One of the most confusing topics in training is “effort.”
It doesn’t matter whether I’m talking about running…
Or strength…
Or flexibility…
Whenever we try to prescribe some sort of “effort” level for training, people inevitably have about a thousand questions.
“How do I know I’m lifting at an 8/10?”
Well…
In the description, I said that means you have about 2 reps left before failure and/or the last rep moved significantly slower than the first one.
So did the last rep move significantly slower than the first one?
Could you have done more than 2 more?
Or did the bar end up sitting on your chest and you had to have someone come from across the gym to lift it off of you because you tried to bench the weight you remembered from your old high school football days?
Regardless, doesn’t sound like an 8/10.
And the same questions come with running.
“Easy.”
What the hell does that mean?
Well, for most people, it’s a pace where you could hold a good conversation but probably not sing a song very well.
Or it’s a pace where you could hold a good conversation with a friend, but probably wouldn’t want to take an important business call.
How do you know if you could hold a conversation?
Well… make a phone call and see if you feel like your running is affecting the conversation.
Or just talk to yourself.
If you can speak in full sentences and control your breathing, then you’re probably running “easy.”
If not, then you probably need to slow down.
And if you could sing a full operatic aria, then you might actually want to pick it up a little bit.
While some of that might come off as snarky or condescending, it’s really not meant to be.
Trust me, I’ve been there.
It was only a couple years ago that I started looking at programs on the internet trying to figure all of this shit out and it felt like I was just wading through a bog of meaningless numbers and unhelpful descriptions.
It was particularly difficult because I inherently don’t breathe well due to a very narrow nasal passage.
As a result, I strapped heart rate monitors to myself and even tried testing lactate levels.
Fun side note: it turns out my fingers are so calloused from years of lifting and manual labor that the normal grade needles don’t actually provide enough blood to get a good test. Yes, I know they sell thicker ones… Beside the point.
But the biggest thing I learned after all that testing?
It doesn’t have to be perfect.
More importantly…
It’s not even supposed to be perfect.
When it comes to prescribing some sort of effort, a good coach is just trying to get you in a general area that will help foster adaptations.
And I realize that answer sucks.
We want certainty.
We want to know that the thing we’re doing will help make the changes we’re looking to make so we’ll hit the goal that we’re trying to hit.
We want the hard numbers that tell us we’re actually doing the right work.
Yet we would do well to keep something in mind.
You’re probably not strong enough or fast enough for it to matter.
At least not yet.
And I truly don’t mean to offend you by writing that, but it’s an important thing to understand.
I have this conversation often with a lot of different people about a lot of different activities.
Most of the time, the answer is “You’re just not strong/fast/skilled enough for that to matter yet.”
We get a lot of our training advice from two groups of people – untrained college-aged males and professional athletes.
There’s good reason for that.
Untrained college-aged males are really easy to find where they do studies – ie universities – and make decent study participants because you can usually bribe them with pizza.
Unfortunately, they’ll also probably improve no matter what you do.
If a person has never done an activity and you have them do some activity… they’re going to get better at it.
Especially if that person is 19 and currently full of more testosterone than they’ll ever have again in their life.
On the other end of the spectrum, we study professional athletes because we know they’ll be consistent.
They have to train anyway and they want to know the answers even more than the researchers because they’re the ones that might get a bigger paycheck.
But professional athletes have squeezed pretty much everything they can out of “traditional” training methods and are looking for whatever tiny edge they can get to beat their competition.
So they do a lot of things that probably don’t matter all that much to the rest of us (see my message from earlier this week).
Yet most people reading this will fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
So while we need some level of direction in our training, we just don’t need the level of precision we see from professionals.
We should also try to remember something else.
The point of signing up for the race was probably to do the race.
Think about this.
What would you do if someone could promise you would get the result you wanted.
Like, a magical genie came out of a lamp and absolutely guaranteed that you’d get the result you wanted on the race you signed up to do.
You knew how it would go.
So much so that the RD just offered to give you the medal/buckle beforehand because you already knew the outcome.
Would you still run the race?
Why?
Because the experience is probably the point.
Everything from the struggles in training to the suffering on race day…
The experience of the thing is why we actually do the thing.
And if not, then we should maybe question our motives a little bit – because I promise there are easier ways to get t-shirts and medals and belt buckles.
As athletes, we spend a lot of time looking for certainty.
But it’s often a false certainty.
We want to know.
But truth is… you can’t.
I’m not saying you should go out and completely ignore all training prescriptions.
I’d actually be pretty pissed if that’s the message you got from this.
But if you’re in the right ballpark, you’ll do just fine.
Do work.
Don’t lie to yourself.
Be consistent.
Expect it will take longer than you want.
If you do those things, you’ll probably get pretty damn far.
And if you happen to be fairly well-trained and struggling to break through a plateau, then message me and I’m happy to help see what might be going on.