Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to the Evergreen Athlete podcast...
This podcast is designed for people who used to live for sport but are now in a different place. They've recently focused on their careers and families and are unsure how to train athletically as they age. They have different stressors and problems. My name is Finlay MacHugh, and this is something that I have gone through myself to help people overcome every single day. If you're here, you likely have questions about how to train and live optimally. So this is what to expect...
What You’ll Get:
About Me (Your Host):
As of writing this in February 2025, I have been a strength and conditioning coach for 15 years, and I've coached at some level for 20 (Christ, that's scary). I'm the founder of Evergreen Athlete, an online coaching platform for those over 30s who want to regain their consistency and confidence to be their best version.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Evergreen Athlete podcast. I'm yet again back in the green room on the green sofa, and I have recorded this episode about three times. The irony is that I was driving down to the South Side Of Melbourne yesterday, which is a torturous forty five minute drive through traffic. And I decided to record an episode just on my phone, just plugged it in, chatted away as I as I was driving down to put be someone that that isn't overly perfectionist and just get something put out and improves throughout by just doing lots of reps of it. Now I actually got home and then I just thought, fuck, that episode was utter trash.
Speaker 1:It was more of a lecture, you know, like for a sports science grad than something that was practical and useful for people to be able to take home. So I decided to refilm it, kind of repackage it and rework it, which is what we're gonna do today. And I've just filmed it half an hour ago and I realized my microphone was turned off. No. And here we are again to record it for now a third time.
Speaker 1:So I maybe I just need to accept that I'm just a perfectionist and I just need to keep chipping away until it is perfect and that'll be fine. Now okay. We're back. Right. That's a bit of background to understanding what this stuff.
Speaker 1:I come across slightly frustrated in this episode, you're gonna understand why. But what we're gonna talk about today is the how sorry. The distribution of your running sessions through the week because I find that when people start getting involved in events, they just lace up their shoes, they get out the door, they wanna run five k, 10 k and everything looks the same. They are just repeating the same run. They're making a bit of progress for a while, but I think one of the reasons that people struggle to be consistent with their training is a, it's really fucking boring just doing the same session over and over again.
Speaker 1:B, when you do those types of runs and you're pretty much trying to get a personal best in every single one, your body does build up a hell of a lot of fatigue pretty quickly. It is difficult to go out and perform at a very high effort every single time. And three is we don't make a lot of progress after a long period of time. You wanna think about your whole training program and training cycle. So that would be like the description of like getting from a to b in over twelve weeks, sixteen weeks, twenty weeks as this big puzzle of puzzle like lots of different puzzle pieces that on their own, they don't look like much.
Speaker 1:They wouldn't represent what we're doing at all. But when you start piecing them together, you get this piece of art, which is your physical performance. And if you are just doing one type of training session repeatedly or maybe you've only got three, then you've only got three little pieces of the puzzle and your artwork, you continue with this analogy, is pretty shitty. So in the first episode, I just kind of reeled off the different types of runs that you should be considering but I actually don't think that's overly practical. That's the kind of thing that you deliver in a university lecture and what I'm gonna talk about is actually how you can create a week of training and throughout going through those that week of training and giving you a couple of different variations across different phases of a cycle, we will cover all of those different types of runs and you can see the logic of how I'm putting them together.
Speaker 1:Ultimately though, all of these different types of sessions are just different ways of grading the intensity of your work and there are lots of different methods of grading the intensity of your training and unfortunately new methods come out all the time from developments in technology, new research that's come out, changes in the names, new coaches that have their own little distinct system for this And it becomes this quite messy soup. And what you'll find is someone will describe one type of run using one system and then a different type of run using another. So for example, someone might describe a zone two run, which is based off heart rate. How hard how hard your heart is working is the rating how hard the intensity is. Then they might describe another run as LT two which would be like lactate threshold two which is using a separate system to be able to delineate between what's difficult or not or they might use something that's a bit more colloquial where they might just say, ah, this is a interval session.
Speaker 1:Sweet. Okay. That doesn't help out a lot and this creates a lot of confusion but ultimately I don't think it's overly important to be too fussy about that and I think we can just use names that are quite closely linked to the outcome that we're trying to get from these sessions. The the end product of it. So let's let's break down a hypothetical week of someone's training.
Speaker 1:This is someone that is a real keen athlete, someone that is training not, you know, professionally but a decent amateur level and they're training at least six days per week. They're probably not doing any more than six sessions. They might be doing seven sessions but they're at a decent clip And I would recommend that you think about starting your training week on a Sunday. Now why on a Sunday? The Sunday is the fulcrum of your training week.
Speaker 1:It's the day of the weeks that you do your easy long run. It's not set in stone. This is more of a cultural thing and is a bit of a practical thing as well but it is more often than not and you want to start that by basically knocking on the head the highest amount of kilometers or miles that you are gonna run that week. Tick it off straight away rather than having it looming over you thinking it's gonna be coming at the very end of the week. So that's why I think mentally preparing yourself that Sunday is the start of the week.
