The XLR8 Performance Lab Podcast
Exciting, in-depth, and sometimes humorous conversations with experts in sports performance and human optimization across the globe. Including athletes, coaches, elite scientists, and self-experimenters, this show has it all. Hear directly from the source about all of the behind-the-scenes happenings in our sport and the ways they go about impacting it on a daily basis.
The XLR8 Performance Lab Podcast
5 Reasons Long Slow Distance Running is Dumb! (And maybe a few reasons it's not...)
Is your endurance training really pushing you towards peak performance or just pushing you towards a plateau? Prepare to have your training beliefs tested as I, Ben Tilus, cut through the noise surrounding long slow distance (LSD) running. This episode isn't just another running commentary; it's a deep dive into why the one-size-fits-all approach to distance running might be derailing your athletic progress. As the XLR8 Head Performance Coach, I'm here to shake up the status quo by revealing how LSD could actually inhibit VO2 max improvements for certain athletes. We'll unpack the mysteries of muscle fiber composition, energy metabolism, and training periodization to help you discern whether LSD is your ally in the race for endurance or just a deceptive mirage on the marathon route to success.
This session isn't just for the marathoners; sprinters and middle-distance runners also stand to gain or lose from the LSD debate. The episode moves beyond the track, examining the cultural phenomenon of high mileage as a digital badge of honor and its potential pitfalls. I'll steer you away from the pitfalls of training for applause and guide you towards training for applause-worthy performances. Whether you're lacing up for a competitive season or building a base in the off-season, this podcast is your personal pacer, setting the tempo for an individualized training regimen fortified by professional insights, like those gleaned from bloodwork. Strap on your headphones and let's break away from the pack together. Subscribe and follow to ensure you never miss a step towards smarter training and superior performance.
Hey everybody, you are listening to the XLR8 Performance Lab podcast hosted XLR8 Head Head Performance Coach, Ben Tilus. You are about to hear strategies that have helped produce many elite middle distance and distance runners over the last 15 years. He shares why running success doesn't have to be hard. You just have to know a few key tools, from workout strategies to important info on sleep and nutrition. You are guaranteed to learn something that will help you in your running journey. Be prepared to get faster, stronger and better in your racing and training. So, as always, sit back, buckle up, enjoy the ride. Here we go.
Ben Tilus:Hey everybody, welcome back to the XLR8 Performance Lab podcast. I'm your host, Ben Tilus. It's great to be back on the podcast here and getting a chance to talk with all of you as we head towards the start of the school track and field season. It's been a barn burner of an indoor season, both here in the Midwest and around the country, from athletes from the East Coast, west Coast and even right here in Central Iowa. There have been some amazing performances and I cannot wait to see what happens as we venture into the next few months, with everything starting up here in the Midwest here over the next few weeks.
Ben Tilus:So before we dive into the season, I wanted to start a new series where we talk about different things in training that may or may not be valuable to different coaches, different athletes. Some of these might apply directly to your situation, some might not apply at all, but you know what they're all kind of cool to learn about and if you're the type of athlete parent coach that loves to hear something maybe defined in a way that you haven't heard it before or broken down in a unique way, this is the place to be. We're going to start off with one that has been widely debated, and that is long slow distance running for improving VO2 max, and I'm going to give you five reasons why that might be dumb. Today that might hit some of you in a funny way, and already I can feel some of you heading to your social media accounts or into our comment section and typing away like crazy why maybe long slow distance running isn't dumb, but maybe why I'm dumb. Feel free, go for it, totally get it. But before you do that, I want to share those thoughts and then I'm also going to share some reasons why. Of course it has value to a lot of applications that we have across our sport, but some of the reasons why it might be dumb. We're going to start with number one.
Ben Tilus:One of the main reasons that implementing too much long slow distance running during your season is that you might be doing it at the wrong time of year. So might not be dumb all the time, but there might be a time of the season when it is dumb. If you're periodizing your season in such a way that you're trying to hit big performances at certain times of the year, one of the very first times of the year that you want to start to decline that long slow distance running is as you start to get into more of the specific phase of preparation for the season. Why is that? Well, we know that all work is VO2 work. All right, whether you're going slow or fast. The faster you go, the more you are going to raise your VO2 in that same amount of time. But obviously we're going to be limited at the volume of that faster work that you can do.
