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Full Video Transcript

Introduction to Non-Specific Lactate Work (NSLW)

Here’s a training method that very few people do, but is a gamecher. Non-specific lactate work. What in the world is this? Well, I’m going to be like every influencer known to man and create my own name and then acronym.

We’ll call it NSLW, non-specific lactate work. Just kidding. So, here’s the problem it

The Problem with Balancing Aerobic and Anaerobic Training

solves. Okay. Generally, when we look at speed and endurance or aerobic or anorobic, we’re going to simplify things a little bit. But what we’ve known for a really long time is there’s a contrast in a balance there.

So, think of it like a seessaw. If we go too much aerobic, it harms our anorobic system just a little bit. Or opposite, if we start doing all sorts of fast anorobic stuff, what happens is it harms our aerobic system. This is the genius of Arthur Lyard, what he kind of figured out years ago.

And then what modern research, again I’m simplifying, shows is that this balance between enzymes that push towards our aerobic system and enzymes that push towards like anorobic, they can counterbalance or counteract each other. So we end up in a mess. And in simplistic terms, it’s what every coach has faced before, which is you do too much speed work too fast, too soon, and athletes peak early and then have nothing left because their aerobic system degrades. Or on the flip side, you take that middle distance star, you say, “A, I’m going to get them really strong in terms of endurance, and all of a sudden, they lose their ability to sprint or have speed, and then b tolerate things and have speed endurance.

It plummets.” That 800 fast guy is now a not so fast guy. And that’s why the balance is what matters. But there’s an in between solution to this and that is

Understanding Non-Specific Lactate Work

non-specific lactate work. What happens here? What is this? It is when we do workouts that create higher lactate levels.

Again, lactate isn’t the enemy, but it’s a surrogate marker for it because it occurs at the same time as things like acidosis, hydrogen ion accumulation, other things that contribute to actual fatigue. So, what it allows us to do is get work in that has higher lactate levels. And generally when we do work that is higher lactate levels we get more of that anorobic enzymes less of the aerobic we shift that seessaw balance and over time our aerobic system degrades a little bit. But what non-specific does is it allows us to get the some of the benefits of hyrolactate levels without as many of the drawbacks.

So we don’t shift that seessaw. Why? Well for a simple reason. What we’re going to do in this work is essentially have our muscle fibers that are generally not normally used or recruited in that way produce the lactate or the muscles that generally aren’t recruited in the same way produce the lactate.

And what happens is we get more of a general high lactate response but not in the specific intermediate fibers that are normally powering our faster running. Now this is key because what happens here is when we look at these enzyatic changes they’re at the muscular level. So what happens is we’re able to get some of the benefits of higher lactate without the drawbacks. So think of it like this.

Okay. If I go, we’re going to pull extreme thing here. If I go lift some weights, relatively heavy, but not too heavy, lots of reps until we get local muscle failure. If we were to look in that muscle, lactate levels would be relatively high.

And then if we were to look at the blood, they’d start increase a little bit. Why? Because they were high in the muscle. Some of that would get shuttled to the blood and our blood lactate levels would go up.

But when we’re just bench pressing or lifting with our arms, like our legs aren’t feeling that. And what research tells us from Brook’s lactate shuttle is generally what happens is the lactate producing muscles spit it out into the bloodstream and then some of that lactate is taken up by muscle fibers that are not producing lactate. So those muscles get used to a dealing with absorbing using that as energy for lactate shuttle or clearing it out without feeling the acidity themselves. All right.

Now let’s

Practical Applications and Examples of NSLW

take it from the extreme of maybe from arms to legs and think of okay what does this mean in the real world? What does this means is a couple things. Think of hills. Think of circuits.

Think of uphill circuits. Think of lifting routines with running after all of those do is change the muscle recruitment enough. Some big time like the lifting bench press versus running. Some a little bit such as running uphill, you shift the fiber recruitment, you shift the muscle recruitment slightly depending on the steepness of the hill.

Right? But what we’re doing is is shifting that fiber recruitment, shifting the production of lactate a little bit from the muscular level. And that’s why I call it non-specific lactate work. And we’ve known this for a really long time.

If

Historical Context and Training Insights

you go back and you look at Lydiard’s original schedules and training, what did he do after the base phase? He didn’t jump into okay, it’s track phase. He had a hill phase. And that hill phase often consisted of circuits.

