how much do you need to run are junk miles a thing should you do more easy runs or intensity that's what we're going to talk about today as we take on one of the controversial topics which is mileage and easy runs and volume so let's start with this let's start with some research that I tweeted out that came out recently and looked at over 100,000 straa users or Runners and they looked at Marathon times and then the volume of training and then the differences in their Zone 1 2 3 and a three zone system and
what they found is that the main differentiator was how much volume and easy running they were doing so when you looked at sub 230 marathoners they were 120 km plus a week if you looked at 230 to 3H hour marathoners they were 80 to 100 km a week and then it just goes down and down 3 to 3 and 1/2 hours 60 km a week 3 and 1/2 to 4 about 50 km a week all the way down to you know 4 and 1/2 hour plus is 30 kilm a week plus so you can convert
that to miles but once you get past about you know 3 hours plus they're not running that much right 60 km a week a little more than 40 m a week roughly my conversion is right like that's how much I do full and round in running with my daughter in a stroller right I'm not training for anything I'm running 40 mil a week to stay fit now I get it it's recreational athletes but the point is this is we know volume is probably a limiting factor with these athletes in 3 to three and 1 half
hour marathon is not that slow right it's a respectable time especially if you have a you know family job all that stuff is pretty good but what this tells us is that obviously higher level athletes even you know those with families and jobs who are running 240 or what have you are still running higher volumes now that doesn't answer the question on how much you should run but it hints at that volume makes a big difference now one of the reasons why we get this wrong is if you look at research and interventions especially from
Health influencers who tweet about high-intensity stuff what they look at is they look at a bunch of short-term studies that shows increases in performance in V2 Max over 6 to8 weeks and they say oh high-intensity interval training works better there was another recent review that evaluated a whole bunch of studies and it found that if we looked at longer term studies on volume then if we just looked at V2 Max one thing is that it has about the same Improvement total as the intense work it just takes longer to get there so if you compared
hit training at 6 weeks versus uh volume training at 12 weeks they get to about the same spot and the intensity training increases and then levels up off the volume training keep increases at a slower rate but is slow and steady and keeps going and we know this not just from the research but if we look at the history of training so I did a video on this so go watch this that if you want the to go deep but in brief for a long period we didn't do much volume in the early 1900s some
did but mostly not and then we bounce back and forth between volume and intensity until at some point we realized hey there has to be a baseline of volume in order to improve in order to maximize our performance now we periodize that have certain periods with higher and certain periods of lower volume but we need that aerobic Foundation or aerobic base and if we don't have that our performance will Plateau early the reason why if we look at the physiology of it is something I alluded to earlier in that review easy running or accumulate volume
is the slow road to Performance Improvement why it takes longer amounts of time to get the adaptations you need a steady slow gradual kind of pressure on the system to improve so we can look at it from terms of mitochondria creation and efficiency we can look at a capillarization in the muscle we can look at Central components to adapations to the heart okay we can look at adaptations to efficiency and running economy and what research tends to show us and what practice confirms is it takes longer to maximize those benefits we need an accumulated load
for a really long time part of the reason why is because a lot of these are structural mitochondri creation slow twitch muscle fiber Improvement Etc and it just takes longer but there's good news because it takes longer generally if you maintain it with a reduced volume it takes longer to lose that to a a large degree and this is what we see when we look at research on performance and all sorts of stuff tying back in the history one more time is is if we look look at coaches like Arthur lyard erns Van Aken even
Emil zpac the runner what we saw as a revolution in the 50s 60s and 70s that showed us we need a decent amount of volume lyard was famous for being a Milkman who then experimented with training on himself and experimented with relatively low all the way up to 200ish miles a week found out that was too much but settled into a happy medium where he said hey we need a 0 90 100 mile weeks in order to maximize performance and his athletes did well now let's get into the details we've explained why it's important I
want to go into a little bit of details of of how we know this and then whether that sweet spot is 100 miles a week like lard or more variable and hint it's more variable we'll go into that so first off a couple of the research studies that I want to give to back this up so a lot of it was conducted by uh you know Jack Daniels Dave costell some of the the ogs of exercise physiology where they were experimenting with athletes on volume of training costell famously took some uh relatively Elite athletes who
had six months off and then increased their volume and tracked measures like V2 Max and other physiological markers as they increase their volume again and and what he found is that V2 Max increased kept increasing all the way to 100 miles a week and then as they increased all the way to 200 miles a week there was no further Improvement in that perimeter gives some evidence towards you know the lard Theory right there is a ceiling at least for v2 Max but there's a ceiling to Performance as well so it's not just accumulate more and
