Explaining: Dr. Jack Daniels’ Interval and Rep Paces (I-Pace & R-Pace)

0:00 Everyone says, "Do your intervals. Hate your V2 max work." But what does that actually mean? Are intervals the same as reps? Is V2 max just that number that Garmin tells me on my watch? And when Jack Daniels talks about Ipace and Rpace, what's really happening inside your body? So today, I'm wrapping up the training zone series. I'm breaking down interval and rep training. And I'm going to try again to make the language, the purpose, the physiology all crystal clear to you. So, you'll hopefully take away from this video understanding how each place builds different systems, how V2 Max workouts truly fit into your training and how you can use these workouts without burning yourself out.

0:31 I'll show you how I use them with athletes from Boston qualifiers to Olympic hopefuls and I'll give you plugandplay sessions that you can add to your plan this week. For those of you who haven't followed along yet, selfish plug, I've been told I should ask you to subscribe. Please subscribe. I'm Brandt Statchel, former national team running coach, mental performance coach, and registered psychotherapist. Over the last 15 years, I've dedicated my life to coaching everyone from first-time marathoners to Olympic hopefuls. I help athletes build and break through physical and mental plateaus using evidence-based training and mindset strategies. I've personally guided over 150 athletes to qualify for Boston. And I've coached more than two dozen athletes to represent Canada internationally. And for better or worse, I've spent as much time on the track as I have in the lab in the therapy room. And so when I bring all this together, it's 15 years of experience. And I'm just trying to help.

1:13 That's why I've started this YouTube series. All right, so let's get straight to the language like we did in the tempo workouts. There's so much language that we use in the endurance world. It's super odd. I don't know why we don't have one set piece of language, but here it is. This one's a little bit more simple. Intervals and rep pace both sit in that zone three in a three zone model, zone five in a five zone model.

1:31 RP, you know, 9 10 lactate through the roof, 10 12, heart rate, you know, 88 92% and plus. That's where both of these sit. So I want to break them down each uh a little bit more individual. High pace or interval pace as Daniels describes it is working on your V2 max and your aerobic ceiling. Trying to push it up. Generally the rep duration is anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes can be a little bit different depending on the phase. Recovery equal jog again depending on the phase. I'll explain a little bit of that later. What we're trying to do with this is raise your aerobic capacity. We're talking about how feel hard controlled. Whereas our pace or repetition pace is more so to focus on your neuromuscular economy and efficiency. I think 90 seconds or less unless you're truly trying to be a mileer, maybe 3k, 5k guy, gal. So you want a full jog on that in most cases.

2:14 So we're trying to improve that forms and speed and really the efficiency of what you do, right? So fast and smooth is how you would feel. Put succinctly, I pace builds the engine, our ppace tunes the chassis. And when you hear V2 max, it's just simply a shorthand for maximum oxygen consumption per minute. That's what it means in the physiology. So it's essentially your body's horsepower rating. So intervals use you to train that horsepower. reps teach you how to handle it more gracefully and efficiently. So, physiology in plain language, picture your body's lactate curve. Again, we talked about this in the tempo video. There's your LT1 and your LT2. V2 max is above that.

2:46 Remember, temper runs sit just below it. Intervals above it. So, intervals further stress the heart, the lungs, and the oxygen delivery system to their limit. Reps, they go shorter and sharper, still higher above, right? So, we want to focus on that neuromuscular efficiency and oxygen supply. So, when you do pace work, your heart rate stabilizes at a much higher percentage of heart rate, 90 95% typically. Breathing is hard but rhythmic and you're flirting with that big aerobic ceiling. When you do our pace work, the reps are too short broadly, maybe till the end of the workout to do lactate flooding. So you're teaching stride, stiffness, coordination, and power. All the stuff that makes you a fast, economical runner. Put simply, intervals, they build the capacity to go fast. Reps teach your body how to use that speed efficiently. So when I talk about Jack Daniels system with Ipace and RPACE, he didn't just guess at these numbers. He measured them. He's one of the first exercise physiologists. You can see pictures of it in his books. He would strap the big old gas masks at the time. They had like garbage bags on the back of them. And what they would do with those is they would measure your V2 max. Eventually evolved to standard, you know, new type V2 max testing and measure your blood lactate and race performances. And he created a field ready system for coaches and athletes, anyone really can use to put proper workouts and paces together. That was his genius. He built in these safety rails through labg guided data. And this is why for years and years now, we've all come back to this system, maybe iterated off it a little bit, but it's the best system we have from a truly purpose-built physiology system. So, some of those guardrails or safety rails that he had was keep I pace volume small, 8 to 15 minutes of total quality running. Some elites can get away with a little bit more in each session. They want to keep the RPA volume even smaller. Maybe think 1k to 2k, mile to mile and a quarter, maybe depending on the athlete, unless you're in a mile like 1500 meter block. And you want to always pair I wraps with a different recovery than you would RPA. So RPACE you typically want full recovery. I pace depending on the block and what you're trying to accomplish. You can have all the way up to equal time to halftime.

