faster or on the flip side if your 4 by mile is you know at 530 or something like that and not anywhere close. So we have to have that support and what I’m imagining here as I’m doing this is saying okay how do we build and connect these things in? So, I’m going to try and do this mostly on the fly here, but let’s let’s see what we have.

So, specific, how do we want to build this? Generally, when I look at specific

Building Specific Workouts

workouts, I say, “Okay, I want to build this in two different directions.” Okay, depending on the athlete. What do I mean by that? In my past workout progression video, I said, “Hey, we could progress the speed, the distance, the rep length, the recovery, all these things.” I generally choose two based on the athlete sitting in front of me. What do I choose?

based on what do I think’s going to help them. Okay, that’s a longer coaching conversation, but it’s like, do they struggle extending their ability to last at that pace? Do they struggle with the pace itself? Do they struggle with the endurance?

Do they need more volume of it? You got to look at their individual in front of you and see. In this case, what we’re going to kind of combine here is uh what I’d call like a a bottom up approach plus I’ll call like a blended um top down. Okay.

So, what I mean by that is

Combining Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches

this is a bottom up approach means that we’re going to um we’re going to start shorter and sometimes a little bit faster and then build it up. So, for instance, okay, if we’ve got a bottom up approach and I’ve got a 5K, a lot of times what I’ll also do is, you know, say, hey, where am I trying to end up at for this? Maybe it’s four by mile or something similar to that. But here’s how I’m going to do it.

Okay, bottom up approach. So, let’s start with 400s. We might say, “Hey, we’re going to do uh four to five sets.” You know what? Let’s do five sets.

Five sets of four by 400 with short rest way maybe a minute, maybe less at 5k pace or a little bit faster at 5k pace. Okay, great. That’s our first workout. And then we say, okay, next time we’re going to do four by uh four sets of 4 by 600.

So we’ve taken off set, you know, similar rest, similar pace. Okay, we’re going to keep it simple here, 4×600, but we’ve lengthen the rep. And then the next time we might say, hey, we’re going to do three sets of 3x 800. And this time maybe we go a little bit faster.

Like instead of a date 5k pace, we go towards goal 5k pace. Or we’re cranking it down just a little bit. And then I might say, okay, that’s great. We might do two sets of 1,200, 800, 600.

And what we’re doing here is we’re taking away the set distance, right? Or set number so that we can create more density in the workouts. it itself if that makes sense. Okay.

And I get we’re going down here in volume but generally while we’re doing that is we’re increasing the intensity to get more specific more at their goal pace etc etc. I’m just not including it all

Progressing Through Workout Phases

here. Now on the blended top down we might say okay great. We’re not going to start with the race pace that we want to or around that. We’re going to start a little bit slower but have the volume be there.

So, we might start with a 5 by mile at maybe just faster than 10k pace. So, kind of just faster than that. It gives us the distance, but we’re not at the 5k pace down. Now, what we might say here is we could say, okay, we’re just going to get those mile repeats faster and faster and faster.

But for this athlete, I said, you know what? We’re going to do um kind of a blend here so that we can work at not only getting the pace faster, but racing. So now we’re going to do four by mile 400 with short rest in between. Let’s say 1 minute rest and then three after just to give you some numbers.

And this is going to be at that just faster than 10k. But that 400’s going to be at 3k pace. Okay. Why?

We’re getting all working on changing the gears and going back and forth. And then next next we might say let’s do 4 by 1200 400. And this time instead of like just faster than 10k pace, we might say, “Hey, got to do 5k pace or just slower than 5k pace and 3k pace.” And then we might say, “Okay, we’ve gotten to this point 5k 3k. We’re blending it together.” We might do a traditional 4x mile goal 5k and then blend it both together with saying like, uh, we’re going to do 4 by one mile 300.

