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Full Video Transcript

Introduction: Singles vs. Doubles in Training

should you work out once or twice a day do you need to do doubles even if you’re not an elite athlete today we’re going to take on the age old question of singles versus doubles in training so let’s get into it first I want to start

Personal Running History and Early Training

with a little bit of my history so way back in high school when I was a 4minute Miler and I was really known for running a ton in high school I ran a 100 m a week and my entire senior track season and before I was above 80 m a week every single week until the state meet and track so I ran a ton but if you looked at that mileage my high school coach mostly split it into doubles so even when I was running 100 miles a week which comes out to I don’t know 14 15 miles a day it was 8 and8 or S and seven meaning 7 miles in the morning 7 miles in the afternoon now part of the reason we did this was because at my high school we were limited to running on campus so we could only run essentially a little under a mile and a half Loop tracing around the whole campus and everywhere we could go and that was it so most of us kind of like swimmers got mind-numbingly bored if we just did loop after loop after Loop so we split it meaning we had morning practice where we’d go seven and then or I’d go 7 in afternoon practice where I’d run s on the easy days the second part of it is this allowed I was training in Texas and this often allowed me to get the volume in because if you’ve ever trained in the heat and humidity of Houston Texas let me just tell you the longer you go the more and more it sucks cardiac drift goes up heart rate it is just goes crazy even if you’re running 7 8 Minute miles and slow um it just takes a toll on you so splitting it allowed you to accomplish more now that’s my story and background I want to investigate does that help us should we consider that

The Science Behind Doubles

let’s go down the rabbit hole of some science and history to explore this so first off traditionally when we think of doubling the way it goes is you build up your mileage in singles and then you hit some point where you’re like ah it kind of sucks to run all this miles only in singles I’m going to add some doubles I think that’s the wrong approach to do it I think adding doubles once you’ve gotten to decent mileage misses the point in some of the benefits and we’ll go through that so there’s a