4:40 Remember the goal isn't to suffer here. It's to target the right physiological window and stay consistent across your workouts, across your build. Consistency builds success. Okay. So if you want to try and find your paces, my first recommendation is to do the Daniel's VOTE calculator. find a recent race performance, plug it in, and it will give you your paces. The second piece I would look at is if you're trying to triangulate that effort, which I'm big on, and I talk about this in the rest of the series, you can think of your IP pace as something that you could hold for 10 to 12 minutes all out. So on the elite end, that might be 3K to 5K, like super elite end, obviously. And this is exactly what Daniel's called it, Ipace, interval pace, right in between your 3K, 5K pace. For our pace, I would use a mile or you can look at bumping a couple percent faster than your eye pace.

5:24 Again, these will also come down to the individual athlete. For some athletes, mast's athletes or newer athletes in particular, Ipace and RPACE tend to be really close. So, we have to be careful with that prescription. The piece that I would also want athletes to consider is you have to adjust for your environment. The classic example I use all the time is if I take you, I fly you to Flagstaff or Boulder or pick your altitude destination, you would automatically change. So, for me, where I live in the Northeast, in the summer, it's hot, it's humid, in the winter, it's cold, it's snowy. You have to adjust. So, again, I've talked about this the whole series.

5:51 Don't be a slave to the watch. We want to triangulate with effort. That's why we're thinking I pace 10 to 12 minutes. Our pace 4 to 6 minutes, maybe 4 to 7 depending on the athlete. So remember, we always want to chase the physiological stimulus, not the watch number. The watch number is a proxy and a sometimes poor proxy for the physiological stimulus that we're looking for inside. As always, I want to try and dispel some of the biggest mistakes that I see new athletes coming to me or when I watch content online.

6:16 And so the first one would be racing intervals and showing off how fast you are. So, you're supposed to touch V2 max repeatedly with these, not run a really fast one and then explode and blow up the rest of the workout. And so, the general rule that I like to do is to try and keep all reps within like two to three, two to four seconds, super tight bandwidth for how your time is between rep one and the final rep. I'll give a lot of people a little bit on first rep.

6:38 Sometimes if you're running a lot or you're tired or a mast's athlete, first rep's like super slow. So, you can omit that one and then look at two to the the last one. The next one that I see is that athletes will do either too little recovery or too much recovery. And so one of the things that I see with the rungroup movement now is everybody comes together and the workout might be five by a kilometer. Well, the fast people up front might do those in close to 3minut ks and some of the more newer runners might do it in five or six minutes. So if you just give everybody 3 minutes of recovery, that's a completely different workout. And so when we're programming workouts, especially if you're going to do it by distance, I like to do it by time, but if you're going to do it by distance, you have to consider that that's a very different workout for the 6-minute K person than the 3minut K person. And so within that, you're either shortch changing somebody potentially or giving somebody way too much. So again, I always come back to this. We coach the person, not the spreadsheet or the workout. The next mistake I see when it comes to our pace is that people fight it. We we clench up our shoulders, we ball our fists, and we fight fight fight. And so when we do that, we're actually losing part of the neuromuscular efficiency and form piece that we're actually trying to get from it. So again, what I see most people doing is go, if my RP pace is this, I have to hit it, right? Or like faster is better, right? But if you're tensing up and you're tightening your back and you're over rotating through the core to try and get that pace, you're actually just losing the quality that we want.

7:52 And so that quantity when it comes to pace does not beat the quality here that we're looking for. The final mistake that I see all the time is stacking too much intensity. Especially for newer runners or really like gung-ho runners who are really trying to like press up against the wall. Maybe they've come to the sport late. They want to get really good. They see what their friends are doing. They go to different run groups throughout the week. And so they'll do like a tempo and then a day later they'll do an interval and then the next day they'll do a marathon pace long run.

8:16 And so I see way too many people stacking all this intensity. And so the best way I can conceive that we think about it is we think of a triangle. Okay? So I only got two hands so I'll do this. You want to have the biggest surface area under the triangle. And so intensity is the top piece and easy runs and anything under LT2 is the bottom. And so it takes a lot of work to pull the triangle up like this to create that surface area. And with that, with all the intensity work, we see way more injury risk. We see way more burnout risk, nervous system burnout. And so we know it's much better and easier to actually make the pyramid bigger this way and then pull up with the intensity.

