Transcript
0:00 It's time to talk about one of the number one workouts and skills that almost everyone neglects. When it comes to hard workouts, what we generally try to do is every time we try and run them a little bit faster. You run your mile repeats in 6 minutes and next time you're like, "I'm going to run them in 5:55." Or the 400s in 70, next time 68 seconds. That makes sense a lot of times to be able to, you know, hit that adaptation, to push that stress load, to improve.
0:32 But, here's the deal. Part of racing is connecting the feeling in the mechanics. It's connecting your running form to how it feels so that you can lock into a pace. We saw this with Josh Kerr, who just broke the mile world record, first time in 27 years that record has been broken. And if you look at his splits, even after the rabbit fell off, that last 600 m, every 100 was between, I think, 13.67 and 13.88 seconds.
1:13 Yes, he had pace lights. I get it. But, that dude was locked into that rhythm. That matters, especially if you don't have pace lights. With coaching runners, I call it rhythm workouts. We do these quite frequently. Yes, we still want to get some sort of physiological adaptation, but more so the pace becomes the thing. Canova calls it, "Are you worried about the physiology or the math?" So, when you look at the math, if the workout, if you're not hitting that pace, it's better to just bag it, go home, come back the next day or two when you're rested so you can ingrain that rhythm.
1:57 Okay, so we're going to talk about what workouts we do and how these look and where we fit them into the training periodization. And before that, the point in how we should frame these. Because again, it kind of goes against everything we do in workouts, especially in the US, is like we're trying to push our bounds to get that fatigue, to get that stress load, to sometimes impress ourselves on hey, we hit this workout with these splits, like we're fit.
2:25 That's not what we do with rhythm workouts. So, to start, I'm going to take you back to something that Tom Tellez, fame coach of Carl Lewis, Leroy Burrell, all sorts of great sprinters and Olympians and medalists, taught me is that at its heart is we have to connect what we're doing with what we're feeling. Okay? What in the world does that mean? If I say, "Hey, Steve, go run 400 m at 65 seconds."
2:56 I should understand what that feels like and what I am doing mechanically to lock into that pace or rhythm. Okay? And if I'm really good, I should be able to do that without even having a watch. I once had to do this actually when I put my money where my mouth was. I was teaching a bunch of master students in strength and conditioning and exercise science in the UK at St. Mary's University. We were out on the track doing some workouts, doing some drills. I was teaching them up on running form and I said, "Hey, like this stuff you should feel it. We've got to connect the things and it should be connected so much that if I told you if you said, 'Hey, Steve, go run 60-second quarter without, you know, your watch, you should be able to lock that in.'"
3:42 And then one of these smart students said, "Well, do it." I said, okay. So, you know, I I did a little quick warm-up and then said, "Okay, we'll do it." Threw the watch over to them. Think one of them ran with me, which was almost purposely trying to throw me off and get me to drag out with him. I said, "Okay, 60 seconds, here we go." Little nerve-racking, but I think I have forget what it was exactly. It was like 60 point or 59 high, but it was within a couple tenths of a second. That's the skill we're trying to develop in every other sport we trying to develop that feel, that connection. In running, we often you know, don't. Okay? So, what does this mean? Connecting this feeling.
4:29 Okay? First off, when you're running that pace, paying attention to mechanically what you're doing to feel that way. Coach Tellez often taught me is your arms are like the gas pedal, right? You get in a nice little rhythm there, and then if you increase the speed of it, it's like pushing on that gas a little bit more. If you increase the range of motion, even more so, you're pushing on that gas further. It's what you're kind of controlling.
4:58 And if you've driven a car for a long time, you don't think about, "Okay, I'm going to push this far to get up to 45 mph this much more to get up to 60." You feel it cuz it's ingrained. If you're learning, it's kind of herky-jerky because you got to experience it and feel it. With running, it's much the same, except we don't have a gas pedal to push. So, what you want to do when you're learning this is pay attention to the signals that we do have, which often arm swing is the easiest one. Okay?
5:28 Because generally arm swing and leg swing are connected. The other thing you can pay attention to is how much kind of push into the ground do you have to give as you change paces. One of the basic ways I like to teach this, and again borrowing from Tellez, is to take a 200 or a or something like that and say, "Hey, we're going to just gradually go through your the gears and I want you to feel what it feels like to go from running at easy pace to up tempo down to 5K pace down to mile down to not quite sprinting but really freaking fast the last, you know, 20 30 m." And over that 200 you're trying to smoothly work through that gears just like you're trying to just gradually press on that gas pedal to smoothly go up. Not herky-jerky there.
6:18 Not I'm going to hit it, you know, at 150 to go or 100 m and just like turn it on. You want to see what am I doing to have that smooth acceleration through the paces. That gives you an idea of the skill you're having, okay? That's step one. Once we get that, then what we do is we go into what I'd call rhythm work where we run lots of short distances, often 200s, at that pace with relatively short rest and recovery but not so much that it becomes a hard hard workout. The point is to keep it short enough where you can lock into that rhythm but disrupt it enough where you have to keep finding it. This is why I love 200s, 300s, 400s, minutes on off, those types of things. Often at the track what we do is we'd go down and say, "Hey, 20 by 200 200 jog in between. Let's go.
7:15 Start at 5K pace, maybe lock work down to 3K even mile pace, whatever the goal rhythm is." And the point is you just get this practice of I'm going to lock in. I'm going to lock in. Here's the my arm swing on this. Here's how much I push into the ground. And at first it's conscious and over time it just becomes second nature, okay? These workouts still give you some physiology bang for your buck. If you're doing 2200s at let's say 3K down to mile pace, you're going to feel some fatigue at the end. Okay, it's going to get a little that acidosis, lactate's going to increase, all that stuff. It's going to feel a little bit bad, but it's not going to feel as bad as doing 10 400s at the same pace, right? And that's the point. We want it short enough where fatigue doesn't get in the way of establishing and locking in that rhythm.