Theories Supporting Doubles

couple different theories on why doubles may work so first off is what I’d call the recovery Theory and it goes like this when we split the Run up it allows us to handle a little bit more so we can accumulate a little bit volume or load intensity as well because we’re splitting the load up yes we’re working out twice a day sometimes but instead of doing 12 miles we get to do eight and four or seven and five it’s a little bit easier because we’re not going all at once which kind of beats up the body a little bit more in terms of pounding you know fatigue Etc and there’s some data on this so let’s consider a couple different factors here is a if you look from a muscle damage standpoint especially if we’re not looking at intense stuff you’ll tend to actually have lower muscle damage when you split it up versus a single long run it makes sense right do a single long run it’s more load at least when I double even if I’m doing the same volume or similar volume I get hours and hours between to kind of restore both the muscle and the glycogen uh so that I start that second row not in a totally depleted state but a slightly more recovered state to keep that volume second off there’s the hormonal theory of this from a recovery standpoint so if you look at recovery hormones like growth hormone in our body what happens is during easy runs you usually get a very quick and heavy uh increase of growth hormone so one study found that from zero to about 40 minutes of easy exercise growth hormone goes up 550% huge bump but then as you go on it still increases but at a much lower rate so for instance from 40 to 60 Minutes another additional 20 minutes you only increase another 40% or so okay the point is if you look at growth hormone which we know plays a role in recovery is you get most of that Bang for your buck early and then it levels off so if you’re doing two 40ish minute runs do you get that growth hormone bump twice which helps recovery versus once and then it comes back down again that’s a little mechanistic we don’t have the research to tell us how or if that impacts things but it’s worth considering because we get the same bump not only in terms of growth hormone but you also think of it as in terms of like blood flow increases movement Etc two shorter runs two bumps in the day can Aid recovery this is why athletes often do like ShakeOut jogs or warm-ups or Etc to kind of help get the blood flowing and and feel a little bit better and change that muscle tension okay that’s Theory number one it allows us to get a little bit more and sometimes even recover a little bit faster F the second theory which kind of goes with it kind of goes against it is what we call the depletion theory meaning that second workout or second easy run is done in a slightly depleted State even if you’ve had hours of recovery maybe your glycogen isn’t fully restored maybe your muscles aren’t fully recovered and when we do that second workout in a slightly depleted state it gives us a incre stimulus which allows us to adapt a little bit more so think of it there was a study a couple years ago that was on oh gosh I think it was cycling don’t quote me on this but what they did is they compared athletes who either did a normal schedule where they went hard easy every other day so hard workout maybe some intervals easy you know cycling then hard workout easy and they just did that once a day every other day and then they compared that to a group that did hard and Easy in the same day and then took the next day off so that they could keep the total volume and load the same so what you’re looking at is something along the lines of doing an easy cycling session in the in the morning and then a harder session in the afternoon so what these researchers did is they had um a group cycle easy in the morning and then come back with a hard workout in the afternoon and what they found after the results of doing this for several weeks is that essentially mitochondria activity and aerobic enzyme activity increased more that did it twice in the same day versus those that did it hard easy the traditional alternating hard and easy now performance Improvement in each group and proved about the same which is important to to note so same results in terms of performance different in terms of like enzimatic um activity increases now what this gets at is there’s a little uh probably a bang for our buck in terms of like training in a slightly depleted state is what they hypothesized it could be a number of other things but that’s tends to be where the science and research goes right now because we’re doubling up the stressor even though it’s separate ated by space if you look at some Modern training and iterations which we’ll talk about in a future episode coming up as you can see this in kind of the Norwegian double threshold model where they do a threshold workout in the morning and afternoon you can see this in kenova’s special block training where he does double workout in the same day now this isn’t easy and hard it’s hard and hard but that can have a similar effect even more so because you’re doing two depleting activities so that second one uh is definitely going to be started in a depleted State all of this is to manipulate the stimulus and adaptation now I’m going to be honest do we have any research that tells us this is better than this no it’s simply really hard to do a and b it hasn’t been done even if you look at at some interesting mice studies it kind of points in the same direction of oh something is happening when we double but we don’t have that clear of a picture and I think that’s where we have to turn to Theory and history so Theory again we can take take the diminished or the depleted and the recovery and combine those together if we’re looking at doubling on two easy runs it allows us to get about the same volume or maybe even more and recover off of it allowing us to consistently get higher volumes of work with often lower injury rates okay why lower injury rates because if we look at the fatigue M mechanisms for overuse injuries like Achilles tendonitis and knee tendonitis stuff and it ban is triggered if we look at overuse by again repetitive use and not having the recovery cycle in line and if we split that double what happens is it puts less of a load and gives that muscle tending unit a little bit of time to bounce back even though you’re working out twice in the same day okay so it allows us to accumulate a little bit more load we still get those hormone boosts Etc we can also look at this from the depletion standpoint which I think is more along the double threshold or the easy run plus the workout and this is where it gets it’s kind of nuanced and complicated but I’m going to simplify it for it when we come to doubles you have

