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Full Video Transcript

Introduction to Easy Training Confusion

There’s a lot of confusion when it comes to easy training. Should we go all in zone two? Should we do zone one? Is venturing into zone 3 the sweet spot or the worst thing that you could do?

Today, we’re going to unravel it, looking at the science, the history, and the practical takeaways to help you become a better endurance athlete. So, let’s start with this.

Purpose of Easy Runs: Recovery vs. Development

What’s the point of easy runs? And I think here sometimes we get the confusion, okay? Because we can delineate this in a number of ways. So sometimes they’re more for recovery, meaning we’re trying to get the blood flow going.

We’re trying to get moving a little bit. We’re trying to make ourselves feel a little bit better for the next hard workout. And sometimes therefore development meaning we are saying we need the easy runs to get all of the central meaning cardiovascular system heart pumping stroke volume all those things up as well as the peripheral mitochondria capillarization basically the delivery of oxygen to the muscles and the takeaway of CO2. We can look at all of those things and say, okay, are we trying to build up something or are we trying to recover?

And I think that’s the first thing. Often we mix those two together. All right, so keep that in mind. Let’s talk

Zone Training Simplified

about if we’re trying to build the thing because the recent hype around like zone two go slow to go fast like these are simplifications of a very kind of complex process. So let’s break it down a little bit. First off, if you’ve watched this channel before, you know that I kind of despise the zone training things. Yes, we need to categorize training, but unfortunately what it does is it makes us think that these are like very distinct physiological zones when they’re not.

They’re more of like a rough rule of thumb that helps us categorize something, but there isn’t a strict delineation between this is zone one, this is zone 2. We just kind of pick some physiological measures sometimes and say, “Hey, this sounds good.” It’s not an onoff switch. It’s more like a a dimmer. So when we talk about zone 2 versus zone one or even zone 3, like [gasps] I think it loses its practicality when we’re talking about easy run and building.

And we’re going to get to why that’s the case. But if we simplify things and say, okay, if we want our easy training or go slow to go fast to help develop our performance, what are we after? We’re after long-term aerobic development. We’re after building the foundation or our aerobic house.

Okay, we’ve got to build a large enough house. And what both science and practice tells us is that lots of relatively easy stuff is the best and safest way to do this over the long haul. Okay, we can shortcut this a little bit. If we do a lot of threshold or intense work, we can still get aerobic development.

But what history and the research tells us is that we’re essentially taking again the shortcut. We’re saying, “Ah, you know what? We could take our time to build a bigger foundation and make sure everything’s right and get the walls right or we could kind of, you know, just prefabricate it and hope it works out.” Okay, so the reason we know this is again twofold, science and history. I want to

Historical Perspectives on Endurance Training

go through the history real quick and then I promise we’re going to get to the practical of how fast should your easy runs be, how long should they be, you know, how long should you have a base. The practical is this is I did a video on the history of endurance training. And what generally happens over the past 100 plus years is we go through this cycle of emphasizing intensity and then emphasizing volume and we just bounce back and forth and correct in over time we generally head towards a happy medium instead of the extremes at the beginning. Early on the during the 1920s we had the flying fins.

The fins dominated distance running most much like the East Africans have in recent years. But what the Fins did is they said, “Hey, we got to build a base. We don’t need just kind of the train for the couple months before the Olympics or what have you. We got to build a foundation before we do the intense stuff.” Now, for Pavo Nurmy and the Fins, it was lots of long walks.

Nurmy loved long walks. He was so diehard about it that years after he’d retired and the f finished runners weren’t as good. He told people it’s because they don’t walk enough anymore. Was he right?

Probably not. But he loved his long walks. And what he realized is that gave him this foundation. Okay.

And from Nurmy, we forgot a little bit of that. We went in the opposite direction with people like Emil Zadipc and others who went heavy into the interval training and not so much of that foundation and they improved. But the next iteration of improvement came from people like Arthur Lyard and Erns Van Aken. Erns Van Aken if he was alive today he’d love the go slow to go fast.

His was run slower to live longer. That was his phrase. He was a doctor in addition to a coach of some elite athletes like Olympic medalist Harold Norpoff who ran 1320 something which was elite and he was essentially hey lots of really slow stuff and spices of fast work will get us there. Lyard took kind of a more combination approach.