8:10 I love to do these workouts often as the secondary workout of the week. Or, you know, depending on the thing, third big session if you do that kind of stuff. But let's take a typical track race week. If you're doing a Monday hard session, or yeah, we'll do Monday hard session, could be Monday or Tuesday, you get the gist, but Monday hard session, and then you have a race on Saturday. Then you come back Wednesday or Thursday and you do 12 by 200, 16 by 200, you know, something like that where it's like, yeah, it's not going to leave you that fatigue. You're going to recover off of it, but you're really locking into it.
8:48 200s work bad great for mile, 3K, if we need to lock into a little bit longer of a pace. Sometimes we'll do 400s or more so like minute on, minute off, or 2 minutes on, 1 minute off, something where we're just locking in, but it's not long enough to create fatigue. Okay? That's a rhythm workout. We can also do longer repeats on this, but have it, you know, more rest in between or more fresh stuff, especially for slower slower paces. So, for instance, marathon pace will often I'll like to do Ks or 1200s or miles because 1 mile at marathon pace isn't that taxing, but then you take a nice jog and you do it again. The point is to focus on locking into that that pace, to practice it, and to connect that practice to what it feels like so you understand how to like lock into that rhythm.
9:42 Then the final piece is kind of putting it all together as we practice working through the gears at the beginning to get a sense of how you change gears and what matters. Then you practice locking in those 200s for endless days after days. Just keep freaking doing them. And then what I like to use say, "Okay, we're going to practice locking into the rhythm and then breaking out of it." So here instead of let's say you're working at mile pace on stuff. Instead of doing 200s, you might do 300s where the first 200 lock in, last 100 gradual acceleration or pick up. Similarly for a 5K, maybe you do 400s. First 300 lock in or first 250 lock in, then gradual pick up. You're working on changing the gears, okay?
10:26 Because a lot of times what happens is once you get that rhythm down, you're really good at that, but sometimes you get stuck. This is where East Africans do really well because of their fartlek type training, is they're able to shift that gear and go, you know, back and forth even because they're used to this. If you don't want to do this on the track, we can do this on the road fartlek style or on a cross country course fartlek style.
10:50 The other thing I'd say here is at first the watch becomes really important feedback. So I said you should be able to do it without a watch, but at first the watch is kind of the guidance. It's giving you that feedback on like, "Hey, was what I felt accurate?" And if it's not, then you need to say, "Okay, what am I going to adjust to tone this down to lock into this?" I also suggest doing these alone versus with someone else because if you do them with someone else, you're going to borrow the pace from that person.
11:21 Okay? So watch at first and then if you're good enough, take away that watch so you can't use it as the crutch. Or if you're training solo, tell yourself, "I'm not looking at the watch at the 100 m split or the 200 m split or whatever you're doing until the end of the workout or that end of that rep. So you're using it as a speed back to adjust instead of the thing that adjust during the thing, but kind of distracts you from the task at hand.
11:52 Why do we do this? To lock into the rhythm. To train that ability Josh Kerr or anybody else, Bernard Lagat, Hicham El Guerrouj, like they're all the good runners, marathon runners especially, they're able to lock in it. When to do this? Again, secondary workout. Remember, the point is not to push for more speed, it's to to make that speed feel easier, which is the second half of this. If you've done 200s at 29.0 for days, guess what? Your body knows what it's like and it feels comfortable and easier to do this. The famous coach Mihály Iglói, this was a whole part of his system. He would teach people not based on pace, but based on these effort levels he had that were kind of like easy, fresh, good, hard, which he then related to the amount of tension you held and then also the we called it the swing. So we could think of it as our arm swing. He was talking about legs as whether you had like quick tempo or were opening up.
12:56 But he used this these ideas of tension and swing to get at the same thing to Lázsló was getting at, which was the feel and the mechanics. In tension, what Iglói would try and train is to train you to feel that kind of fresh or fast, you know, without the tension. And he'd often describe it in your shoulders or your neck tightening up or you start to feel it go higher and higher. It feels like that. Sometimes as coaches you can see that.
13:26 He would train during the 200s, 100s, 300s, all these intervals they would do. He would train people to run faster while releasing that tension. That's the point, okay? If they couldn't run 30-second 200s without having that tension, then they'd say go essentially run this tension-free fresh speed and whatever that comes out to, it comes out to. If it's 32 seconds, great, but then we're going to gradually increase that so you feel comfortable running 30-second 200s at this kind of fresh speed.
14:00 So, there you go. We tend to want to try hard. I get it. Part of working out is to push the envelope to increase that stress load so that we adapt. But, have these rhythm workouts in there. Again, I like to use them early in the season with fartleks. Minute on, minute off is like the secondary workout or that third workout if you're not racing where you're kind of saying, "Okay, it's kind of a a medium effort physically, okay? But, we're getting something out of it." And then during race season, I love to use it as a kind of our our prep work. That Wednesday or Thursday workout before a weekend race. That way we kind of lock into the into the pace, that rhythm, we ingrain it, we make them feel good doing it, and it's not that taxing of a workout that digs us into a fatigue hole. It often makes us feel good. My athletes often get sick of running 200-m repeats during track season because it's such a staple.
15:00 But, it's such a staple because I want you to train that ability, that skill. Think of it less as hitting the physiology and more of as any other sport would. We need to train that feel, that experience, that connection to doing the thing. So, there you go. Go run some 200s.