Circuits where you would run somewhat hard uphill, do some essentially near sprints at the top of the hill and then go really fast downhill. Sometimes I think Snell and others reported running 800 meters downhill in sub 2 minutes for part of this. Okay. And rest and repeat.

Sometimes sprints at the wind like I think they called them wind sprints at the bottom of the hill repeat. Okay. Other times Liard had circuits where they do bounding up a hill. Again a bigger change in muscle fiber recruitment and then some of the wind sprints or other things often included as well.

What do we got here? We’ve got this bridge of the gap between his specific phase and his endurance phase where he’s essentially saying, “Hey, we can build some strength endurance that is not quite specific but allows us to start bridging that gap. It’s non-specific lactate work because the hill shifts and changes things. It’s why Steve Scott, the former American record holder in the mile during his base phase or pre-ompetition phase, often included 20 by 200, hard up the hill, jog down it.

Why? Because the famous quote that everyone says, I forget the originator, but hills are speedwork in disguise. And the benefit of them is yes, if you do too many, sure, you could shift that balance a little bit, peak early, but we know what we know from practice is it takes way more of doing those hills than doing the same kind of work on the track because it’s non-specific. So, think of it as hills allow us to sneak in some of this quote unquote anorobic stuff.

whether you’re doing again I hate the terms aerobic and anorobic but I’m using it not scientifically but generally to show like high intensity building some lactate above the lactate threshold acidosis etc versus just purely aerobic lactate levels low. So you get the idea. But what that does is it allows us to get some of this work without a major shift in that speed and endurance balance without saying, “Oh my gosh, we got to get all these anorobic enzymes and like, hey, forget about this aerobics enzymes. Our endurance is going to drain a little bit.” This is why just about every program uses hills as a early transition.

Okay, great. Hills work. What else is there? Well, one of

Canova Style Hill Circuits

the things that very few people do are what I’d call a Kova style hill circuit. So, Kenova has these wonderful hill circuits where you vary the length and distance, but what they do is they intersperse running, sometimes hard running, with some sort of drill or exercise. So for instance, a extensive strength resistant workout circuit for Kenova that he gave an example of is 900 m uphill, okay? Followed by 700 m flat, the gradient 710%.

300 m fast uphill running, okay? So you’re running hard and then you stop, you do 10 squat jumps and then 60 m near sprint and then 20 m skipping with strides. So bounding skippings, then 200 m moderate up the hill, 20 m heel to butt exercise drills, 300 m fast running up up a hill, 20 sagittal splits, 200 m moderate on the flat, 30 hops with locked knees, 500 m fast at 85% of max speed to finish. And what you’re getting here, okay, in this case is that will take 6 7 8 minutes depending on the athlete, right?

And then you jog down and repeat it maybe a couple times. Maybe for an elite athlete four to five times. Someone less elite obviously not as many. But what you’re doing here is you’re mixing the intensities and the exercises in a way that you throw some lactate into there.

Then you do something like some squat jumps again to create some fatigue to increase non-specific lactate. And then you go into 200 m moderate where you’ve got to deal with that even though you’re running uphill. And then you throw some more into the system and you’ve got this nice again both from the hill and then the circuit a non-specific like lactate response meaning we’re getting lactate thrown in yes from muscles that are activated during running but also in ways that we generally aren’t. Okay.

And the beautiful thing about these Kenova hill circuits is you can go for the long ones like that or you can go for a shorter more intense one. So for instance, when I was at Houston, we didn’t have many hills and we were preparing for some cross country season and conference meets with tons of hills. So what we did is we found the only hill around a 200 meter gradual hill and what we would do is Great job ladies. Great job.

We start at the bottom and do some sort of fatiguing exercise. Some squats, some squat jumps, some lunges, a lunge matrix, stepups on a bench, things that yes, hit the legs, but hit them in a different way, often activating our quads more so than we normally feel and experience. And the idea was simple. create some fatigue, throw a little bit lactate into the system, and then right after we’d go 200 meters uphill hard, and then our jog would be, it was actually a steady run, a steady run, which went from the top of the hill, and it was about a 3 400 meter loop that went around into the bottom hill.