8:49 Once we've got the established base, this is why we call it the base, right? Base phase. So, we build that out and then we use the intensity. Too many athletes rush into the intensity or feel that because easy runs don't feel hard, I don't feel like I did anything. It's not making me faster. When in reality, even if you only cared about V2 max and that's not what you should care about, plenty of that. Maybe I'll do a video about that at some point. But you don't actually need to make your V2 max bigger per se. You just need to be able to do a higher percentage of it. That's your LT2 essentially. And so, what you want to do is add the intensity at the appropriate times to pull up to have the biggest surface area. So most athletes too much intensity, not enough base work to support. The final mistake I see all the time is that there's no progression of workouts. It's the same one or two or three workouts throughout the phase. So there's no stimulus. Right? The other thing that I see that happens with that is athletes then race it. If last week I did it at X pace, well then to show that I'm improving, I got to do it 2 seconds a K or 2 seconds a mile faster, right?

9:38 And then what ends up happening is you're racing the workout to prove that you're fit rather than using the workout to build fitness. Remember, we don't actually care per se how fast you are on the workout because most of us are doing this for our race times. And so, we don't want to pull the carrots up too early in workouts, testing, testing, testing, testing, and then leaving us burnt out, injured, and fried for a race. So, you want to progress workouts both from a physiological stimulus perspective, but also from the psychological perspective of giving athletes something that's a little bit different and removing that comparison trap. Okay. Earlier on, I talked about some of the workouts I use. These are in no particular order. I'm not saying copy these indirect, you know, line that I do them in. I'm just trying to provide a couple that I've used. When I look at I pace workouts earlier in a build, I like to do fart style ones. So, I might do 10 by 60 seconds at eye effort, 40 seconds at e-pace. I really like that one early on or if I'm new to working with an athlete because I get to learn about their pacing. It's short enough yet long enough that you have to pace it right otherwise you blow up in the back half of the workout. So, it's a good little tester or maybe a return to run workout that I utilize a lot. As we progress through somebody's build and depending on what they're specifically doing, I like to do things like 5x K, 4x 1200, 8 by 800. That's the workout. For some reason, everybody hates when I give it to them. All my athletes hate that workout, but I like those workouts, right? And so depending on where they're at, I might give a little bit less recovery, a little bit more recovery, and depending on the gap that they need.

10:55 For our pace, I tend to use this a lot more now as strides. I don't coach as many mileers, 3k, you know, 5k people anymore. And when I did, I would do things like 10 x 400, 12 x 400 on a minute easy jog recovery up to 2 minutes depending on what your pace is. The workout that I give when I am working with that population that everybody seems to hate. I hated it when I did it to was 3 to 4 by 800 m at rep pace on 7 to 8 minutes recovery. If you're a little bit on the slower side, 10 minutes recovery. It's a brutal workout, but it'll really tell you what you can do for a mile. So, where does this fit into your week and how much is enough?

11:26 So, generally the pattern I like to utilize for most athletes not in a marathon build is Sunday long run, Tuesday tempo, Friday Ipace or rep pace workout depending on what phase they're in. If they're really targeted in on a 3K, 5K, maybe sometimes a 10K or a specific part of a half build. I might do an Ipace workout on the Tuesday and an RPA workout on a Friday. Generally, I like that spacing out of things. It just gives you recovery in between. You can actually hit the workouts tired but fresh. I know that's oxymoronic, but as runners, you'll probably get what I mean by that. And so if we do it that way and we space it out, we decrease the injury risk, we decrease the burnout risk, and we increase the likelihood that we're recovered but not recovered enough to get the maximum adaptation out of that.

12:05 So if you're somebody who likes numbers and like restraints for Ipace work, for most people, 8 to 15 minutes for experienced runners or elite runners, 15 to 20 minutes per session. Our pace 1k to 2k total fast work. But again, depends on what you're training for. Okay, so this is me wrapping up this series. I hope you've enjoyed it. It's been really fun to do. I've got some really great feedback especially on that temple one. So thank you everybody who liked and subscribed and commented. So to encapsulate this here to end it right so easy pace and marathon pace that's your aerobic development that's the bread and butter especially easy pace that's what we want to do all the time.

12:36 Tempo teaches you that pace control rises at LT2 intervals capacity reps efficiency. And so when you master all three you unlock your pace. Thanks for making it this far. If this video has helped clarify training for you please drop a comment. I read them all. I try to respond to them as fast as I can. If you are enjoying this series and you think it's worthwhile, I've been told to ask. I hate doing this cuz I don't like seeing it in stuff myself, but I've been told to ask and it's really fun to see and it shows me that I'm actually doing a good job and that I will continue doing this if people think I'm doing a good job. So, if you could please subscribe so this helps reach more runners who want smart, nonsense free, no fluff training advice. Otherwise, keep training smart, stay consistent, and perform fast and