Ben Tilus:So as you head into the season and maybe you're an 800 runner and you start to do more intense interval work, you can't also do massive amounts of long slow work. One, you're going to be counteracting the very gains you're trying to make with the anaerobic system. And two, you may be in a position where you're also just it's from a standpoint of recovery your body just is not going to be able to do both at the same level. There's only so much your body can do and still make positive adaptations, all right. So one may be the time of the year. It's just dumb to do long slow distance training during that time in your training block. Number two you might be an athlete that does not respond well to long slow distance training. All right, that's going to come down to fiber type more than anything how your body utilizes energy, the way you metabolize energy to help you do the job.
Ben Tilus:People with a large amount of fast twitch fibers very explosive fibers even if they were to try to train for a 5k long slow distance running anything below threshold is going to be a vast majority of that is going to be using only slow twitch fibers to do the work and we're not able to. It's going to be a lot of fat utilization and things that are used more when our body is trying to again use those slow twitch fibers to help us move more aerobically. But if their fibers are mainly fast twitch or a high proportion of fast twitch and you don't do enough of the work that utilizes those fibers and helps develop them in a way that they are used to grow, you're not going to see any stimulus. So you can't just take a 800 runner, who maybe is more inclined to be a 248 type of runner, and just say, hey, we've got to add more mileage, we got to just get this kid out plodding along just to raise their aerobic system. It's not going to work for them. That's an area that you guys may see, that where it is Now an area where that might work and it wouldn't be dumb.
Ben Tilus:Before all of you again go to the comments, is there a lot of type of athletes maybe they're an 800 runner that runs the mile and two mile and they have a higher preponderance of slow twitch fibers. And those slow twitch fibers do thrive more on aerobic based training. And so if you're looking at that type of training, it may be really valuable for that athlete to have different types of aerobic work in there, which would include maybe some longer, more relaxed recovery or aerobic based type of runs, so that those slow twitch fibers are getting a great amount of work, they're fatiguing and they're coming back stronger. So for an athlete like that, during certain phases of their training, if they're more slow, twitch, inclined, a lot of that longer, slower running may indeed be valuable. But if you're more of an explosive based runner and you know that you're more of that, you could drop down to the 4x4 or 200. Too much long slow running is going to not even work the fiber types that you need to complete the event.
Ben Tilus:The next thing is the type of event itself. Alright, there may be people who are inclined, you know, for the 400 or something, to still have athletes run a lot of longer, slower miles, but the reality with that is that they're the main thing for events of minute and shorter is going to come down to top end speed, which is mainly, you know, influenced by ground force, your reaction time off the ground, your rebound speed, your body's ability to store and utilize fast, fast, fast energy, you know, through the Achilles and the calf and a good ground response, just overall muscular strength and stiffness, things like that, mechanics and whatnot. There is metabolic, there are metabolic ways that it can be helped and there is definitely a VO2 component, but not through long, slow running. What's going to happen is you're going to lose all that mechanical efficiency and power and you're going to develop habits of longer ground contact time and so on, and it's going to those maybe slight improvements of VO2 that might be able to help them metabolize energy better are going to be offset by significant degrading in the ability for the body to get on and off the ground with a lot of force quickly. So that may be another time that that is done, all right. The fourth time where that is done is maybe you only have a couple months to prepare for an event.
Ben Tilus:Okay, long slow training is such that it takes a very, very long amount of time for it to really create adaptations in the body. You may see some quite a bit at first with new developing runners, but as you progress and eventually there's not a new stimulus and you're simply just going longer and slower all the time. It takes a very long amount of time, and so why is that? You're actually changing the size of the heart and the ability for the cardiovascular system to be more pliable. That's deep down structural change, not economical or more facilitative change. That we would see with things like stroke volume in the heart, where just the simple maybe the pathways become faster and we've got changes that create more power in a short amount of time, like we might see with shorter interval type of VO2 training, tabata training, hiit training, etc.
Ben Tilus:But if you're somebody that's so, maybe it's you haven't trained a lick and here we are coming up on February or March. If you just decide, hey, I got to get fit, so I got to do a lot of long slow running, you're going to get fit a little bit right away. From the standpoint of pretty much anything will start to help your fitness If you're coming off of not really doing much work at all. But the reality is, if all you're trying to do is is, once a year, getting shaped for an 800 meter run or a mile run, and then you're going to go right back for the next nine months and other sports and things where you're not building a consistent aerobic development, then there really isn't a huge reason to be doing a lot of that longer, slower running. That running is going to accumulate over a long period of time. That begins to like, like I mentioned, slowly actually make structural changes to the cardiovascular system. That will be very, very valuable for those of you that train a long time.