more and see what we get more recent research kind of confirms this so there was some wonderful studies out of out of Europe that looked at um both Elite world class athletes and then world class East Africans comparing them to a you know European class or national class European athletes and what they found is in the separate studies but in one of them when they looked at World Class athletes when you looked at what predicted performance and predicted performance Improvement it was number one volume of training had the best thing and volume of easy running
after that there were something there was correlations with short intervals and Tempo runs but less so than volume and easy run volume if you looked at comparison between uh European National class athletes versus Elite East Africans what were the biggest differentiators volume of training easy training and then it went Tempo runs and then short intervals so again we look at accumulated volume in Easy running as the biggest differentiators or predictors of performance so more evidence that tells us at the highest level we need to accumulate enough volume to perform at a decent level now I
want to be clear here most of this research is in you know distance athletes so 5K up to up to Marathon still applies to a degree with middle distance athletes but the more we move down to the 800 there's more tradeoff between volume and intensity okay so let's go into what this all means first off it means anyone who tells you that you know you don't need volume they're lying to you need a decent amount now what is a decent amount it depends on the individual their level of development and the event they are training
for okay so if we're talking about a marathon that volume requirement is increased because why we're we need adaptations that help us you know sustain for two hours plus you know at a high intensity volume matters more than if I'm a 1500 Runner so we look at the marathon generally at the elite level the minimum there are exceptions but the minimum is peeking out somewhere 80 90 mil a week most elite marathoners are around 100 some go up much higher but in that General ballpark we're talking both men and women okay that's just what what
the data tells us again you can get away with less but generally you're not running a marathon at an elite level or maximiz ing your performance off 50 mozo it's just not happening okay you can complete one you can run pretty well but you're not coming near to your maximum performance the volume is requirement is higher if we go down to 5K there's more variation but even there at the elite level most elite 5K Runners are running somewhere between you know 70 plus to 100 plus miles a week very a bit but the low wind
is still near 70 m a week and that's low okay very few To None Elite 5K 10K athletes are running 40 50 miles a week okay why because it takes an accumulated load to get some of those adaptations and then secondarily we need the load to make us resilient and adaptable and recoverable because aerobic ability impacts our ability to bounce back and recover from things so it allows us to handle more of the high-intensity work or more of the tempo work or interval training that we need to do we can bounce back we recover quicker
between intervals and sets it all AIDS everything okay what does this mean at the recreational level or the novice or intermediate or semi Elite level what it often means is that you're not hitting the volumes to maximize performance and that's understandable because there are life constraints that often get in the way so you can't do you know doubles every day or most days or even any days for example if you have life getting in the way that's understandable you have other stressors which increase uh you know injury uh rates because you have to deal with
stress of Life stress of work which causes can can lead to overtraining and injury because you're adding a stress of training on top of that all understandable but the point here is this if you're recreational athlete training for the marathon or even a half marathon at 40 miles a week your biggest bang for your buck probably comes from accumulating more volume now if you can't do this in running or have like injury history or what have you then you can supplement with cross trining biking elliptical swimming whatever you want to use in there to get
some of not the exact but many of the aerobic adaptations and that's why it comes back to I said that event determines things but so does the individual level so the way I look at volume for events and individuals is I look at okay what's the event you're targeting and then you as an individual what are your strengths and weaknesses so do you come at it more from a speed orientation or likely more fast twitch side or more slow twitch endurance orientation so for instance let's take the 5K is my strength that I have a
really good mile or 1500 and I'm just trying to extend that a little bit if you're coming from the speed side your volume requirements are probably a little bit less if you're coming from the endurance side they're probably a little bit higher because you need to maximize that strength okay same goes for the other events other individual characteristics include their injury history where's the weak Link in the biomechanical Shain is it sustained repeated load can we do anything from a strength training standpoint to bolster our our you know chassis to handle that or are we
relatively resilient and can handle a decent amount of volume that determines things that also determines our percent of volume that comes from maybe running and cross training okay and then I think the other thing from an individual standpoint is your life slash you know life work family constraints how much time do you have a day this is what constrains my volume right I have less than an hour a day most of it is pushing my daughter in a stroller so my volume stays around 40 mil a week because I'm running you know 7 miles is