We’d rest a little bit and then repeat and change the exercises as we went. But it’s another way to again get some of this non-specific fatigue and lactate increase, deal with it a little bit while maintaining our posture and form and stuff and get some sort of again fatigue, higher acidosis, anorobic thing without it killing our aerobic side. Now, these don’t have to be done uphill like Bowererman and some others like Scott Rasco, the coach of Allen Web. When I was training with Rasco, what we would do is we do do circuits sometimes on the track, sometimes on a hill, but we do them simply, right?

Where you’d run 100 meters or 200 meters and then you do some sort of strength exercise, often something like a medball toss. So again, we’re getting the strength and a little bit of power. Sometimes some squats or a circuit where we’re doing some bounds, other things like that. And what are we doing is we’re again creating some fatigue, non-specific lactate increases, and then going into running afterwards.

Now, the running sometimes it was steady. We want it steady when we want to teach our kind of slow twitch muscle fibers to take up and clear that stuff out. We want it a little bit harder when we want to get more of that quote unquote anorobic effect. We’re saying, “Hey, there’s a lot of lactate into the bloodstream coming.” That means the differential between muscle and blood isn’t as or is you can’t just like spit that out into the bloodstream.

So, you’ve got to get used to tolerating that on a local level. What you’re doing here is again non-specific work. And the

Creative Workouts and Final Thoughts

last example I’ll give is something that I learned from John McDonald who would put his athletes through a relatively heavy strength training session or circuit. So they lift some upper body, some lower body, take 30 to 45 minutes in total and then they’d go right out the door and do a eight mile run. It would vary a little bit, but 8 mile run. And the goal was to have that eight mile run work into a pretty steady pace where you’re highend aerobic.

What are you doing here? You’re creating a lot of pre- fatigue in a non-specific way, but that translates a little bit. And then you have to go out and do your specific exercise running at a high-end aerobic state so that you learn how to deal with the fatigue and then also in the short run at least early on deal with some of that lactate and take it up and clear it and improve it. There’s other mechanisms of fatigue that play in a role here, but what I would suggest is try this.

I did this once is hop on go to your gym. Hop on a treadmill. Do something like tempo-ish for a couple minutes. Go to let’s say a bench press.

Bench press hard for 8 to 10 reps. Some something moderately heavy. Hop back on the treadmill instantly. Tell me how your leg or your arms feel.

And you’re going to notice like, holy crap, we’ve got some local muscle fatigue. And even though I’m not using my arms much when I run, except to kind of counterbalance and drive things, it’s going to feel really crazy. So the point is this, there’s nothing quite magical about non-specific lactate work. But what it does is it gives us this in between moment where we get to get speed work, where we get faster stuff, where we get higher lactate levels.

Often during that transition from base to competitive or in that pre-competitive, this starts preparing us and priming us to get used to some of those levels, higher levels systemically and then somewhat locally depending on the exercise you choose. But it’s this wonderful bridge where we can do it without having as high of a risk of doing lots of speed work early and quote unquote peaking early or losing our endurance. It’s also a great way to create strength endurance or speed endurance depending on how you modulate things. So there you go.

A little bit different of a twist of an exercise that is not often used that used to be more used when you look at athletes or coaches like Bowererman and Ser and some others who had some of these circuits. In fact, you used to see this with John Cook who coached Shellain Flanigan and Shannon Roberry and David Torrance early in their careers is he was famous for having some of these circuits which developed strength endurance and I would argue non-specific lactate. In fact, I remember being at and watching a workout with the late David Torrance who did a bunch of 400s and 200s and then right afterwards did some squats and squat jumps and then straight into a steady I think it was a 800 or a mile that was again not super fast but steady enough especially after cranking 400s and 200s in all that was done is the strength stuff and then into the fast cooldown was what was it what was he doing Right. Creating a little non-specific fatigue.

And then again getting a little more bang for his buck on I’ve already got a lot of specific fatigue. I’m going to get a little bit more strength endurance in here. And then let my body learn how to clear, tolerate, deal with it by going somewhat steady but still aerobic. There’s a lot of ways to skin this cat, but the point is to get you starting to think about creative workouts that don’t quite fall into the this is the V2 max workout, this is the lactate threshold, this is the speed work, this is the highintensity stuff, this is the quote unquote anorobic stuff.

is if you understand to a degree the physiology and you understand history, we can start to put these pieces together and understand why just about every good runner has somewhat of a hill phase that precedes their actual speed or speed endurance phase. Anyways, thanks for watching. Hope this is helpful. Take care everybody.