We’re doing 5k 300 at 3k maybe even mile pace faster here. So what we have here is we’re generally again depending on the training as you’re alternating. So one of these a week then the next week this next week this or the next 10 days however frequently you’re doing them depending on your training plan. Again I’m just giving you idea.

So we’ve got our specific here. Now we’re going to look at okay how do we connect this up and see how it all fits together. So up here

Connecting Aerobic and Speed Work

as I say, okay, I’ve got to support this. I’ve already got this four five by mile here essentially at 10k plus pace. How do I get to where I can handle that? I could do it and say, hey, we’re going to do 6 by mile, 6 by mile, a little faster, then 5 by mile, a little faster till we get to this point.

Perfectly reasonable for this. I’m going to give you another example where I say, okay, I’m going to take an alternation approach. And on support systems, I don’t build it in two ways because we don’t have that many workouts. I tend to build it in one direction.

What do I mean by that? You choose one of these bottom up, top down, alternation. And you say, “Okay, I’m going to use this.” And the reason I’m going to use alternation is because I want to connect it with the threshold training over here. So, here’s what I’m going to do here is I’m going to say, “Hey, we’re going to do um you know, five cycles of let’s say 400 at 10k pace straight into 1,200 at marathon pace, okay?

Or around there, you know, steady.” You say, “Okay, well, this is a higherobic workout because there’s only a little bit.” And during these alternations, this is continuous. So there is no break. There is no rest. Your rest is 1,200 at marathon pace.

So it’s really hard aerobically workout, which is the point on building this direct support. And then the next time I might say 600 at 10k and then 1k at marathon. Then I might say 800 at, you know, 10k, 800 at marathon pace. I’d say, okay, we’re going to really crank this 1k and then 600.

I might say five all the way down. Maybe this goes down to four, whatever we want to do it, but something along that lines. And this is a really specific 10k workout, right? For a 10k runner, this is hard.

Okay, once we get beyond the split half and half, there’s not much recovery during the 600 because it’s still hard. Um, this workout sucks. So, here we get to the point of like, okay, we built it. And then I might say, okay, I built it with alternations.

Let’s top it off with like six by mile at 10k pace or five depending on the athlete at 10k pace. And what we’ve done here is we’ve kind of like bridged this where we’ve kind of built this up, you know, to where you can handle this. And I might even not include this. So I might jump straight towards, you know, say, hey, we’re in a good spot somewhere in here.

We’re going to use this as one of these workouts to kind of direct support transition down. So I might insert it in the paragration like right here, if that makes sense. So, what you have is you have, you know, we’re trying to build up the support and about halfway through this, you might start some of the specific work with this one right here because we’re building this support to where now we can handle this and then jump down and jump down cuz we might say we might actually use these first two like if we were to map out the season, we might say, “Hey, you know, once we get to here, we’re going to do five by mile, you know, as our specific intro.” And then once we get down to 8 after 88 or maybe after we might say 4 by 1 mile 400 and then we get here and then the rest if we ever do any of these workouts is just support which means like we’ll combo it up with stuff. Okay, which we’ll come back to.

Okay, so great. We looked at that. Now if we look at we’re

General Aerobic Work and Base Phase

going to keep this simple so because it’s dragging on is okay. How do we build up our aerobic sport? Well, it might start with like steady runs with like a fast finish. So, you know, informal stuff and then we might say, “Okay, great.

We’re going to spend um 15 minutes at lactate threshold and then next one 20 minutes at lactate threshold and then next one we’re going to say, you know what, we’re going to split it up. We’re going to do 10 105 at threshold. So we get 25 minutes and then maybe it’s um you know 15 10 5 once we get up to like 2530 you don’t need it as much. So now I might like transition and say, “Hey, we’re going to go uh 1510 at threshold plus 5 minutes at, you know, what we call critical velocity or like 10k minus, meaning just a little slower.