He said what I noticed is that just like Nurmy if we do a long foundation of lots of easy we’re able to take on more of that hard stuff. So what we see is Lyard said, “Hey, we need a long block of marathon training.” He called it, okay, before we go into hills and bounding and then really sharpening up with some intense work. If we have a big base, the sharp work pays off. He didn’t say, “Don’t do the intense stuff.” He said, in fact, in his early schedule, he said do five days a week of intense stuff.

He said the big bass is going to benefit from it. And that revolutionized training. And ever since then we’ve essentially even the intense the people love intensity acknowledged we need a big foundation or base. So historically what we’ve done is we’ve moved towards foundation matters.

Now that foundation has switched a little bit but it still matters. And if you

Modern Science and Training Adaptations

look at the research what it tells us is actually one of Lydiard’s fame disciples Peter Snell became exercise physiologist and looked at this. He said, “Why does lots of slow or longer easy runs like or steady easy runs help us so much?” And he found again the science just changed a little bit. But his initial finding was like, “Oh, as we run longer and easier, the muscle fiber recruitment changes a little bit. we start utilizing glycogen from our fast twitch fibers and like we’re recruiting them and they’re getting trained a little bit when normally they only get trained when we’re doing fast stuff.

So it if we go long enough especially the long runs that Lydia had emphasized we get this aerobic boost to not just our slow twitch fibers but we try to start bringing in our our intermediate fibers and then eventually our fast twitch fibers to carry the load as the others get fatigued. It’s still a good way to think about it. It’s not entirely accurate because there’s some shuttling of fuel source that comes from the fast twitch fibers to help essentially relieve the slow twitch fibers, but it’s still a a helpful way to think about it. He also Snell and others at the time also found that things like capillarization incur that improve.

Think of it as like we’re building more roads to the muscles themselves to deliver and extract things. So we have more paths versus just like a single highway to get to that that spot so we can exchange more goods. Modern science backs this up to a large degree. What it tends to show is that more intense work tends to get us gains aerobically really quickly, but over the long haul those level off in the easy to steady aerobic stuff almost has a shallower improvement initially, but it keeps going and it keeps going.

Okay. So, what we know is that aerobic training helps us over the long haul. There’s also research that shows that if we sequence training and we have an aerobic base first and then add intensity just like Lydia did, we tend to get better performance boosts and physiological adaptations versus if we don’t or we go the opposite direction. We go intensity then endurance.

The sequencing matters. There was a study in the 2000s that I cited in my book science of running that covered this really well. It’s one of the few studies that looked at periodization and and the aerobic base, but it validated Lydiard’s idea. Build the foundation and then develop it.

Okay. Modern training when we look at coaches like Rnado Kenova have added a little wrinkle to this. Okay. There’s this wonderful quote from Kenova.

I’m going to read it here where he said during the first 5 years of career every athlete must continue to increase the volume. Okay. After that period, he reduces the volume, cutting slow runs of regeneration, maintaining or increasing the specific volume in order to preserve the structure because too many kilometers or miles when you have an aerobic house are useless under metabolic point of view and damages under mechanical point of view. What does that mean?

Now we get to the nuance of practicality. What Kenova is saying is you got to build your foundation just like Lydiard said. But at some point that foundation is going to be so big that house you’re going to have enough rooms in it that you have to start filling it with stuff and keep building and building and building more space. more space eventually makes it where you’re losing efficiency and you’re essentially saying, you know what, we’re going to take more risk here because we can’t.

The weak link in the chain has changed. And this gets to the important part here. When it comes to easy running or easy volume, it depends on the weak link in the chain. Most people, especially noviceses and amateurs, their weak link is almost always the aerobic system.

They come in with, you know, often decent enough speed to hit their goals, but they don’t have that aerobic foundation. When we look at professionals, at some point that switches where you’re like, “Hey, you got a lot of easy volume behind you. You need to start adding some intensity.” And sometimes that’s high-end aerobic like threshold. Sometimes it’s more intense stuff, but like the weak link in the chain has changed.

The other part of it is the weak link in the chain for an amateur or novice is often when it comes to adding that volume is often the mechanical structure which gets in the way. Meaning yes we could add more volume but we don’t have the time or recoverability to be able to handle that in a sport of running. This is why if you look at the total volumes of runners versus cyclists versus swimmers hours spent training swimmers cyclists generally train more because running becomes is limited by the mechanical load especially for noviceses. So what does all this mean?

