When I ask my athletes if they are into pain, nobody raises a hand. Yet when pressed, they reveal a no-pain-no-gain training bias. They think, for instance, that post-workout muscle soreness is a sign of having done a “good” workout. Indeed, some claim that all fitness gains require some discomfort. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Hard-Easy System is based on the idea that performance gains do not require pain or discomfort. This idea flies in the face of experience, as many athletes have, in fact, gotten faster by adhering to a no-pain-no-gain approach to endurance training. Thus, their experience reinforces the efficacy of a no-pain-no-gain attitude. It also leads them to over-look the possibility of gaining greater fitness through the less risky no-pain approach.
Post-workout pain is a sign you’ve put your body into shock. Shock is the body’s inevitable response to something it isn’t used to doing. Shock is necessary to adaptive processes, but pain isn’t a necessary aspect of the shock phenomenon. In other words, there can be shock without pain, provided there isn’t too much shock. There can also be so much shock that pain becomes injury, which can shut your training down until your body recovers. Some athletes spend more time recovering than training!
Shock is not the same as adaptation. The training cycle has three phases: shock, adaptation, and exhaustion (see graph). Shock and exhaustion reduce your capacity for exertion, while adaptation improves performance by expanding your capacity. So, how can you get through the shock phase and into the adaptive phase so you can race faster? The single most difficult training problem is to establish a new workout without becoming sick, injured, or exhausted because you’ve shocked your body with too much workout effort.
“The workout effort should produce just enough shock to stimulate significant gains over a period of weeks.”
A new workout must be initiated at the passable level of proficiency. At that level, a workout feels moderately challenging, but not difficult. The workout effort should produce just enough shock to stimulate significant gains over a period of weeks. Psychologically, this is enormously difficult to do because you may have done this workout at a harder level six or eight months earlier, with impunity. But remember, you are attempting to ride shock’s impetus from passably able to fully able without getting sick, injured, or exhausted.
Pain in this context is a sure sign the workout was too difficult. So, you must look for other signs of progress, such as feeling satisfied with the workout, knowing you could have done more, and knowing you will do more next time. We used to add mileage gradually (and maddingly) in 10 percent increments. There was method and discipline to the process.
It took longer to establish a workout, but we reduced the risks involved. And once the workout was established, we repeated it exactly as established until we became fully able to do it. If we plateaued, we avoided making the workout longer or faster, which would have put us in danger of a shock-induced injury just before the big race. Are you skilled enough to do all your races without coming down with a cold or injury at the last moment?
The above graph illustrates three phases of the training cycle: shock, adaptation, and exhaustion. Over a period of weeks, a sequence of metabolic forces (the large arrows) changes one’s performance capacity (the dashed circles) in response to an established training stimulus (say, a 90-minute, light exertion workout). In the process, capacity is reduced initially (phase 1), then expanded, then reduced again.
Adaptation (the 2nd phase) is not inevitable. Its onset depends on one’s ability to negotiate the necessary shock phase without being shut down by injury, illness, or extreme fatigue. The graph shows the ideal effort entry level (the red arrow) at the passable level of proficiency. Shock is optimized at that level, offering just enough metabolic impetus for adaptive forces to adjust to the stress of novel effort and thereby increase capacity, but not so much force that one becomes (through injury or illness) ineffective or unable to train.
With time and repetition, the adaptive forces could lift proficiency to the fully able level, i.e., peak ability. At that point, the athlete can do the 90-minute workout without fear of injury, as long as it is done at the established, 90-minute, light-exertion level. Peak adaptation, however, is never a permanent physical condition because the hard-easy system postulates the inevitability of exhaustion (the 3rd phase of the training cycle).
In other words, the body cannot hold peak proficiency forever. Eventually, repeating the workout fails to stimulate improved performance. Continued training at the established workout level (90 minutes) could result in a fitness plateau that’s higher than the original level, but lower than peak proficiency. Or, alternately, the athlete can opt to change the training stimulus entirely (say, to 120 minutes), initiating a new training cycle.