Speaker 1:Now what is an easy run? An easy run is where we are running at a low pace. It is when we are primarily training our aerobic energy system. So that is our heart, our lungs and our ability to oxidize fat to use for fuel and to be able to travel and train for a long period of time at a sustained effort. Our easy run, the main purpose, particularly if someone's in a general phase and they're trying to build volume is to be going further, to be how can I run continuously for an hour?
Speaker 1:Can I run continuously for seventy five minutes, ninety minutes, two hours? Our goal is to be able to extend that amount of time and you will get the adaptations of improved ability of your heart and your lungs to able to pump blood blood around your body, oxygenated blood around your body to be able to make your type one muscle fibers work and continue that effort. Also, separately often not talked about is that the specific adaptations from just running for that amount of time were on our our legs like our our tissues needs to be able to adapt to that as well. Like that is a that is a specific load to be able to do, you know, if you're doing a 180 steps per minute and you're running for sixty minutes or ninety minutes, you can do the math pretty quickly. It's a lot of steps and it's a lot of contacts and our body will need to gradually build up to that and be able to cope with those steps and, and the fun that comes with it and the mess that your feet will get into.
Speaker 1:So that is our easy long run. That is the bedrock of our week. On a Monday, what do I typically encourage people to do? Think that's the day that you get in the gym and you get your main strength session done. I'm not gonna go into the weeds of exactly what that looks like but that is just a like I said, a great day for that, because it, can help restore painful tissues.
Speaker 1:It can help build your capacity and if you're gonna be doing a lot of running when you have a bit more free time in your week, which is gonna be at the weekend, this is this is a good junction on that. So you're also not becoming into the weekend overly fatigued. After we've done that, I think the first good session of the week on a Tuesday, I think doing something called a tempo session is a great way to fill your Tuesdays and what would a tempo session be? Tempo is working harder than the easier run or faster than the easier run. You're getting your legs kicking over and as the name says, we're running at a quicker tempo because we do need to practice running at the speeds or closer to the speeds that we're gonna be running our event in.
Speaker 1:Depending on what specific event you're doing, this is probably gonna be closer to like a 10 k pace or even maybe a half marathon if you're much more of an endurance athlete. The way I would think about tempo running though is it's it's going to be typically done in intervals in breaks. The rest periods wanna be pretty short or really short because we still want it to be an aerobic run. We don't want long five or six minute breaks and then to go out too hard that becomes more anaerobic. So we wanna keep the body working, but it almost it doesn't not matter.
Speaker 1:Where you start and how many intervals you do is not irrelevant. You could do sixty seconds on, ten seconds off. You could do two minutes on, thirty seconds off. You could do these intervals and you're keeping the your heart rate continuously going because the interval rest period is quite short, but as you go through the weeks of training, are wanting to extend how long you are able to run at tempo or the total amount of time that you're running at tempo because when we come to do the our actual event, we are gonna be running tempo or faster and we wanna be able to build that capacity to run at that sustained pace. So that's our Tuesday.
Speaker 1:So Tuesday is a slightly tougher session that which means that when it comes to a Wednesday, I think that's a great day for us to either have another easy run or introducing the third one here, a recovery run. So what is the recovery run? A recovery run is slower than you're easy and shock horror clue is in the name. It is there to improve our body's recovery so that we are fresher and feel fitter for later in the week for Thursday and so on. Now for athletes that are building up their frequency of their training, their recovery is gonna be a rest day.
Speaker 1:That's gonna be doing nothing, you know, go and have a sauna or whatever. But when we get to a certain frequency of training and our body is able to cope with a certain amount of total training load, we can recover just well if not better by continuing to run a bit further. But there are some key markers to this recovery run. One, it's gonna be shorter than your easy run by quite a margin. If your easy run is about, you know, 30 to 50% of your weekly volume, Your your your recovery run is gonna be much shorter than that.
Speaker 1:It might be seven to 10%. It is gonna be done at a slower pace than your easy run. Again, don't want to be adding fatigue to that and the harder we work, the quicker it is to the easier it is to add fatigue to our system. And we want to do this sorry. By the end of the run, we should feel better than when we started and one of the reasons is that when we finish the run, we should have a release of some hormones that help with our recovery.
Speaker 1:Human growth hormone is typically released and that's a fantastic thing and even you can even split these runs into two shorter runs throughout the day to get a double dose of that. So that's our recovery ones run. So we've done that on a Wednesday. Now we're moving to so we've done that. Yes.
Speaker 1:It was Sunday easy, Monday strength, Tuesday tempo, Wednesday easy recovery or another easy, and then Thursday. Right? So we're feeling pretty good now. We've just had that crew cruisy day. Thursday is the day that we wanna work hard.
Speaker 1:We need to have some intensity in our program and again, this also depends what kind of phase you're at. So for me, typically if someone's in an early general phase, I do very fast sprinting work. So that is 30 meters at six seconds, eight second bursts, it's hill sprints. These are the kind of training sessions that they've got in their program because we're trying to improve their neuromuscular efficiency. We want to improve their running economy, I.
Speaker 1:Be able to get their maximum speed up so that they're running at a lower percentage of that. And it's less specific to the actual events. We typically wanna do it further out from the event. If you are closing in on or an event or you're moving into a specific prep prep block of training, this session might be something like a v o two max session or a threshold session. Now what is the difference between those?
