Volume vs Intensity
TEXT
Alan Couzens
”If I’m dealing with an athlete over a horizon of multiple years, how relevant is an
8 week study?”
promoting the benefits of
low intensity aerobic work.
So what’s the answer? Where
can we go to get an honest,
unbiased assessment of what
methods actually work in the
‘real world’? The journals?
Volume vs
Intensity
’Data mining’ the answer to
an age-old question
As key races approach,
athletes get understandably
antsy. The mind starts to run
with thoughts on ‘what’s missing’ from the training plan.
This isn’t helped by all of the
mixed messages in the media
and popular training texts.
22
MARCH 2016 · RACEMAKERS
Am I doing enough “sweetspot
training”?
Is that Zone 3 stuff really ‘no
mans land’?
Should I be doing more work
at FTP to boost my ‘ceiling’?
“Data Miniing” the answer to an
age-old question
More volume or more intensity to improve your swim?
Photo credit: Jesper Grønnemark
Scientific studies continue to be
limited by 2 significant constraints
– time (i.e. duration of the study)
and the sample (both the size and
the specificity of the sample). The
first is the most significant problem. If I’m dealing with an athlete
over a horizon of multiple years,
how relevant is an 8 week study?
If an athlete improves rapidly over
the course of 8 weeks but then
plateaus and regresses beyond
that, how much ‘real world’ value
does the protocol really have?
Similarly, if the protocol ‘works’ on
novice college aged subjects (as
most protocols do), how valuable is it to my sample of serious
endurance athletes with a long
training history?
Fortunately, if we are willing to
Is my training sufficiently
‘polarized’?
Incidentally, it’s impossible to
answer yes to all of the questions above!
Actually, forget the confusion
provided by books and the
internet, science is pretty
confused too! You’ll find just
as many studies touting the
benefits of very high intensity training as you do studies
RACEMAKERS · MARCH 2016
23