I like to experiment, plain and simple.  There is not a lot of things that I won’t try at least once.  I have hiked through Nepal, I have lived for weeks in the woods, and I have tried the peanut butter and jelly omelett, which was suprisingly delicious.  My desire to experiment has also spilled over into my training and coaching.  I have no problem adding something in, if only to find out if it will be effective.  If it improves performance, we’ll take it and use it again later. If it doesn’t, we’ll leave it alone.  In the words of Bruce Lee, we take the useful and disregard the useless.  One thing that I have found to be very useful, especially in runners with an intermediate training age (4 or so years), is using the stage loading system in interval workouts.

The stage loading system is where you expose the body to a heavier stress early in the workout, and subsequently back it down later in the session.  What this means in terms of actual sessions is something like this:  an athlete will do 4x200m at 800m pace before switching gears to doing 600s at 3k pace.  What’s the point?  Well, after exposure to the higher stress (200s at 800m pace), your nervous, energy, and endocrine system is prepared to operate at a higher level, but because you are backing down the intensity the 600m reps are seemingly easier than they would be if you just started doing 600s.  This allows for one of two things:  the feeling stronger over longer reps provides a big confidence boost or the pace of the 600s can be run a little quicker than normal.  It is not uncommon for both to happen, of course, but we try to control intensity in sessions pretty closely.

To reiterate, I find this to be most effective in athletes with a greater training age simply because a beginner would be just fine without complex loading schemes and could possibly, with a lack of training background, be unprepared to cope with the biomechanical and phyisological stress of the session.  In more advanced athletes, I’m toying with the idea of alternating reps 800m/3k/800m/3k/etc or possibly adding an extra set of faster reps at the end.

Happy Friday,
Carson Boddicker