Speaker 1:So I've introduced three different runs there. We've got a sprint, threshold and v o two. So sprints, I've given you an explainer of that. But the a v o two session. So v o two is when we are working above our second threshold, which is the threshold or the marker between working moderately hard and working very hard.
Speaker 1:Once we're above that work, our heart rate is gonna be high. It's gonna be 90%, 95%. We're gonna be accumulating a lot of fatigue or black tape by products are gonna be building up. Our brain is gonna be going, oh my god. We are I'm getting pretty tired here.
Speaker 1:I haven't got too much in it and it's gonna be more fatiguing and more it's more cause more, say damage, but it's gonna be much harder on the tissues on our body. So a v o two max session is when we are working at v o two, which is basically the maximum amount of oxygen that your body can be able to process and efficiently use and it hits a point and kind of plateaus and we can't go any further and we're trying to work at that level and it's the most specific way that we can improve your v o two max shock horror. We are gonna do this in much smaller doses. This is gonna be interval lengths of anything like between two minutes. Four minutes is typically a well researched sweet spot, but do I know that some people will extend those intervals up to five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes, once you get much more advanced.
Speaker 1:But we're gonna do these intervals. These are gonna be hard. These are gonna be the kind of ones that you finish the rep and you're gonna be bent over double. You're gonna be questioning your life. And we're gonna do them on a Thursday.
Speaker 1:We can also, if you're on a slightly different phase, you might do something called a threshold session. So a threshold is if we were talking about that cut off between working moderately hard to very hard. A threshold session is typically where we're working either just on it or just below it. And that is a stage where we're gonna be able to work for slightly longer intervals, but our the primary goal is to be able extend the amount of time that we can work at that threshold and the underlying physiology is that we're trying to get better at clearing those byproducts that start to accumulate when we work hard. When they accumulate, they kind of cause us to feel pain pain and discomfort and we don't want to run anymore.
Speaker 1:We get better at processing them, using them for further energy and kind of getting rid of them out of our body and not having them build up quite so much. So those are a couple of different types of difficult sessions that you can have on your Thursday. So can you guess what we're gonna do on a Friday now? We're gonna be needing a lighter or a lower day here. This is a a great time in the week where again you might have a second easy run or you might have a second recovery run and this really depends on how your body is responding and what you're able to tolerate there and we're just you can see we're just undulating through the week between difficult, easy, moderate and we're keeping that flowing.
Speaker 1:Saturday, look, I did mention this this hypothetical person is going to be, training for six days, so I'm gonna call Saturday a good, rest day. You might also wanna flip your Fridays and Saturdays. Look, this these kind of differences don't make much of a change, but either way, we're giving our body enough time to recover to get ready and be prepared to go in for those long runs. For an alternative athlete that might have been trying to really build work on their aerobic energy system, I would maybe encourage moving your longer run, your longer easy run to a Saturday and then backing up on a Sunday with a moderate length easy run again and that's another great way of continuing to challenge your aerobic energy system to help your body train itself to use fat for fuel and to be able to oxidize that flat and which is going to be really key to your long term aerobic energy system development. Okay.
Speaker 1:So in summary, I hope that you've been able to follow that sequence. I'm more than happy to create a handout to go along with this and to be able to put in the show notes as well to give you an example. But just a summary, we've got six key training session types starting from the easiest. We've got our recovery runs, very slow plodding runs, shorter distances. Goal is to help our body feel better.
Speaker 1:We've got our easy or our long runs. This is the core of our aerobic development. It's there to improve our the way our heart and our lungs pushes blood around the body. We're trying to extend the amount of time that we're able to do these for. We've got our tempo runs.
Speaker 1:These are shorter than our easy runs. They're working at a faster pace, but we're still in complete control of them. We can split them up into intervals, short intervals, but we do want to try and build those intervals up so that we're working for a longer amount of time. Threshold. We're trying to increase the amount of time that we can work at faster at tempo, closer to threshold.
Speaker 1:Threshold is where we're gonna be around our five k pace. We're gonna be hovering around or above that and we're gonna be working pretty hard. It's gonna help us clear the byproducts that start to accumulate when we work hard and be able to use them for fuel. We've then got our v o two max sessions. These are really tough grinding sessions, shorter intervals still.
Speaker 1:We're trying to work extend the amount of time that we can work at v o two and to push the ceiling of that. And then lastly, we have our sprint training, which is where we've got really short intervals, 30 meters, 40 meters, 60 meters, hill sprints, six seconds, eight seconds. We're working hard and we're again using more of our fast twitch muscle fibers to be able to help our running economy by being able to increase our total speed that we can run at or our maximum speed that we can run at. Okay. That was a fairly dense session on different running types.
Speaker 1:But when you have that wider variety of training sessions in your week and alternate alternating as you work through your programs, that is what again that that variation, our body likes variation if it wants. So it doesn't like variation so it has to adapt and we need variation to continue to make progress. If you enjoyed this episode, please I would love it if you were to share it with someone that is training for a 10 ks, training for a half marathon and training for a Hirocs. They will hopefully find this very useful.