Practical Applications and Recommendations

to ask why are you doing this in the first place if it’s to accumulate a little bit more of an aerobic stressor well taking care of injury or taking care of injury risk you’ll probably want to double up your easy runs if you’re saying hey I need to get more of a stressor and boost out of my harder workouts then we might need to start doing some double thresholds or before that or double workouts before that mixing a easy and a double hard workout meaning just like the study on cyclist where we go either easy in the morning and then hard in the afternoon similar you can do this although I don’t always recommend it but for some marathoners I do you can do something like a long run on a Saturday and then a moderate workout on a Sunday that moderate workout you’re not recovered from the long run so even though it’s not double you’re starting in a depleted state allows you to get some of your bang for your buck for your workout all right so breaking this all to who should double why and when okay let’s start with the novice or beginner or not not even beginner we’ll call it the intermediate athlete double shouldn’t even be a concern until you start you know you’re fit enough to train and here’s where I think doubles play a role so first off if you need to accumulate volume and you have constraints like I did in high school right schedules weather Etc or you have an injury history where volume not frequency is the likely trigger now sometimes there’s only one way to test that this which is to try it but if volume is a frequent trigger meaning every time you get over an hour plus a day you start to get in what I would do add a double in split it down the middle so it’s easy double meaning 30 and 30 instead of a 60-minute run whatever have you what we’re doing there is getting our way to try and accumulate volume in an easier way now for Master’s Runners especially we can even do this with adding cross training right add some cross training in the morning come back with easy running in the afternoon or vice versa depending on your history here allows us to accumulate load the second part is for the easier recovery method for doubles is this as you’re accumulating load you look at your easy days where the goal is not I need to get the long single to get this stimulus such as a long run but your goal is I need to get volume in to keep my aerobic adaptations but recover well that’s a place where you start adding split doubles so for example if you have a schedule where you have a Monday hard workout Thursday hard workout Saturday long run right after that Monday hard workout on Tuesday instead of doing your 12 mile run you might do six and six why because your goal isn’t after the hard workout especially coming off the long run on Saturday after a hard Monday workout it’s just to recover and if you need to maintain the volume but you’re looking at how do I recover and bounce back split the double the other case for doubles is the workout double and I think here this I wouldn’t use for intermediate I wouldn’t use for novices obviously I would save this for advanced Runners who are looking for a way to get a little more bang for their buck and take a slightly riskier shot at adaptation and that’s where we start doing I would start with double easy and hard meaning one easy session one hard and then eventually maybe trying the double threshold double workout model now there you have to be careful meaning making sure going into and out of that you’re recovered because you you can’t dig yourself a hole and not pay that price you got to be able to bounce back I promise future episode double threshold we’re going to go all into it but to

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

summarize here’s here’s kind of my thoughts doubling is typically thought of as an advanced technique that you wait until you run a lot of miles and then you start adding doubles I think that’s wrong I think it’s another way if you have the ability meaning with your life job Etc it’s another way to increase volume in a slightly safer way sometimes because the fatigue mechanics of running prolonged versus twice a little bit shorter okay and when we look at twice a little bit shorter I love more even split than you know odd split meaning like go five and five instead of seven and three why because if the emphasis is recovery the splitting it down the middle maximizes that is it if the emphasis is still getting that longer aerobic stimulus then go for the odd split meaning you know seven and three where one is much longer than the other okay but anyways the point is if you’re trying to figure out how to increase your performance but you keep running into problems of increasing volume I would try the splitting the easy days first with cross trading and then second with runs to see if you can adapt and handle that better it’s a safer way to get volume second part is the hard workout double save that for when you need it don’t go there until you need to go there anger britson goes there because he needs to go there he’s trying to maximize his his time under threshold most of us have not spent enough time doing regular threshold runs to need to get to that part where we double it up but as I said I’ll go through it in a future episode so there you go there’s the Steve Magnus take on doubles versus singles it differs a little bit from the traditional you know Arthur lyard go run as much as you can in singles to maximize that that length but often you know that pushes us to a place where most people can’t handle it now and we have to remember the context of their time and also lard tended to do longer stuff when he was building the capacity vers versus maintaining it when he was maintaining it you know you look at the workouts they’re not quite as long it’s not 100 Mil a week and on in with lots of singles there’s doubles included often easy ShakeOut with a harder workout in there as well so even lards group used doubles if you looked at the American usage of this a lot of the single culture came in with uh running with the buffalos Mark Wetmore at the University of Colorado great approach but they did that to prioritize a they were at altitude and B they were College athletes who found it easier to get you know one workout in per day and then be done so that they could call it for you know going to college and living that life so again sometimes our constraints dictate our training so if you haven’t yet check it out try some double start with cross trading and easy maybe add some workouts in we’ll go into workouts and double thresholds later if

Outro

you enjoy the channel thanks so much for listening check out my new book when the inside game it’s coming out shortly if you pre-order it you get my 100 plus page coaching ebook the principles or elements of coaching which goes into training psychology everything you can imagine on how to run and get better not just running but life um and you get this wonderful book on the mental side of performance and redefining what it means to strive for Success it’s based a lot on my career in uh coaching running and whistleblowing uh so check it out order today thanks for listening we’ll be back next week with another episode of me diving into the science of training endurance and coaching