Tick Tock

No, not THAT Tik Tok

This is the fifth essay in POISON, written originally circa 2011, rewritten in 2013 and slightly edited today. I know I said there wouldn’t be a lot of writing about fitness or training on this page but it’s going to be difficult to avoid if I want to serialize POISON or at least keep some of my training theses available. The above image is from 1997 Cyclocross Nationals which I shot on assignment for Men’s Journal and one of my earliest action shoots using a Leica M6.

I once wrote about time or lack of it and its influence on training plan design. With a few more days (and years) of thinking and discussion some more ideas surfaced.

A friend who recently attended a (cycling) training camp in Spain commented on the deliberate nature of the training done by serious athletes, in this case pro riders. Everyone has a healthy respect for the work they themselves are doing and that done by others. Everyone knows the racing is done on race day, that no one wins a training session. They go hard when it is programmed to do so. The rest of the time they pedal according to the particular characteristic being targeted: long-endurance, tempo, recovery. The training is generally 80% easy (a relative term) and 20% very hard, with very little time spent in the middle.

Because of this mutual respect, pros like to train with other pros. Amateurs, with little training time available like to go hard every session to "maximize" the benefits of what little time they do have. Their low weekly volume allows them to do this because ample recovery time is built in: no one will blow up from five hours per week. Pros who are training on a diet of 20-25 hours per week or two-a-day combined gym and fight sessions 5-6 days per week must respect the easy/hard polarization of the different workouts. Going hard all of the time is a ticket to disaster. Hammerhead training may look good at the time, and earn positive social feedback, again, at the time, but guys who do this consistently either DNS or DNF or have excuses for poor performance on race day. As my riding friend said, "they are training to look good, not to be good."

High intensity effort is incompatible with high volume, which is why the infrequent trainer can handle it. Done too often, genuinely hard and fast eventually becomes a pace that feels just as hard but isn't fast. Being hard and strong only wins when attrition is decisive. How often is that? In a gym context the parallel is simple: you cannot go heavy and hard all of the time, light and "hard" OK (that's what circuit training is about), but however defined, high intensity and high volume do not a long marriage make.

Back when I used to teach people about fitness and training the concept of intervals came up over and over in different contexts: the interval nature of work and recovery must be respected in all aspects of life and training. Hard work must be absorbed before one can go truly hard again. The capacity to absorb the hard efforts, and the time available to do so determines the frequency and intensity of them. If I only have 5x1 hour per week I can maybe do 3x30 minutes fairly hard and the rest easy. If I do 2x30 minutes truly hard and the rest easy I might produce a better training result. Or I could do 5x1 hour moderately hard, which might eventually lead to adequate fitness and I could lose some weight or whatever but it won't produce race- or match-winning performance because the level of intensity required to actually win is never addressed or absorbed.

The concept of deliberate training is important, whether in a strength and conditioning or an endurance context. Learn what needs to be done and do it. Do it when the appropriate conditions present themselves. A hard, high-intensity workout undertaken in a recovered condition will produce better results than that same workout done starting from a deficit. Starting from a recovered take-off point means being able to hit target power output and duration. Last season my mantra was, "if I'm not going hard - truly hard - I may as well go easy." While there is some value in training the middle ground it is a swamp and easy to get stuck there. I think for most people it is better to work the ends of the spectrum and trust these efforts will drag up the middle. And if that middle area is genuinely important then pay attention to it once the poles at the margins are standing tall and solid. Medium effort won't drag up the ends.

Where is the middle? In the gym it is 4-6 sets of 8-12 reps @ 60-75%, the kind of work that makes you big but doesn't deliver true strength or meaningful strength-endurance or power-endurance. But it does make you sore, which means it takes a long time to recover.

"Oh, there's a workout that doesn't produce the results I want and it hurts and it's hard to recover from? Where do I sign up?"

In an endurance context the middle ground is not hard enough to push lactate threshold up from below and too easy to pull it up from above, and again, it increases recovery demands. In a five-zone system it's in the low-3s, hovering (for most) about 8-12 BPM below threshold. Don't hang out there, unless specific circumstances require it.

The middle is where most people train. They do not go hard enough on the hard days, or easy enough on the easy days. The zone that appears to be a good compromise is actually a dead end. The thinking goes like this, "I don't have enough time to do all that Foundation work, it's too easy for me anyway because I'm such a stud. So I'll bump up the intensity. On the other hand I am not strong enough to go really heavy or fast so I won't do any truly intense work, which isn't safe anyway. But I can increase the volume at the less intense level I've chosen and that should make it work just as well as ..." This decision-making process starts with a lack of time paired to ignorance and an unrealistic expectation.

Our expectations are imposed by whom? By what? We want what we are conditioned to want. And we are hopeful optimists so we believe our (unique) expectations are apart from the tried and true rules. Sarcastically, I say "Yes, your desire transcends physical law so you will fulfill your expectations and get what you want without spending time and energy according to those laws." It sounds ridiculous because it is. And we fall for it over and over.

During a week-long block of instruction I would urge the students to ask and answer the following questions:

1) How important is it to you?

An honest answer will influence the next question:

2) How committed are you?

Truthfulness is paramount because the truth will affect the answer to the next question:

3) How much time are you willing and able to allot to training and recovery, learning and practice?

The more important the task and the greater your commitment, the more time and energy you will devote. TIME is the ultimate guideline. I used to tell the students, "don't bother planning what you aren't going to do anyway." What can you do on five hours of training a week? What can you achieve with ten well-spent hours a week? How can you best spend the time you have, and what can you realistically expect from those hours? Answer some of these questions, and consider the inherent unanswerability of the others before you touch the keyboard or put pen to paper. Often, when the importance, commitment and time questions are answered the training plan and its outcome has already been written.