a day in that time period sometimes workouts but that are a little less volume but that's kind of it that works in my life that's totally fine but I'm not going to run my best marathon on that volume but I have to accept that if I ever wanted to run a marathon that's fine it works in my constraints so what does this all mean when it comes to mileage it's kind of in Vogue to say like ah it's overrated don't worry about the long run which we covered earlier they have it the long run has
its place mileage is foundational for anything basically 1,500 and up 800 you can get away with less, 1500 you can get away with less but even the lower mileage athletes like the historical Seb Coos of the world still you know ran 60 70 miles a week um if not more on on occasion you've got to get in the accumulated training load it's just part of it a lot of that again comes back to how to do it safely and well so let's go over that real quick first off there's the 10% rule never increase your
volume by more than 10% I it's a good rule of thumb sometimes but I think it kind of sucks for some people because it'll take you forever if you're coming from 25 mil a week to only go 10% all the time and for some people they need that gradual increase but there's a big difference between you know going from 25 miles a week to 30 and you know uh 60 m a week to almost 70 for example I know the math doesn't quite come out to 10% but you get the idea I like to think
of it more like this okay I want to increase my volume up to what I have safely sustained for a long period of time so if I've sustained 40 mil a week for a long time I can increase to that relatively quickly the main indicator is when we're increasing vage to somewhere new we haven't gone before is just be gradual listen to your body if some aches or pains or whatever come come up just pull back the second thing is I like slight down weeks to absorb but I'm a fan of not Peak weeks but
what can I sustain hold so I'd rather have you sustainably hold 60 miles a week for 4 weeks than say hey I'm going to hit 80 and then I'm going to drop back down for a while because I'm I'm can't handle it I don't like scheduling and down weeks I like to save them for when I kind of need them so if it's once every four weeks every five weeks every 3 weeks you know every 6 weeks it just kind of depends on what your body takes all right so there's a little bit of the
second last part I'll say is how do we increase mileage I like to add it to easy runs first and not the hard days because the hard days are already accumulating volume all right so we've we've given a lot here I've given a lot the bottom line is volume is your friend if you can't increase it I understand it because of time constraints if you have a long history of injuries I get it add some cross training to it do it great gradually support with things that will help your injury resistance like strength training strides
you know mechanical work etc but we can't escape the fact that as Frank Shorter told us many years ago the key to training is two hard workouts a long run and then accumulate as much volume as you can handle for months and years on it for all of us that's going to be different that doesn't mean 100 Mil a week is the magic there is no magic in that number but we know to optimize performance at our highest level we need to build up to decent volume obviously if you're a younger athlete you shouldn't get
there quickly don't go there until you need to go there but a gradual sustainable increase in volume from year to year till we get to a relatively high amount is foundational for basically everyone from, 1500 all the way up to Marathon and ultra marathon now the good news the last thing I'll leave you with is after you've been doing it for years you can actually come back down a little bit right if you've done built up to 80 90 100 miles a week 110 miles a week you get to come back down and you'll sustain
the adaptations for the volume so the uh world class former world record holder steeplechaser uh Shaheen was a great example of this in his training you looked up over four or five years he built up to high volume and then came down for the next 2 or 3 years where instead of I forget the exact numbers instead of 100 miles a week he's you know consistent in the 85 miles a week which allows him to sustain the adaptations and then shift the emphasis elsewhere to get a little bit more boost so these are the details
we're playing with but the bottom line is we got to have that long-term aerobic ad patient if you care about performance again life constraints get in the way totally understand but often just as I was told when I was a high school Runner freshman coming in by my coach when he said hey Steve you want to get better I said yep he said well guess what you got to run on weekends and days when we don't have official practice volume increase is the simplest and straightforward way to improve long-term performance again there is a point
of diminishing return but many people and most people don't hit that actual point so look at ways for how you can increase volume sustainably thanks for listening I hope you enjoy these subscribe check them out if you haven't yet check out my new book win the inside game it comes out soon if you order now you get my 120 page I think it is ebook on the elements in philosophy of coaching which goes through my entire philosophy of coaching in addition so order now you get two books this great one on the mental side my
other book that I've never released before it's not even for sale on coaching philosophy and training and you you won't regret it so check those out out thanks for listening till next time everybody take care for