Okay, let’s get to the practicality.

Practical Guidelines for Easy Running

When it comes to easy volume, what you want to do is think of what level am I at? Where is my l weak link in the chain? Is it general aerobic fitness? Is it mechanical?

Is it what you know speed? Whatever it is and what are the constraints I have? So time commitment, recoverability, you know, all of these things, what are the limits that I have? And what that does is that targets what kind of easy training you would do.

In an ideal world, we do what Kenova said, meaning we increase the volume for several years. Well, yes, of course, adding intensity to compete, but the idea is during our aerobic phase, we increase the volume for years until we get to a point where it’s like, okay, volume is no longer the limiting factor to our performance. But for amateurs or even sub elite athletes, often the constraint is not how much volume I can handle, it’s life that gets in the way and recoverability of that volume where we can’t handle it without getting injured. So the reality is what do we do in that case?

We go from not just having easy aerobic volume where it’s easy talking all that stuff. We bring in a little bit of safe shortcut. This is the marathon pace, the high-end threshold work. What we’re saying is, hey, I can’t run 100 miles a week.

Like Lyd said, I can’t run 80. So, in order to build that aerobic foundation, maybe if I’m doing 40 to 50 miles a week, I’m going to have a good amount slow, but I’m also going to bring in more high-end aerobic. When I say high-end aerobic, I mean marathon pace, steady work, threshold work. We can talk about it, zone 3, whatever you want to call it.

But we’re saying, hey, we’re gonna we’re gonna we’re gonna boost this a little bit knowing and given I can’t get the amount of volume in order to max out like Konova suggests, it’s a little bit of a tradeoff. Okay, so here’s how I want you to think about it. In an ideal world, we would do lots of easy and then just naturally that lots of easy would turn into some steady. And then as we get fitter, because we can handle the steady without pushing too far, we add in some threshold type workouts where we’re like, okay, we’re going to be highend aerobic and ride that line.

And we’ve got a big foundation behind us, so we can ride that line without like it being too dangerous. In a non idealized world, what happens is we say, “Hey, we need lots of easy and that could be walking, walk, jog, go celebrate Nurmy at the beginning.” But the key is full conversations until our aerobic base is big enough where we can start handling some little bit of steady, maybe not optimal, but steady or threshold type work. And we use that to kind of say, okay, let’s boost the aerobic system even if we don’t have the size of the house, as many rooms as we want. Okay, this is why even if you look at elite athletes, sometimes those who are lower volume, running 60 to 70 miles a week instead of 100 for a half marathon or 10k or marathon or what have you, is the ones who run a little bit shorter volume often have a little bit more density of steady work in there.

This is again, if we look at the amateur level, why the Norwegian singles method, which I’ve covered in the past, has taken off. because they’re saying, “Hey, I don’t have the capacity to handle the volume requirements, so I’m going to try and take some short circuit here.” Okay, so that’s what we’re looking at. It’s a trade-off. It’s not necessarily that zone one is better than zone 2 or zone 3 or what have you.

Is you’re looking at the tradeoffs. Now, here’s what I’ll say. The more you go, the faster you go, the little bit more risky you are because you’re delving into intensities which require more recoverability. With easy running, you generally bounce back pretty quick.

Once we get into steady or marathon pace or threshold work, it takes a little bit longer to bounce back. Even if we control it or lactate test or split it into intervals or what have you, it takes more to bounce back. We ride that line a little bit. So with whatever your choice is given your situation, you just have to consider the riskreward.

Okay, that’s number one. Now the other an the other question I often get is okay Steve I got it like zone one, zone two, zone three, it’s like a riskreward. We ideally would want want some easy whether that’s zone one and zone two to develop aerobically but sometimes we have to say hey I can’t get the volume necessary so I’m going to have to take a little bit of a safe shortcut okay how far and how much okay it depends what we do know is when it comes to easy running there’s not exactly a threshold but you generally need about 25 to 30 minutes to get some sort of benefit right? Long enough to create some sort of like stimulus.

Ideal world, I would say most easy runs are 45 to 60 minutes with some longer efforts in order to take advantage of that Peter Snell effect of recruiting some more intermediate tra fibers, fast fibers, all of those good things. Okay? Again, think of it as longer we go, the more we create a little bit more of a new stimulus because we’ve got to take up care of fatigue and all that stuff. And we do that.