And you can see here how we’re supporting and then transitioning towards like supporting that stuff. And eventually, same here is this moves from during the base phase as like being the thing to eventually it being like support and now we could use support where we’re maintaining these two things like I said over here. So maybe now it’s like 20 minutes threshold plus two by five minutes at 10k becomes like your support workout or something similar. Support just means like we’re maintaining those things once we built them up.

general aerobic work. I’m not going to I mean essentially you look at mileage, then you look at um steady work, then you look at like, hey, do I want to do some sort of like marathon pace work? Since it’s general, we don’t have to get crazy. This could be a progression run, right?

And we said could say, hey, we’re going to do a progression run where the first time it’s uh you know, 10 mile run with the last five miles progress. And then we could say, you know, maybe the next time it’s in our long run and it’s 12 miles with the last six miles. You don’t have to go crazy here, but this is just like to support and give you the foundation for this. All right, let’s go the other way.

And sorry, the last thing I’ll say on this is what you’re generally looking at is this is more during your like pure base. This is during your like transitioning towards like base plus stuff, okay? Where we’re starting to build things. This is your like uh your support, you know, pre-ompetition phase where you’re really emphasizing this.

And then this is your specific phase. Now, you’re doing things blended. So, it’s not like I wait till my spec specific phase to start these things, right? I might start the 5 by mile or even the 400s because they’re not that stressed during the pre-ompetition phase.

So, I’m setting the stage to work towards where the latter half of the specific phase I’m nailing these last couple workouts during the last 6 weeks or so of training. Same thing goes over here. Okay, during the base, we’ll start in reverse order. During the base phase, what am I doing?

Mileage, steady, maybe some progressions. And on the other side, I’m doing strides, right, and pickups to set me up. And then I might go through a a progression of saying, you know what, I’m going to do six by short hill sprints. So, uh maybe 8 seconds in length and then maybe I’m doing seven and then maybe I get up to eight.

And generally I would do like easy run maybe like four or five miles depending on the athlete. That’s high level and then hill sprints and then a couple mile cool down. Maybe we get up to eight and we say, “Great.” Like, we’ve done eight. Now we’re going to do six short hill sprints plus, you know, two to three times 30 seconds longer hills at slightly slower, which guess what connects here.

And then maybe eventually like we do some other stuff. Sometimes some flat sprints, but it’s not a middle distance runner. Maybe we stay away from flat sprints, but that’s always an option. But so what we have here is during our base, we’re building up our hill sprints and our general ability.

And then at some point we say, okay, we’ve got to connect this over here to where we’re getting the support, right, to be able to extend this out. So we might say, hey, we’re going to do a full set of like 68 by 30 second hills, right, at mile pace. And then we might say, hey, we’re going to do some maintenance hills or some maintenance or cruise rhythm 200. So maybe it’s like a 12 by 200 at mile pace with 200 jog.

We might say, hey, we’re going to go up to 16 or two sets of eight. And all we’re doing is setting the stage here, okay? because it’s not like we don’t need the deep anorobic work of like cranking out mile pace especially early on. We’re trying to bridge that gap.

Now eventually we might if we really need to sharpen up for this athlete to kind of bridge that gap, give them a gap between their mile and their 3k and their 5k. If that’s the case, we take it further. We could say, “Okay, we’re going to do instead of uh 16 1200s, we’re going to do um you know 10×300.” And then we might say, “Okay, great. We’ve done 10×300 and we’re going to do uh three sets of 4×400 at mile pace.

If you wanted to blend some 800 stuff in there because we said we needed the sharpening, we might do uh sets of uh let’s go three sets of four four three or it’s mile and this is 800 pace. We have longer rest between sets. You get the idea. Anyways, then that brings us to like our support, our kind of 3K pace stuff.

And here, what we’re looking at is saying, “Hey, we just need enough gap to give us the ability to run 5K pace relatively comfortably.” So, what I like to do here is in this case, I’d probably work from the bottom up. And I’d say, great, we’ve done 200s at some point around here. We’ve done 200s at mile pace. So, now we’re going to do um three.