Ben Tilus:So there's the opposite, when it might not be done. Might be if you are somebody that's training year round and you're somebody that's looking to maybe expand your career out over several seasons, multiple years, multiple decades, even that long, slow approach and accumulating miles in that range will have an impact on overall structure, mitochondria, capillary beds and so on. Okay, so that's something to keep in mind. But if you're just having maybe a six to 10 week season where you've just got a small window to get fit, you know, don't be afraid of throwing some of it in there, but it better not be the only thing you're doing, because it has just takes way too long for that to really make a big impact on your overall performance levels. You'd be better off attacking hit training. There's been some studies on, like the Tabata type of workouts or hit training, you know, shorter intervals, maybe even 100 to 200 meter intervals with pretty short recoveries that have dramatically improved VO2 max in a much shorter amount of time. Those, though, on the other hand, are only changing economical changes. They're not really structurally changing, so when you go away from them, those gains will disappear pretty quickly as well. As opposed to the structural change, gains can keep you pretty fit for a long period of time.
Ben Tilus:All right, so those are four of the keys to what it might be, why it might be dumb to focus on long, slow distance running, and the last one simply is why it might be dumb is that some of you may purely be doing this just to show off to your friends on Strava. You might just be trying to get more mileage than other people in your training group, or just other people you plan to be racing. You're just trying to intimidate them, or just try to use it as a means to pump yourself up. If that's the only reason you're doing it, you might be missing out on other training stimulus that don't require as much volume but could have an equally positive impact on your overall performance level, simply because the biggest thing that you're worried about in showing people is that final mileage number that day or that week, rather than being able to find ways to show If you really want to show that to people. Sometimes it's not as easy for them to dive into the inner workings of the workout to see where you got better. So we use mileage as a quick cheat code to say how hard we're working. So don't use long slow distance as a cheat code just to tell people you're working hard.
Ben Tilus:All right, yes, it's a lot of work. It takes a long time, high amount of volume, but that'd be a dumb reason for you to focus on it. If you actually have some reasons, like we talked about, the body is more inclined to benefit from slow twitch training or slow twitch fibers, so the long slow training will help it. If it's the right time of year where maybe it's early enough in the off season we're building that large base and movement economy isn't as important that's another time to use it. Longer events is when that's going to be important.
Ben Tilus:So those are the types of things where, as you're looking at it, you've got to really realize that there really are some dumb times to train just purely long and slow. But for those of you that are more in that camp on that long, slow training trust me, I use it all the time with athletes as well Just depends on the type of athlete and honestly, you never really know till we see them in the facility where we're able to take blood and figure out okay, is this the type of athlete that would benefit from more of the slow, twitch type of training, fast switch type of training and so on. Again, it's really only abundantly obvious if you get in and you get a blood draw. Obviously it's one of those things that we're able to do at XLR8, at our lab, and you know, would love to have you come in if this is something that interests you and you want to make sure you're getting the right types of training at the right time and you're not doing things that are dumb at the wrong time of year, right when you know you need to be performing at the highest level. So there you have it. Hopefully that gives you some reasons why certain types of training might not make the most sense at certain times, but everything has its place at the right time. So don't go running off telling everybody that we just said it's always dumb. So listen to the podcast, get all the full information and make sure you know when to use it, how to use it and the best ways for you to benefit from it.
Ben Tilus:In our next podcast, we're going to talk about five reasons why the anaerobic focusing on anaerobic and high intensity intervals is dumb. So we're going to kind of flip the scales a little bit and look at why reasons why that might not be beneficial for you as well. So we're just hitting all angles of it and giving you a chance to maybe get drawn in and hear what we have to say, and hopefully, by doing so, you find something that is valuable to you as an athlete and you can take it back and have great performances. All right, so that's everything we've got for today's podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Really appreciate it every time you listen to us.
Ben Tilus:One of the things, though, that helps us out a ton is if you can subscribe to that podcast. Just do it right now. Hit the subscribe button. If you're on a social account or you can get to one really fast, follow us. Subscribe like hit every time you have a chance to hit one of those. It gives us the opportunity to reach more and more athletes to improve what they do, as well as pop up on your feed, where you're looking for more content every time that we produce something. So make sure you're doing that and can't wait to see you guys in one of these future podcasts and stay tuned for all kinds of new content coming out here in 2024. All right, take care everybody.