Okay, ideally again working up to about 50 to 60 minutes, 45 to 60 minutes for most easy runs and then having one or two longer sessions to push that up to get that aptation if you want to. With amateurs, I often suggest, you know, getting in. If you’re getting up to 45 to 60 and you want to increase volume a little bit more, then we bring in some either cross trainining or short doubles or something like that because it’s a little bit easier on the load than to just go longer singles all the time. The

Balancing Volume, Intensity, and Recovery

last part I’ll say on the easy training thing is going back to the beginning, we talked about building versus recovery. At some point, like as Kenova pointed out, lots of easy stops becoming like a central stimulus to keep adapting aerobically. You’ve kind of tapped that out. You’ve got to maintain it.

This is why if you look at elite athletes, they often build volume for several years and then they can drop it down a little bit and say, “Okay, I’ve built the volume for long enough. I’ve got that. Let’s stop running 120 a week. We’ll go 100 a week and add some intensity somewhere else.” Okay, at some point those easy runs become a little bit more recovery.

And what I mean by that is you’re maintaining the aerobic system and you’re enhancing recovery a little bit. In those case, the paces matter even less. This is why you see some elite East Africans or even some elite Americans who run really slow on some recovery runs. We’re talking 210 marathoners who run like 8 9 minute pace on their their recovery ends.

Why? Because the stimulus matters a little bit less when it comes to easy training. This is where you throw the zone two, zone one out the window. It’s like, no, just get in enough to maintain, but also you switch the emphasis to the hard workouts more so.

So whether it’s seven minute pace, 8 minute pace, it doesn’t matter as much for an amateur where you’re in building phase matters a little bit more. But again, you want to make sure that you should you can bounce back from your easy runs and keep doing them and doing them. One of the clear signs that you’re doing them too fast is when during a phase where it’s mostly easy runs, like you’re starting to accumulate fatigue. No, you got to bounce back.

You got to, you know, take it down a notch. All right. So, we’ve gone through a lot. So, what in the

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

world does this mean to me? Accumulate as much easy run as possible given the constraints. And that includes mechanical because we talked a lot about physiology. But part of the point of easy running is to adapt mechanically getting your muscles, tendons, all of that prepared to handle the load.

Okay. So as much easy running given those constraints mechanically and your life, right? And what I mean by life is like how much time do you have to devote to this? How recovered are you going to be given your life and job and family commitments and that the more time constraints the more you can look at okay I’m going to have to take a little bit of a safe shortcut which might mean you say hey these easy runs once I’m adapted I’m going to make them some of them a little bit more steady and push those a little bit while I get a little bit more bang for my buck honestly this is what I often do I’m no I’m running like 35 miles a week just having some fun, right?

So, what does that mean? Sometimes my easy runs become a little bit more steady versus when I was running 70, 80, 90, 100 miles a week when they’re mostly relatively easy. Because at 35 miles a week, I know, hey, I can get a little bit more bang for my buck and dig a little bit more into fatigue during the easy stuff because I don’t have the volume pushing me or the volume contributing to that fatigue to recover from. So, it’s this this push and pull.

Again, this is why you see often low mileage athletes like a Sebastian Co was like run six minute pace or relatively fast on their easy runs versus a high volume athlete maybe even like a Kip Jo often starts really freaking slow on their easy recovery runs. Okay, it’s this interplay between like volume, time, intensity, and what you have to give. This is why again there’s no magic about zone two. There’s no magic about zone one.

There’s not even magic about zone 3. We want to interplay between those. And where you fall exactly is going to depend on those constraints that determine, hey, how how much do I need to push this? What are how long do I have to build this base?

How much time do I have to build this base? Identify where you are and keep in mind that no matter what we’re doing, we need that foundation. That foundation can be built through lots of steady. It can be built through lots of easy.

It can be built through a mix as I’ve shown in other videos. It can even be built through aerobic intervals like iglooy often did which I’ve covered in the past and I’ll cover more in depth in the future. So hopefully that gives you some insight that’s helpful. Until next time, subscribe, share, like.

I appreciate all of you for taking the time to join me on this nerding out of running physiology and science. All right, everyone. Till next time, keep on