You shouldn't be winded

Many people, including myself, have fallen victim to a pedal-to-the-metal mindset when it comes to cardiovascular training. We believe training intensity determines training efficacy and that every workout not pushed to the limit is a missed opportunity. We watch Rocky movies and see killer montages to greatness, we see Instagram posts or YouTube videos showing the most intense training and the author’s supposed results. We award and celebrate those athletes that push through injuries to achieve greatness. We celebrate overcoming adversity but this can be taken too far. This is the fallacy of the intuitive training method.

What is this intuitive method?

Let me tell you a story about how my brother trains for his club Frisbee team in the summer and we'll discuss how almost everyone I know, me included, has fallen for this trap, why it's sub-optimal, and what the alternative is.

Ultimate Frisbee is essentially soccer but with a Frisbee instead of a ball. It consists of nearly constant intense running up and down a large field. Therefore, to train for this my brother decides, like most well intentioned athletes, to train like he plays. His workouts consists almost purely of interval sprints because Frisbee has a lot of transitions from slow jogs to fast sprints. And when he's not training sprints, he's running for as fast and as far as he can that day, hopefully further and faster than last workout. His mentality for his workouts is "to not be a baby" and to be better than last time. This is the classic Rocky montage, or pedal to the medal mentality I mentioned before. It's highly motivated, but poorly informed. It is better than nothing, and will probably improve his running a bit, but not as efficiently, healthily, or fully if he adopted an alternative.

Train Slow to go Fast

Or why the intuitive method isn't the best method.

It's intuitive for many, myself included, to think that if you work harder then you will benefit that much more. But I am sorry to say that this just isn't the case. Yes, exercise requires work and dedication, but this cannot be misplaced into trying to become Usain Bolt overnight. You must implement work with a proper plan and dedicate yourself to following that plan if you want to be successful and avoid plateaus and stagnation.

The intuitive method isn't optimal because if you train at too high of an intensity, even just enough to feel a burn, you may be missing out on some important training adaptations. For example, training at low intensity, a pace you can sustain conversation at, allows your heart to stretch maximally. This stretching of the heart strengthens it and makes it more efficient, resulting in a higher stroke volume (how much blood pumped is pumped in a single heart beat) and a lower heart rate. This is where you should spend the vast majority of your endurance training, and I mean like 80-90% of it. What happens if you start running too fast or too intensely is your heart begins to beat too fast. If your heart beats too fast, it will not stretch maximally, but rather it will twitch and you will not be strengthening it as much. Furthermore, training at a lower intensity allows you to train longer and more frequently which helps speed up training adaptations. Constantly training at a high intensity is just unsustainable. My brother was only ever able to keep up his routine for a week or two max and then he would burn out. And when I trained too intensely, I would get shin-splints and be out for the rest of the season.

In sum, DON’T GET WINDED.