Uh let’s say let’s say uh 300’s at 3k pace. So let’s say uh 12×300 at 3k pace or sets of them. And then we might say we’re going to do a combo of uh 4 3 2 1. Can’t do math off the top of my head.

So maybe three sets of that or four sets at 3K pace. Then I might say, “Okay, great. We’re going to do, you know, um 600s, 300s, 200s at 3K pace. Maybe three sets of those.” And then we get to, you know, something more classic where we say, “Okay, we’re going to do 6 by 800 at 3k pace.” That really sets us up.

Okay. And once we can do that, we’re really ready to go. Okay. And maybe that branches into this workout over here as these tend to work well together.

Meaning like this sets us up to be able to handle those 800s at 5k pace. And all right, so you can see how the mess comes together. And oh boy, this is PhD level. But all along the way, just as up here, as this stuff goes into support, so does this stuff down here.

So support, we might have like, hey, we’re going to do rhythm work again. So this is why maybe the week of the race, we just do like 12 to 16 or 20 by 200 at 3k down to mile pace. Sometimes it’s it’s doing, you know, um it’s doing a fartlick on the road or grass of like 60 45 30 going from 3k to mile. The key to support work is it’s about 60 to 70% of what I’d call like total stress or volume.

Okay. So it’s easier to maintain something to build instead of build it because so these become like the secondary workouts of the training cycle instead of like when we’re emphasizing this. So there you go. That’s how I kind of look at

Final Thoughts and Coaching Philosophy

training and map it out before coaching an athlete. And the point isn’t to exactly follow all of these progressions, but instead to give me kind of a map to understand, okay, where am I trying to go? How do I think I should get there? How do these things support and link up with one another and like integrate with one another?

And that gives me this map to compare to as we’re progressing along. And I’ll often like change things, aboard sessions, go a different direction. But I do that knowing that like here was the first goal. Here’s how I saw these things coming together.

And if the feedback on the track or road or cross country is telling me, no, no, this is the weak link here. We have to emphasize this and maintain this or like, yeah, yeah, we thought about going up from the bottom up, but there’s but they don’t need to work on extension. we need to like work on the the speed gap there or something else like that. That’s how I see it as a coach.

If I’m batting pretty good, I’m going to hit 80% of these workouts, maybe 70 80%. If I’m not, you know, bad job predicting. So, there you go. Hopefully, this didn’t leave you confused, but instead gave you some insight in what it’s like behind the scenes to kind of do artistic side of mapping out the workouts.

If you enjoy this stuff, please let me know. If it’s over your head and you want Steve just explain how to how to increase our long run or do something else, don’t worry. I’m going to keep that content coming. My goal here is to kind of balance between, you know, beginner, novice, intermediate, serious, amateur, and elite of the elite so that you can kind of see the the behind the scenes because I think in coaching, we often miss that.

We kind of dumb things down and don’t explain the behind the scenes uh too much. And my job, just like when I wrote The Science of Running years ago, was I put that book out because like I felt like there was a need in the market instead of just a paint by numbers book. I wanted to explain things. And that’s what this channel’s about.

So, we’re going to go deep sometimes and we’re going to nerd out. And you’re going to look at this and be like, “Steve, what in the world are you thinking? Does this do you need to this? Someone’s going to tell me I’m over complicating things, but this is my artistic process so that I can take what’s in my brain and put it on the paper so that I can have some sort of creativity and idea of where in the world we’re going and how we fit it all together.

So, if you liked

Conclusion and Additional Resources

it, subscribe, join, comment, tell me all the things. Till next time, everybody. Thank you. Check out my work.

I also put a guide in this one as well so that if you’re deeply confused, tried to simplify it a little bit so you can see where I’m coming from and where to start to go on this process. So check that out. It’s in the in the notes below. Thanks for watching.

Take care of them.